I am a developer of https://www.photopea.com, a popular photo editor that runs in a web browser.
Many people are asking AI models to take the Javascript code from my website, remove all ads from it, and they publish such a "new product" on Github for everyone to download.
There exist tens of such repositories on Github. I want my website to be the only source of a stable version of my program Photopea. I even received emails from people complaining about something in Photopea, and it took several emails to figure out that they are not using Photopea.com (so it ruins my reputation a little).
I reported it to Github on the 4th of September 2026: https://www.photopea.com/g/XKoqqIGv
Today, a month later, I received this response:
Thank you for submitting a DMCA takedown notice. We've reviewed the information you've provided, and based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201.
What do you think I could do? Do you think I should look for a lawyer to deal with it outside the digital world? I really doubt that a real person ever looked at my report, and they probably send this response automatically to 99% of people.
Man, some of the comments this is getting are absolutely wild.
OP, I’m sorry this is happening to you. It must be incredibly frustrating to have people ripping off something you’ve worked on for many years and pass it off as their own work. I would be furious in your position.
I wish I could do something directly to help you but the best I can offer is to echo the best advice others have already given you: it’s time to get a lawyer. That is the one guaranteed route to get GitHub to sit up and take the action they should already have taken on your behalf.
Empty appeals to emotion aren't getting him any closer to solving this problem.
Free hugs will not replace lost ad revenue.
He needs to take the lesson learned on how to better protect IP at the source. Once it's out you cannot put the genie back in the bottle.
Literally every paywalled article posted to this site has an anti-paywall link in the discussion and it's often top comment. How is this materially different?
This isn't GitHub's fault and it's effectively impossible to stop.
Regardless of what you do now, I think you should be prepared for the upcoming reality that LLMs are going to be able to reproduce software, feature-perfect, in a way that does not currently violate copyright law.
Right now, the settled law is that such an LLM reproduction is 100% legal.
If you really want to protect your software in the years to come, you might have to seriously consider starting some sort of popular political movement to address this issue in copyright law.
Current models can already do a full reproduction of anything with source code available (e.g. JavaScript...), and there's already been some poor-quality Photoshop knockoffs.
I feel like I need to nitpick a little: Models don't need source code available to reproduce software. See all the "full decompilation" projects cropping up. There's no putting this genie back in the box, because LLMs can also "refurbish" a project enough that it ceases to look like the original. People don't bother now because they don't have to, but in a world where they'd get hit with copyright notices, they would.
> popular political movement to address this issue in copyright law.
Or perhaps the people should admit that copyright, an artificial construct which is not rooted in natural property, was inherently broken and not net benefit to the society and simply adapt around it.
I was watching a video talking about how a world before copyright allowed innovation to spread quickly and allowed people miles away to iterate faster. Even if LLMs reproducing feature perfect software is deemed a copyright violation, people will just do it privately and use the software themselves.
I’m personally waiting for LLMs to get so good that I can make music and movies based on my favorite ones. I probably could never release it to the public, but being able to make it and enjoy it myself would be amazing.
> Right now, the settled law is that such an LLM reproduction is 100% legal.
How so? Interfaces are not copyrightable, but that it not the same as dissecting a js bundle and copying the implementations. Are we sure these LLM are keeping sanitary habits there?
if you've used any Ai in your own code authoring, copyrights may be completely out the window
several courts have rule Ai output is not copyrightable, I am unaware of any co-authored cases
That doesn't top people producing copies though, just trying to copyright the copies.
You should discuss this with an attorney that is experienced with IP law to see what your options really are. IP law is very complex and sometimes very surprising. You need expert legal advice, not advice from the HN crowd.
As an aside, I thought that "cracked" software meant software that has had the copy protection or other access control bypassed or removed, not the alteration of the software functionality itself. If your software was actually cracked then you may have some fairly heavy law in your favor. For better or worse, bypassing access controls (even weak or simple access controls) gets special legal attention.
> Thank you for submitting a DMCA takedown notice. We've reviewed the information you've provided, and based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201.
Did they actually republish you code or were they just creating wrappers that download/cache the code from your website to run locally?
It sounds like you might have a case for copyright infringement. Resolving the situation yourself has failed. Your next step is to talk to a lawyer.
Sorry this happened to you dude. I don’t want to be harsh but, out of the crimes ignored in this era of AI clean rooming, book destroying distilleries and a despondent ostrich adjacent legal system you do seem to be one amongst a deluge of cheated individuals.
Hope you manage to get it sorted but I have no idea how that would go down at this point. I’m sure at least one of them could claim they copied it off the other ones and then you’re shit out of luck.
This really is a terrible timeline.
Yes you need a lawyer. You may not have filed the DMCA request correctly. You may not be understanding the law correctly.
I was like oh cool... until you mentioned the ads.
I would not fork or re-release proprietary code. I would ask my LLM to write a very rigorous end to end test suite for your tool, delete all the code, then have a clean context LLM re-write the code to pass all the same tests. Then I could publish it under an open license.
Ads are a cancer, and it is a matter of weeks before someone does the above where you have zero recourse.
I suggest open sourcing the code properly without ads yourself before someone does it for you. If you do that someone might donate to you instead of paying for the tokens to clone your work.
Software is no longer a moat and DMCA means nothing anymore.
How are you supposed to make a living without ads in this "ecosystem" or should we say walled garden?
I was a software engineer and pivoted to full time security about 10 years ago. Security will be in demand for a while longer I selfishly suspect.
Adobe buys ads rather than sells them, is that correct? How are they making money?
You aren't. People aren't going to be able to make a living in software anymore, unless they work for a corporation. And even then, that's disappearing as well.
When the whole industry manually punched machine code into punch cards, people were threatened by assemblers taking their jobs, and then later by compilers, and now by inference engines.
The real engineering work that will always be paid for is identifying problems and testing solutions to see what solves the problems.
The substrate in which we use to do that will change, but the job will endure.
Those that just do what they are told however, yeah they are SOL unfortunately.
Creative problem solving is the only skill that will matter anymore.
And how many companies need creative problem solving? Way less and less. The problem is the moat is getting higher. Name any other profession that is kneecapped worse than by the free open source movement and the like. Meaning you can't monetize what you create. Or the usual ways are non-conformant, dictated by the corps and their mindless followers.
I think what you want is a legal avenue, like Trademark, Design rights, or patent.
If you have one of these, it’s possible that GitHub would honour it if you go via a lawyer.
> based on the facts presented to us, we're unable to confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201
Sorry GitHub, that's not for you to determine, as you are not a US judge. They should never have replied like this IMO and this behavior opens them up to liability for not properly handling DMCA procedures.
Proper DMCA 512(h) notices (assuming OP's was proper) require the host (github) to remove or disable the content first without even attempting to verify the claims.
Then the repo owner has a chance to challenge the notice. If they choose to do, they're basically required to publicly doxx themselves first, by nature of just going through the motions of the judicial court system.
If there was no challenge after a set period of time, then the content stays down.
If there was a challenge, it stays down until a court decides what happens next.
I personally know Ivan. For many years of his life, every day, he programmed algorithm after algorithm in this complex online photo editing tool. Essentially, he devoted half his life to it. And now, when someone has literally stolen his work, nobody is reacting. And that's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. GitHub should respond to this.
I've seen people on Reddit writing things like, "Come on, what's the big deal? AI can write any code now." I disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code here, very complex code, which even AI wouldn't be able to write on the first try or in a single day. So this person stole this code from Photopea and built a product on top of it.
This is a very old problem. One of my first commercial programs was a wordpress plugin and as you know, you just distribute the PHP source code in a zip file and there it is
You will never sue your way out of this. Piracy will always exist. GitHub will respond to a legal notice but whack a mole is the game and legal notices cost money
The solution in the WP community at the time was variations of the plugin as a loss leader to get revenue with support or to leverage community visibility into larger contracts for work or hosting the platform for others.
If your business model depends on your code being a secret, JavaScript is not a good play. The business model needs to enhance what the code offers since it’s basically a commodity now
Do you have the same stance on using adblockers when browsing the web?
Copying isn’t stealing. We settled this in the 90s.
I saw someone who claims to have re-implemented Photoshop in Rust using clean room specs. I haven't checked into it yet, but it seems to have a lot of interest.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Bard/comments/1wxmqpt/ive_created_o...
Yeah, this bodes well for my meditation app frontend I'm going to release on GitHub. It should be fair use ish but it does seem GitHub is fairly friendly anyway.
> What do you think I could do? Do you think I should look for a lawyer to deal with it outside the digital world?
Use a trademark.
How will that help? Trademarks do not protect code - only logos, names, brands. And brands are easy to remove.
Something else is needed. If the code is basically open, then there is no technical protection. Remove tens of those repos - hundreds might appear.
Wow, that might actually work, thanks!
First of all, thanks Ivan! Happy user of Photopea.
Second, the trademark will help you against the masqueraders, those copying your tool and the Photopea brandmark. That will help with customers complaining about some other modified product. It will not help in case you find someone copying your codebase and putting it out in the open under a different name. For that, you'll need a copyright.
Doing both of these might be expensive but gives you complete legal standing. Companies will have no choice but to take down the copies.
There are 100s of web based photo editors, paid and open source. How do you know they are taking yours, not someone else's or making their own with Ai?
I would imagine they all converge on common features and core implementation foundation
There have been only two photo editors that fully support the PSD format: Photopea and Adobe Photoshop. When a new one appears, which fully supports the PSD format, from an anonymous creator, it is very likely a copy one of these two. And they usually name it Photopea-offline, etc.
but does it actually fully support the PSD format or is it false advertising?
This day in age, we need to verify ourselves
Can you show us an example? How did you verify?
you wrote a complete product in javascript, and people wildly copy the code?
My reply is that you now own a customer list, brandname and trademark, and that is about it.
You want to sue people for blocking ads? Did I read this correctly?
If you want to make proprietary software that's cool, but client-side JavaScript was a terrible choice. The cat is out of the bag.
There's a reason software for which you purchase a license key generally doesn't give you source code outside rock-solid legal agreements.
You did not read it correctly. Author stated that people are modifying and redistributing their code in an unauthorized manner.
Did those people sign a legally-binding end-user license agreement?
Because what I see is essentially "they're storing stolen property" but the burden of proof is on the author to prove it was, indeed, stolen.
I imagine the bar for that is pretty high otherwise anyone could weaponize DMCA to target their competitors' repositories.
You seem to be thinking about "adblocker running in browser", since you brought up EULAs.
That's not what OP alleges - they are saying people are redistributing modified versions of OP's copyrighted code. DMCA is an appropriate measure in such a situation, but it's unclear why OP's DMCA takedown was rejected by GitHub. Without more detail, it's hard to comment further
one would think, if it is still up there, OP might point us at it so we can see for ourselves, right now it's "trust me"
> You want to sue people for blocking ads? Did I read this correctly?
That is an extremely disingenuous and bad faith interpretation of what OP has said and I think you know it. You want to be edgy? Go comment on Reddit.
OP is rightly frustrated that their copyrighted work, that they’ve been working on full time for over a decade, is simply being ripped off by people and GitHub refuses to do anything about it.
Publishing source as client-side JS when millions are out there looking to rip you off at every turn is a losing proposition. And I think you know it.
Shifting blame to GitHub is absolutely idiotic.
Try removing locks from your doors in a high crime area (which is what the Internet is) then being indignant when the police can't stop all the criminals stealing your property.