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.

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.

Use a trademark.

I would imagine they all converge on common features and core implementation foundation

If you have one of these, it’s possible that GitHub would honour it if you go via a lawyer.

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.

My reply is that you now own a customer list, brandname and trademark, and that is about it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did they actually republish you code or were they just creating wrappers that download/cache the code from your website to run locally?

Photopea creator weighs in on Photosuite project

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49972730