Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month

50•IvanK_net•5h ago

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.

Comments

B4uler5•5h ago

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.

seanw444•50m ago

This really is a terrible timeline.

ianberdin•5h ago

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.

sneak•2h ago

Copying isn’t stealing. We settled this in the 90s.

flourish_dev•2h ago

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.

buckleyourshoe•51m ago

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...

binlog•50m ago

Do you have the same stance on using adblockers when browsing the web?

rvz•5h ago

> 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.

IvanK_net•4h ago

Wow, that might actually work, thanks!

fakedang•1h ago

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.

nixrobot•3h ago

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.

verdverm•3h ago

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

IvanK_net•1h ago

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.

verdverm•1h ago

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?

aetherspawn•2h ago

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.

JohnFen•2h ago

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.

mistrial9•1h ago

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.

lrvick•1h ago

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.

lofaszvanitt•38m ago

How are you supposed to make a living without ads in this "ecosystem" or should we say walled garden?

Madmallard•36m ago

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.

lrvick•26m ago

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.

lofaszvanitt

penskymaterial•56m ago

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.

jffry•48m ago

You did not read it correctly. Author stated that people are modifying and redistributing their code in an unauthorized manner.

penskymaterial•38m ago

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.

jffry•28m ago

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

verdverm•21m ago

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"

binlog•51m ago

Yes you need a lawyer. You may not have filed the DMCA request correctly. You may not be understanding the law correctly.

jdlshore•51m ago

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.

bartread•41m ago

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.

handoflixue•40m ago

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.

tgma•36m ago

> 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 is not (or at least no longer is) a net benefit to the society and simply adapt around it.

theturtletalks•19m ago

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.

verdverm•6m ago

There is something similar happening in the game modding communities. One of my favorite streamers had claude write a little mod to change the UI of KSP so it kept with the larger fanciful theme of the game, over being so sci-fi-ish. He didn't like, he changed it, he's probably not going to release it because of sensitivity in the broader gaming ecosystem.

I have agents maintaining several patches to my main tools, not forking, not sharing (some have no interest), personal adjustments

ranger_danger•30m ago

> 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.

verdverm•10m ago

the musicians love it when their original work is DMCA'd by bad actors and YT takes it down and never answers the appeal /s

two sides to the coin, we'll hear about how some evil corporation used their influence to have a legitimate project DMCA'd and HN will have the opposite reaction on that day

something like "jury duty" from the community seems an interesting idea for a middle path, if we want better systems, we'll all need to contribute a little to making it so

jameshilliard•29m ago

> 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?

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