Ask HN: A company used my source code for their product. What can I do? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: A company used my source code for their product. What can I do?

41 pointschpmrc40 comments

Context:

- My source is a library that this company shamelessly copy/pasted into their product (whose source is also publicly available) without even giving me credit.

- This library is a core component of one of their (I would go so far to say it IS one of their) products.

- My source is publicly available BUT it's not licensed, hence it's still considered under exclusive copyright (see https://choosealicense.com/no-permission/)

- Both I and that company are in the EU.

Normally I would never enforce anything like this but we're talking about a company that was funded using public funds (Horizon 2020) and is now making money from basically selling my library.

I want to make money out of this. Any suggestions on how I should proceed? Thanks.

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1. Are you willing to invest the money to go after them? Good lawyers are expensive (think hundreds of euros per hour)

2. Courts generally move slow. It might take years before you have a positive judgement. You will likely need to sue in their jurisdiction, which puts you at a disadvantage because you do not know the language and legal procedures.

3. And this is the most important one: even if you get a positive judgement, the company is likely to be a limited liability company which can declare bankruptcy.

Did they set up an SPV (read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special-purpose_entity) for this project, or is this a larger company with stable revenue and profits that has done this?

If at the end of the day you can collect €150,000 (as an example), you might go and collect from someone with no cash in their account. They can and will declare bankruptcy. Then you're out of pocket legal fees, with no way of recovering them, and with no compensation.

Consider this before you decide to sue.

It might be easier to just sell them the tech for a reasonable amount of money. I would not threaten to "expose" them with the H2020 programme as this might take away their source of funding -- it makes it less likely they will buy your tech.

I would reach out with a friendly email, telling them you noticed they used your library, and that you are aware they received funding because of it. Offer to sell them the library for a reasonable amount.

IMO, reaching out to them with a neutral tone (not overly friendly) is the best approach you can try. If they are not responding after reasonable number of (and sure it's been reached) attempts, you could try either legal options or try other options like to sell the same product as a competitor and/or openly shame the company.

What are you hoping to achieve? If it’s to screw them for as much money as possible speak to a lawyer who can advise you on the best strategy for that.

If you want a small/reasonable amount of compensation and failing that, you want them to cease using your code, I would just talk to them. Put together what your licensing terms are and then simple case of pay or stop using. This the path I would recommend, and as long as the fee is reasonable, I (as someone who has to deal with this sort of thing in my current role) would simply pay, as it the normal cost of doing business.

The reality is that this is likely the fault of a nieve developer, not the deliberate action of the organisation. Aggressively threatening to sue etc is typically overkill and the sort of behaviour that causes legal teams then to restrict developers and prevent them sharing their code etc.

Go find a good lawyer. The funding under the H2020 programme is usually granted only on projects that do not produce a "ready-to-go" product at the end of the project. It should be in a prototype-state.

If you claim that your component IS a major part of their product and service, chances are that the European Comission might take a closer look on it.

However, you'll need a long and steady breath, as we are talking about months and years until sth. happens.

Your best option at first might be, as pointed out by others, to approach them and seek for a license agreement.

You'll need to hire a lawyer, assuming you don't want to go work for the company directly. Nolo press has a book on patent, copyright, and trademark that would probably be a good overview [0] although it is US based. Good luck!

0. https://store.nolo.com/products/patent-copyright-and-tradema...

1. Decide clearly what you want: be ready to negotiate. 2. Gather evidence. 3. Get professional counseling (usually that means lawyer up). 4. Decide what you want and DON'T WANT to do. The latter is much more inpoetant than it seems. 5. Get counseling again. Is the plan feasible? How? Refine the plan 6. Act

Hacer news is not a good counseling source: you get what you pay for.

Where in the EU, anyway I'm guessing you should go talk to a competent lawyer in your country, that's free.

I believe you would need to threaten to sue, or sue. That costs time, money, and/or a lawyer's time, which costs a lot of money. Additionally, you might not win.

Shitty/unethical companies do this a lot. They find clients and they pay engineers to make everything work ASAP.

Your code was a convenient way to fix everything with plausible deniability. I'm sorry for this, and I hope you do win if you sue!

If you were in the US, I would like to take a case like this on for reasonable legal rates.

Sadly, I can't obtain a law license without first paying $140,000 in mandatory tuition :) Hmmmm....

> Sadly, I can't obtain a law license without first paying $140,000 in mandatory tuition

If you’re willing to live in Wyoming during law school, U of W offers free law school to anyone that gets accepted even those from out of state. The campus is super cute in a small town. If that is your thing, it’s a good deal. My brother in law took this route and he LOVED it. He moved from the east coast and plans to stay. He even convinced is girlfriend (from the east coast) to move there and now they’re married with kids.

By free I'm guessing you mean funded by tax payers?

Yes. Funded by state taxes. It is an effort to reduce brain drain, attract higher wage business and diversify the economy. From my datapoint of 1, it seems to be working. My brother in-laws wife is a nurse. WY is in desperate need of nurses and she found a well paying job there. Had my brother in law not gone to law school there she would have never looked for a job there and they wouldn’t have been able to fill that position. Btw, her salary in WY is way higher than on the east coast.

Theft is theft.

Could you please clarify your comment?

Taxes are a form of theft. You vote for politicians who implement laws to use force to take money from people and then waste it on unnecessary crap like brainwashing facilities also known as schools where children are indoctrinated into believing that socialism is somehow a just cause. It's no different from a mafia.

Whether or not it reduces brain drain or whatever is irrelevant. At the end of the day, it's still theft.

Taxes are a form of solidarity. Now, I might agree some tax rates are significantly too high and those could be seen as theft (because you do not agree what they are spent on), but a reasonable amount of taxes need to be paid to cover the basic infrastructure of a country.

I'm sure many people in developing countries wouldn't mind paying more than 5 or 10% taxes if it meant they actually got something back for their money.

You say solidarity. I say indoctrination. It's not solidarity if the government brainwashes people.

Of course we need infrastructure. You don't need taxes to get it.

Here's what taxes are: You think you know what I should do with my money.

You are free to move to a country with a low (or no) income tax rate. Monaco is great if you can afford it.

Certain cities in Ukraine are quite livable (Lviv, mostly) and have lenient visa and taxation policies too, if Monaco is a bit too rich for one's blood.

I just got back from Monaco. Can you tell me what you think is so great about it? Personally I prefer the French villages not tooo far away.

Do you by any chance have a link to back that up? I went to U of W's website and they did not mention anything about free tuition.

Sorry no. I only know that was the case when he went there. He graduated about 4 years ago.

I would contact them and ask.

They in fact mention the opposite:

https://www.uwyo.edu/law/admissions/finances/

Oh wow! I guess they changed their policy. Thanks for finding that!

It might have been a scholarship or something.

At the time it may have been a scholarship the all students received. I remember it not being the case for other programs if study.

Have you talked to them? What did they say if you did? Management might not be aware this is happening.

This here might be a quick-and-dirty attempt to stop them, at least temporarily: https://writing.kemitchell.com/2018/09/02/Killjoy-DMCA.html

Written for the US, but shouldn't matter all that much in practice.

It might make more sense to outsell them. Advertise your library as being used in a successful commercial product yet better supported by the original developer which is you.

This idea that you own intellectual property is questionable. If someone hears your story or song or sees a picture you drew or downloads some source code then that has escaped into the wild and is no longer controlled. Given how much effort leads nowhere at all it is a kind of gift to be valued in this way.

Instead of trying to own things that are conceptual and cannot be owned it makes more sense to control release and advancement. Get people to pay up before any source code can be downloaded, and once the designs or code or whatever is out there then offer more and better to the highest and best bidders.

You say shamelessly but it could also be "cluelessly" (which doesn't excuse the company in any way). When I interview candidates, one of the questions I ask is if they know anything about licenses and if they can describe differences between for instance MIT and GPL. In my experience a surprisingly large number have no clue of the implications on a product and use code/libraries without considering the license. Either way, it's prudent to have someone review projects for this kind of liabilities before shipping anything.

You should contact them and offer them to license your code to them and negotiate on a price, since they are already using it. You could also be proactive about it if you are interested in collaborating with them to continue improving on that library for a salary, since you are the author and the one with the know-how of things. People can be reasonable, try the respectful and honest approach first. They probably missed the fact that the code didn't come with a permissive license and they just added it by mistake. It can happen and doesn't necessarily mean they were being malicious so they'll be willing to make a deal with you.

May I ask why you made this source code publicly available but didn't put a license on it? What was your motivation?

In general, using unlicensed software code poses a large risk for any serious company (corporations even use specialized software to check the license of every open-source project they use), so you might be able to convince them to buy a proper license from you or stop using the code. If they won't you can take legal action.

Having some public code out there is good for attracting attention from employers.

That doesn't excuse not picking a license for it. explicit > implicit...

the fault is with the person who used unlicensed code. OP did nothing wrong if he wasn't explicitly choosing to permissively license it. sounds from his reaction that he wasn't. that's ok.

Sure, but if you leave your house door wide open, it's still not your fault if someone comes right in and takes stuff, but you certainly make it easier for them to do so. Picking a license is easier than trying to defend an unlicensed work in court..

> Picking a license is easier than trying to defend an unlicensed work in court..

Are you speaking from experience here? Whether it has a blanket license or not has absolutely nothing to do with its status as a copyright protected work.

Quite to the opposite, having a blanket license should make it harder to determine whether its use constitutes an infringement on the copyright or is permissible by the license.

There are plenty of reasons not to give your work a blanket license. For one, you might want to share an idea without necessarily giving anyone access to use your work directly, or you may want to present the work publicly for exposure so that interested parties can license it individually.

> For one, you might want to share an idea without necessarily giving anyone access to use your work directly, or you may want to present the work publicly for exposure so that interested parties can license it individually.

> Whether it has a blanket license or not has absolutely nothing to do with its status as a copyright protected work.

I never said it did. My point is, you are not helping anyone by not explicitly licensing things. You might know what rights exist if no license is specified, but not everyone does. I've seen terrible advisers and lawyers say 'well, there is no license and the source is there, so it is "open source" and fair game'. having an explicit license of rights would help to discourage all but the really dense folks from abusing it.

Legally, that phrase doesn't mean squat anywhere in the world. A copyright notice is not a license. Stating that you own the copyright to a work is not a license. It also has no bearing in the sense that you can say "all rights reserved" and still unwittingly give people implied license to use the work for, say, reading it by sharing it publicly.

> I never said it did.

You said that it would be easier to defend it in court if it was licensed. I argue on the other hand that it should be easier to defend in court if it's a clear cut copyright infringement rather than a matter of interpretation of some license, whether the license is at all enforceable and whether it's a copyright case at all and not a matter of contract law. Granting people an explicit license to your work adds a lot of moving parts.

> My point is, you are not helping anyone by not explicitly licensing things. You might know what rights exist if no license is specified, but not everyone does. I've seen terrible advisers and lawyers say 'well, there is no license and the source is there, so it is "open source" and fair game'. having an explicit license of rights would help to discourage all but the really dense folks from abusing it.

I think that someone who is dense (or more likely, unscrupulous) enough to use someone's work without a license to do so is "dense" enough to ignore the terms of a complicated license. We actually see that all the time, for example GPL licensed software being used in ways that don't comply with their license. The "open door" really happened already at sharing the code publicly at all. There will always be people that just don't give a shit.

Agreed with everyone who's saying reach out to the company and/or lawyers.

I hate to sling negativity on the internet, but you posted code online and are upset that someone is making money off of it.

Again, I could be way off base, but you come across in a similar fashion as a patent troll looking for a payday.

How can you prove that they plagiarized your source code? Do they keep an open repo?

Yes, the company keeps an open repo:

>...their product (whose source is also publicly available) ...

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