Their response:

> The team that made dataroom has stated that they did not use any of papermark’s code and that dataroom was made from scratch with inspiration from existing document sharing softwares, and that this post’s allegations of us stealing code are false. [...]

The screenshots clearly show they copied whole pages verbatim, both design and texts. The founder, Nico Laqua, basically responding with "we didn't copy _code_" and not taking any responsibility says a lot about his and his company's moral code. It might not be enough to get sued. That doesn't make it right.

https://x.com/nico_laqua/status/2070158170937581951

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nfw2 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I did an interview a couple years ago when Corgi was first hiring engineers. Nico and I ... did not click and it was probably the least smooth interview I've ever had despite it just being a phone screen.

I wouldn't be that surprised if Nico genuinely thinks "we didn't copy the code" is a reasonable defense. It would be a clear cut rule, and extreme "shape rotator" types often have trouble with the fuzziness of things like law. In reality, copyright infringement is often more like the porn test, you know it when you see it.

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throwawalien 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I never made it to the interview phase because on the phone screen they mentioned they all work 7 days a week in office. nope nope nope nope.

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cmgriffing 2 hours ago | parent [-]

We should thank companies for warning us during the interview process that they are so separated from reality (especially in the AI era)

If AI can’t make them recognize a work life balance has value then it’s easy to see they don’t believe the “force multiplier” BS they are peddling

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nfw2 an hour ago | parent [-]

They are worth 3 billion after two years so it seems like they are doing all right with their strategy although I'm old now and don't want to do that

	▲	manwithopinions an hour ago \| parent [-]
		They’re not really, it’s just the YC hype cycle. The business is selling insurance to other YC startups with some AI flair. They’re not even the first YC startup to do this, a previous YC insurance startup was acquired a few years ago for ~$1bn. So, they’re worth 3x the exit of the exact same company… because of what, AI? The fact that they’re cloning other software to release SaaS products is extremely bearish. Why are they wasting their time on this? A wildly successful $3bn startup would not spend their precious resources by launching a $10/m document sending SaaS. They’ll be doing down rounds soon enough. Could you imagine Paul Graham encouraging this?

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thih9 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> It might not be enough to get sued. That doesn't make it right.

Perhaps that’s enough for them. Legal gray area worked for Uber, AirBnB and many more.

As a consumer in not happy though, I don’t like incentivizing companies with such creative approach to law.

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dzhiurgis an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Please contact model provider {name} for further inquiries

That would be my cynical response.

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charcircuit an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>they copied whole pages verbatim

Parts of pages. Look at the screenshots. The wording is different between the pages.

	▲	saidnooneever an hour ago \| parent [-]
		yes and besides the whole thing that is happening lets not suddenly pretend css and html are code either. There might be bad things going on but we need to maintain our standards!