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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Modifying/modding/remixing software was simply not as feasible as music, but LLMs made it possible.
I have agents maintaining several patches to my main tools, not forking, not sharing (some have no interest), personal adjustments
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?
several courts have ruled Ai output is not copyrightable, I am unaware of any co-authored cases
If you have one of these, it’s possible that GitHub would honour it if you go via a lawyer.
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.
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.
If security is a solved problem then anyone that wants to teach themselves enough can move to trying to solve disease, until disease is solved, then we all move on to building enough robots to mass produce enough food to solve world hunger and shelter... and once the needs of everyone on earth are solved at an ever cheaper price until it is free... then I guess we do whatever we want.
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