Tell HN: GitHub refuses to remove cracked copies of my software after a month
- ID
- 32775
- Status
- summarized
- Published
- 07 Oct 2026, 2:54 AM
- Fetched
- 07 Oct 2026, 10:41 PM
- Provider
- Hacker News
- Category
- dev-community
- Original URL
- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49982498
- Source URL
- https://hnrss.org/best
Summary
- Score
- 7.0
- Created
- 07 Oct 2026, 10:42 PM
- Tags
- Audience
- developersvibe_coderssaas_founders
What happened
The developer of Photopea, a browser-based photo editor, says he filed a DMCA takedown with GitHub on 4 September 2026 and a month later got a reply saying GitHub could not confirm a violation of 17 U.S. Code § 1201 — the anti-circumvention provision, not the ordinary copyright claim. He reports tens of GitHub repositories where people asked AI models to pull the JavaScript from his site, strip the ads, and republish it as a "new product," and says users have emailed him bugs that turned out to be from those unofficial builds. The Hacker News thread drew hundreds of points and comments, including a self-described IP lawyer who laid out two options: hire a firm specialising in this to play whack-a-mole, or accept it as a normal loss.
Why it matters
If you ship a paid or ad-supported web app whose logic runs in the browser, this is the failure mode to plan for: AI makes stripping ads/licence checks cheap, and a §1201 claim is not enough to get GitHub to remove the fork. The concrete decision is whether to keep core logic client-side and budget for specialist IP enforcement, or move the parts worth protecting server-side — the thread's self-described IP lawyer notes specialist firms are cheaper than a one-off lawyer at ~$500/hour but the work is never finished. Also budget for support cost: Photopea's developer spent multiple emails before realising a bug report came from a modified build, which is reputation damage you cannot DMCA away.
Discussion angle
If an AI-stripped fork of your web app showed up on GitHub tomorrow, what would you actually do in the first 48 hours — and does that change where your core logic lives?