Surely UI enough isn't enough to prove that source code was plagiarised?
In the event Papermark chooses to sue how will the defendant defend themselves short of presenting their own (possibly) closed source?
I am curious if/how YC will handle this to get ahead of earning a reputation of being a den of scammers - a few months after the Delve scandal
flock is a YC company, so it's pretty clear that YC does not care about a negative reputation. as long as it makes money, nothing else matters.
Perhaps not what the general public thinks, but I assume YC cares a lot about its reputation among VC firms that fund its companies, because VCs don't like being scammed (directly, or indirectly through unknowingly funding scams)
For example only yesterday I got spam from an YC company, Polymath, and I replied back asking where they got my details from - no response yet. Once I get something I'll make a GDPR subject access request, then a deletion request. I hope the overhead of that causes them to rethink their spamming campaign.
But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.
My comment was not about doing a generic bad thing - it was about scammy behavior in particular (which ties to the Delve incident). YC depends on the VC ecosystem to fund its companies, and no VC wants to be scammed. If a reputation of cultivating/condoning/obliviousness scammers takes root, that would be bad for business.
> But I'm not going to complain to YC about it.
I am not complaining, or even expecting a moral decision. I'm legitimately curious how this will shake out, for purely capitalistic, reputation-management reasons.
Now, INAL of course, but I would think this sort of mechanism would be quite gameable from both sides ( i) a wealthy competitor legally forcing a promising upstart to reveal source ii) a copycat working out some kind of arrangement where the code itself is licensed to them via shell company based overseas.)
If someone is trying to dig into their competitor's trade secrets via discovery, the court offers multiple ways to safeguard against that. The defendant can identify information as a trade secret and ask that it be protected in some way - for example, the documents may be restricted to "Attorneys' Eyes Only", so while the plaintiff's attorneys can review the material, the plaintiffs themselves are barred from reviewing it. Or the judge themselves may get involved in an in-camera session.