Difficulty in protecting intellectual property (IP) and dealing with infringement issues effectively

Signals over time

2 observed signals across 1 sources, tracked for 7 days. Confidence: low.

What people are saying Observed

• “Agreed, only I would rephrase it as, "hiding logic on servers is the best technical / non-IP protection for software" -- consider that IP largely exists to protect things that other means cannot! But as sibling comment indicates, even that is no longer a guarantee. There are demonstrations and anecdotal accounts of reverse engineering entire features or even small applications, including the backend code, by pointing an LLM at the web UI: https://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/generative-ai/bla... This is why I'm thinking that patents and other legal means are likely the only way forward to protect software that does not have a natural moat, like network effects or some huge data advantage. That is actually a huge amount of software. My concern is that without proper protection software without such moats, this will create incentives for people building them to adopt less-than-ideal means of monetizing their work, e.g. the things that lead to enshittification.”

  Hacker News · frustration

• “IP lawyer here - I can't give you actual legal advice because you aren't my client, but generally, you have two options here, neither of which will be surprising, or very satisfying: 1. Pay a lawyer or firm that specializes in this sort of thing to play whack a mole for you 2. Accept it as normal losses and ignore it. Contrary to others claims here, it is not a 500/hour thing to do #1 when dealing with firms that specialize in this. it probably would be if you just hire a random one-off IP lawyer to try and deal with this particular instance. Trying to deal with it yourself will be increasingly frustrating and time wasting for you. You will also never be able to prevent someone sufficiently motivated from doing stuff like this to your software. Unless you want to spend your time dealing with those folks instead of building the software, you should hand this part off - it's not a good use of your time, value wise. Put another way: most companies farm out processing of this sort of request to high volume low cost processing teams. Or AI. Or both. For you this is an important one off. For the person processing it it's one of a hundred tickets they are handling”

  Hacker News · frustration