You should discuss this with an attorney that is experienced with IP law to see what your options are, if any. IP law is very complex and often things that seem like they should be legal/illegal are not. You need expert legal advice, not the advice from the HN audience.

I think what you want is a legal avenue, like Trademark, Design rights, or patent.

If you have one of these, it’s possible that GitHub would honour it if you go via a lawyer.

Sorry this happened to you dude. I don’t want to be harsh but, out of the crimes ignored in this era of AI clean rooming, book destroying distilleries and a despondent ostrich adjacent legal system you do seem to be one amongst a deluge of cheated individuals.

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.

I personally know Ivan. For many years of his life, every day, he programmed algorithm after algorithm in this complex online photo editing tool. Essentially, he devoted half his life to it. And now, when someone has literally stolen his work, nobody is reacting. And that's terrible. I think it's absolutely terrible. GitHub should respond to this.

I've seen people on Reddit writing things like, "Come on, what's the big deal? AI can write any code now." I disagree. There are hundreds of thousands of lines of code here, very complex code, which even AI wouldn't be able to write on the first try or in a single day. So this person stole this code from Photopea and built a product on top of it.

> What do you think I could do? Do you think I should look for a lawyer to deal with it outside the digital world?

Use a trademark.

There are 100s of web based photo editors, paid and open source. How do you know they are taking yours, not someone else's or making their own with Ai?

I would imagine they all converge on common features and core implementation foundation