There are gonna be some really interesting legal decisions to read in the coming years, that’s for sure…
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The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai:
Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish.
The ToS for Viktor.ai include the following fun passages:
> 18.1. The Agreement and these Terms & Conditions are governed by Dutch law and the Agreement and these Terms & Conditions will be interpreted in accordance with Dutch law.
18.2. All disputes arising from or arising in connection with the Agreement and/or the Terms & Conditions will be submitted exclusively to the competent court in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
7.3. The Customer is not permitted to change, remove or make unrecognizable any mark showing VIKTOR's Intellectual Property Rights to the Software. The Customer is not permitted to use or register any trademark or design or any domain name of VIKTOR or a similar name or sign in any country.
8.5. The Customer may not cause or allow any reproduction, imitation, duplication, copying, sale, resale, leasing or trading of the Services and/or the Software, or any part thereof.
Terms of service might matter more for terminating that user account. Whole ordeal is just plain copyright violation. The author had no licence to that internal code, and whitewashing it with LLM will achieve nothing. That case is much clearer than that recent GPL->BSD attempt story.
If LLM-generated code isn't considered a derivative work of the original, then whether the author was licensed to use the code doesn't matter. But I'm sure the courts will rule in favor of your view regardless. Laundering GPL is in corps' interest and laundering their code is not.
I'm not sure why people are clinging to some fuzzy and stretched out notion of copyright and the GPL in a particular. LLM's do NOT just copy code, with the right prompting, they generate entirely new code which can produce the same results as already existing code - GPLed or not.
If copyright is extended to cover such cases we'll have to become all lawyers and do nothing but sue each other because the fuzziness of it will make it impossible to reject any case, no matter how frivolous or irrelevant.
According to US courts, the output can't be copyrighted at all. It's automatically in public domain after the "whitewash", regardless of original copyright.
I think it comes down to the company's appetite for legal action, doesn't it? This case is imo pretty clear but the vibe has quite the smell of Oracle v Google to me.
But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.
Isn't this exactly what LLMs themselves do? They ingest other people's data and reproduce a slightly modified version of it. That allows AI companies to claim the work is transformative and thus fair use.
I could do the same thing but not publish it, still getting the value of their product without legal concerns. Now, what happens when it becomes even easier thanks to AI improving, and takes few hours instead of few days?
Nice. Probably worth making a local copy before it gets taken down.
(Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API)
That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced fairly easily, especially with AI.
Still, props to him for writing a proper blog post and explaining the process
A lot of folks talking about the legality basis of this approach, I think the focus should be more around the true moat behind these hype growth hack companies out there.
This sort of exposure is good, in my opinion it enables competition to emerge with true business moat rather than just "do it first, do it fast, worry last" type of thing we're seeing.
I find it fascinating that this is just some _plumbing_ around some LLM - sold as a product and "AI coworker". They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.
Every part of this is genuinely funny. Viktor launching basically OpenClaw for slack (because claw is MIT so yolo let's go mac some monnney and PJ outta Dubai etc etc). Some guy getting all their source code just by asking Viktor for it. Then rebuilding their core in a couple days because there's basically nothing there. push MIT to Github. TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD
I just want to point out _how easy it is_ to build any of these tools yourself.
I got inspired by nano-claw and built on some of it's ideas to build a whole k8s hosted autonomous agent platform and got it into production in 2 weeks. It's just some api calls and container orchestration. The only hard problem _and it is hard_, is securing it, because you basically have to treat the agents as potentially malicious.
Ignorering the questionable legality of this entire thing, which might fall out in favor of it being a legal activity. Calling the project OpenViktor is as dumb as committing secrets to GitHub. For the love of reason call it something else.
85 comments
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The rest of this comment is irrelevant, but leaving for posterity, I had the wrong Viktor - it's getviktor.com not viktor.ai:
Edit: this one particularly interesting to me as both parties are in the EU. VIKTOR.ai is a Dutch company and the author of this post is Polish.
The ToS for Viktor.ai include the following fun passages:
> 18.1. The Agreement and these Terms & Conditions are governed by Dutch law and the Agreement and these Terms & Conditions will be interpreted in accordance with Dutch law.
18.2. All disputes arising from or arising in connection with the Agreement and/or the Terms & Conditions will be submitted exclusively to the competent court in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
7.3. The Customer is not permitted to change, remove or make unrecognizable any mark showing VIKTOR's Intellectual Property Rights to the Software. The Customer is not permitted to use or register any trademark or design or any domain name of VIKTOR or a similar name or sign in any country.
8.5. The Customer may not cause or allow any reproduction, imitation, duplication, copying, sale, resale, leasing or trading of the Services and/or the Software, or any part thereof.
If copyright is extended to cover such cases we'll have to become all lawyers and do nothing but sue each other because the fuzziness of it will make it impossible to reject any case, no matter how frivolous or irrelevant.
https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...
But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.
Anyways, however you put this, I see this as a property theft and taking pride at open sourcing does not justify it.
(Re: legal - why even bother with a court decision when it’s on GitHub? A takedown is much simpler. We've seen this before, like when Meta went after people reverse-engineering their API)
That said there may not be much here thats actually protectable. It's mostly a CLI orchestrating other tools, and the same functionality could likely be reproduced fairly easily, especially with AI.
Still, props to him for writing a proper blog post and explaining the process
This sort of exposure is good, in my opinion it enables competition to emerge with true business moat rather than just "do it first, do it fast, worry last" type of thing we're seeing.
I got inspired by nano-claw and built on some of it's ideas to build a whole k8s hosted autonomous agent platform and got it into production in 2 weeks. It's just some api calls and container orchestration. The only hard problem _and it is hard_, is securing it, because you basically have to treat the agents as potentially malicious.
Guessing legal action was taken. The comments here predicting a takedown were spot on.
ITs worst nightmare no?