Replit used legal threats to kill my open-source project

> Naturally, I took down my project right away... So a CEO bullied you. He threatened to have lawyers look at something, accused you of behaving poorly, and accused you of being difficult. He is being manipulative. He is trying to guilt / scare you into stopping. And it worked. For all readers... do not be afraid of lawyers. Especially if nobody has even talked to them yet. Lawyers do not like to lose cases, so will not push a…

I understand the feeling of being taken advantage of, but this seemed clearly like an over-reaction. A 100% apology was in order from my (sideline) opinion. He's just an ex intern having some fun, probably trying to impress his former boss even. I was reading through the replit blog to see what kind of things are trade secret vs public, and noticed that they didn't go out of their way to highlight that Bret Victor's "Learnable Programming" is clearly the…

Needs a 2021 tag Last time on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27424195 (4022 points!!!)

IANAL, but the way copyright works in the USA is based on what's known as the inverse ratio rule. Generally, two things are required to be established in order to be liable for copyright infringement: access and substantial similarity. But the more access you have, the less substantially similar you need to be to be liable. Replit may well have been within their rights to sue this person for creating a product like theirs after he was an intern at…