Ask HN: How do you protect your open-source side projects from copycats?

Here is a seemingly counterintuitive idea. Can you partner with them? Together your team could be unbeatable. You provide the engineering, they provide the marketing.

As you point out they have an order of magnitude more users. Evidently they have some skills in marketing and distribution.

> which was open sourced under MIT license

This seems like the main mistake. Try AGPLv3 instead.

Most MIT licensed projects don't get any attention, and none of them make money. Consider your project an outlying success.

Probably not the first time he's taken credit for someone else's idea. This quote from him in the subreddit is pretty funny. "Lots of discussion and outroar lately about Chrome and YouTube forcing ads on users via blocking ad-blockers. It led me to thinking about how I could address the problem with my existing skills." His 'particular set of skills' of taking ideas from HN and passing them off as his own.

How do you know this was actually copied from your code? Is there a link that I've missed to a source for the Chrome version?

LOL @ "functionally copied" it. Are you trying to claim the idea as an original invention?

The MIT license is for the code artifact; if you want to control the IDEA you'd need much stronger measures like a patent.

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First you look at the MIT license (https://opensource.org/license/mit/): "Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

"The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software."

Assuming the full license (I omitted about 892 characters) were in the original the derivative work omitting the original notice violates the license. In USA, you register your copyrighted work and can sue for statutory damages.

Patent protects an original idea (reduced to practice) and one precept is that the idea got independently used only after it was disclosed to the public. Obtaining a patent from the PTO is not a trivial matter and then you can sue for your lost profits, damages based on the defendant's profits, or prohibit use by anyone. All of this assumes you really care.

This guy again. I’m getting REALLY sick of this guy. I’m the person that made the code, this guy and one other have been harassing me on every platform I’m on accusing me of “stealing” his MIT licensed code in public forums. First it was Discord to a server of 1000 people. Then it was spam messages to all these people in the server. Then it was reddit. Then it was the chrome web store. Now it’s also HackerNews and GitHub! 1. I told you I was probably inspired by the idea. I make extensions daily, I always comment on and take inspiration from extensions and others ideas! But I was mostly inspired by the constant discussions about YouTube and adblockers all over the media. Your idea is not unique! You did not discover this method! 2. I already make tons of extensions, this is super low hanging fruit - so I made it. To figure out the basic functionality took 1 minute of investigating the DOM in YouTube. Inspect element of the video player, look at its properties, notice the playback rate property, toggle it, that’s it. 3. I wrote my own code because it’s as simple as setting the video playback rate to 16, doesn’t take a rocket scientist. I did not need to copy your code. It’s simple as hell. Anyone with half a brain cell would figure it out in 5 minutes. I even share my code below. 4. If I copied your code, why was my first iteration a bookmarklet and not an extension?! A bookmarklet which I mention in the original post, that I also shared with users in other forums I’m in. So tell me why I would bother with a bookmarklet if I could just copy your code as you said? THE SAID BOOKMARKLET CODE: javascript:(function(){ function clickButton() { const button = document.querySelector('#skip-button\\:5 > span > button'); if (button) { button.click(); } } function adjustPlaybackForAds(target) { if (target.classList.contains('ad-showing') || target.classList.contains('ad-interrupting')) { const video = document.querySelector('video'); if (video) video.playbackRate = 16; } }

    function waitForVideoAndObserve() {
        const video = document.querySelector('video');
        if (video) {
            video.playbackRate = 16;
            video.autoplay = true;
            video.muted = true;

            const player = document.querySelector('ytd-player #movie_player[aria-label="YouTube Video Player"]');
            if (player) {
                const observer = new MutationObserver(mutations => {
                    mutations.forEach(mutation => {
                        if (mutation.type === 'attributes' && mutation.attributeName === 'class') {
                            clickButton();
                            adjustPlaybackForAds(mutation.target);
                        }
                    });
                });
                observer.observe(player, { attributes: true });
            }
        } else {
            setTimeout(waitForVideoAndObserve, 500);
        }
    }

    waitForVideoAndObserve();

})(); 4. Hard work. What a joke, this took me 4 hours tops to convert from idea to bookmarklet to extension . It’s about 60 lines of code in a content script that a monkey could write! I’m that monkey! And it only took that long because I had to keep pinging YouTube to get an ad to play! Wait for video element, then increase playback and mute! That’s it! Yet you are under the impression this is some arcane knowledge that must be copied to be believed. 5. I actually DID look at your code after thesr accusations appeared, I even posted both our code in the server for others to come to their own conclusions! Additionally you use background scripts and content scripts - I just use a content script because … why would you even need a background script? You don’t. 5. You are discussing legal advice - cute. Now HARASSMENT and slander, those are legal discussions 6. You and the other user who have been harassing me hav...