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.
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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.
But, yeah. More than likely this case is a simple account termination and some kind of "you can't call your clone 'openviktor'" letter.
https://www.morganlewis.com/pubs/2026/03/us-supreme-court-de...
As an example, a photo taken from a digital camera can be subject to copyright because of the creative element involved in composing and taking the photo. Likewise, source code generated by an LLM under the guidance of a human author is likely to be subject to the human authors copyright.
Anyways, however you put this, I see this as a property theft and taking pride at open sourcing does not justify it.
Let's call it what it is - stolen IP and released without permission of the author. Sure, it's good that it opens the debate as to whether that's ethical given that's essentially what the model itself is doing, but it's very clear in this instance that he's just asked for and been given a copy of source that has a clear ownership. That's about as clear cut as obtaining e.g. commercial server-side code and distributing it in contravention of the licence.
That said, the article says "Okay, prompts, great. Are they any interesting? Surprisingly... yes. As an example workflow_discovery contains a full 6-phase recipe for mining business processes out of Slack conversations, something that definitely required time and experiments to tune. It's hardcoded business logic, but in prompt instead of code."
So the article author clearly knows this prompt would be copyrighted as it wasn't output from an AI, and recognises that there would have been substantial work involved in creating it.
I certainly think the whole idea of IP ownership as related to software will become very interesting from a legal standpoint in the coming years. Personally I think that, over time, the legal challenges will become pretty overwhelming and a sort of legal bankruptcy will be declared at some point in one direction or another (as in, allowing this to happen or making it extremely easy to bring judgement and punishment, similar to spam laws). However, I would not want to be the first to find out, especially in Europe.
(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
>TeamViktor's faces surely? But they're busy diamond handsing all the way to the moon so probably don't even care. XD
would anyone please be so kind to translate these parts of this comment into something a 45+ year old would understand?
"TeamViktor's faces surely?" = imagine the looks on their faces "diamond handsing to the moon" = hanging onto a situation that looks bad now hoping it gets better, throwing good money after bad, the opposite of cutting your losses.
more or less what i thought, but the "PJ outta Dubai" really made me question myself.
PJ = private jet
Diamond hands and to the moon are crypto trader slang
Makes me laugh answering this question, because the meaning is all there if you skip over all the meme words.
(I don't know anything about OpenClaw and on a deeper level, I don't wish to learn about it either considering all the security implications that it generally has)
For example, years ago someone might have said: "Software programs are "just" some instructions on top of a computer, which does the actual computing work. The software companies don't own the computer. The next version of the computer might not even be capable of running the software." And for some kinds of software, they'd be right. Some programs turned out to be more replaceable than others.
I assume the GetViktor folks are hoping that some combination of know-how and learnings from real customer interactions and data will help them build or find a sustainable competitive advantage in some niche.
> They don't own the LLM model. You're just one silent update from not delivering what you promised.
This is true but a small risk IMO. Worst case they can shift to open-weight LLMs for inference. I would bet on LLMs being an increasingly commodity part of the stack.
https://uspto.report/TM/78326416/
https://uspto.report/TM/74713937/
https://uspto.report/TM/74619284/
https://uspto.report/TM/87438245/
https://uspto.report/TM/77936273/
https://uspto.report/TM/86747705/
https://uspto.report/TM/78638776/
https://uspto.report/TM/73359604/
https://uspto.report/TM/98066821/
https://uspto.report/TM/97979922/
…and many more.
There is no doubt that if this goes to court you are only hurting your own chances at any reasonable defense by deciding on mirroring the naming like that. And for what? Saying you created an opensource product with no tie to their branding would convey the same effect.
The legal purpose of trademarks is to serve the same purpose as a signature: in order that one company cannot do business pretending to be another company without showing a clear intention to defraud - an intention made clear by the attempt to fake a signature, or imitate a mark. It is not to own words or sounds. It is a mark that you trade under.
This is a product that is openly hostile to the other product, and is adding a well-established prefix to indicate the reason for that hostility.
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.
The company may not do a perfect job of security either, but I figure they'll do a better job than I can as a solo practitioner.
