My back went cold when I saw this HN post
I've been building small products for years. The thing I fear most: someone using AI to rip my code or template, strip out the ads or watermark, and repost it under a new name. It actually happened — and the platform ghosted me for a whole month.
This isn't a "developer problem" — it's something we all need to watch for
Ivan, the developer behind Photopea (the online image editor), posted on HN: someone used AI to scrape his JS code, remove the ads, rename it, and publish it on GitHub — and there were quite a few repos doing this. He submitted a takedown request on September 4th. A month later, he got a reply: "unable to confirm violation of § 1201." The comment section passed 260 replies, with people mentioning similar hits selling Notion templates and Figma assets. This can bite you if your work is digital, downloadable, and readable as code — including your paid course PDFs, templates, and design files. One tactic that kept coming up in comments: beyond filing the takedown notice, you also need to "manufacture exposure pressure on Twitter/Xiaohongshu/media." Platform support teams react to public outrage way faster than to forms.
What you can do today — costs almost nothing
Money: $0 (the DMCA submission is free).
Time: 2–3 hours to fill the form and build an evidence chain.
Technical barrier: no coding needed, but you have to package together "original publication timestamp + your own Git or cloud commit records + screenshots of the infringing page."
First step: grab the form at github.com/dmca, fill it out and submit. For Chinese platforms (Xianyu/Xiaohongshu/WeChat Official Accounts), use each platform's "侵权投诉" (infringement report) portal.
Step back: this isn't for everyone — if you only sell services to friends and have no downloadable digital products, skip it for now.
Should you act — based on where you are
If you're just starting out and haven't launched a paid product yet: don't worry about this. AI won't bother scraping you until you already have traffic — which is a good problem to have.
If you have 1–2 paying customers and sell templates or courses: I suggest you knock out three things this weekend: (1) screenshot your "original timestamp evidence" on every channel you publish to; (2) add whatever watermark or attribution you can to your product right now; (3) save the DMCA template to your notes app. I lost half a day once scrambling through old emails to find the template when something went wrong — because I hadn't saved it ahead of time.
If you're scaling up with multiple SKUs: on top of the above three, spend ¥500–1500 on a one-time chat with a lawyer who knows DMCA — not to actually sue, but to review "which actions build a complete evidence chain." Several experienced devs in the comments said a lawyer-written cease-and-desist letter works 10x better than your self-filled form.