The Battle Over Digital Signatures DocuSign Sends Legal Notice to “Vibe Coder”

SHARE Digital Signatures SHARE Battle DocuSign Problems Cease and Desist to “Vibe Coder”

DocuSign, the largest and most well-known eSignature vendor, has taken an unprecedented step by utilizing a DMCA sham takedown notice to suppress Michael Luo, also known as “Vibe Coder.” 

Even cooler, though, is that Luo himself is the developer behind Inkless—a free online tool that provides you all of the same e-signing functionality of DocuSign, inking up agreements and documents, for free. 

This excellent legislation is just the most recent flashpoint in a rapidly growing anti-competitive crusade by legacy tech monopolies against independent developers using game-changing new technologies like AI to develop new, lower-cost, sometimes free, competitors.

The Adventures of Paperless Rising

As I write this, Inkless is rapidly gaining momentum on Techmeme, largely due to the remarkable speed of its innovators’ evolution and the innovative and unconventional thinking of its one-man maestro, Josh Millard. Second, or at least I like to think in the meantime—not just to respond with a more technically savvy go trot their platform—but to have the whole thing fully mapped out, thought out, and up and running in two days. 

That’s an astonishing achievement only made possible by this most vibrant magic kind multiplied by simply being rad and doing all that fast. Again, this is not meant to disparage any of these specific apps or developments but rather to highlight the accelerated pace of innovation in this new AI era. It now only requires an innovative individual who can swiftly and effortlessly transform an idea into a functional application. 

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Wouldn’t you know it, unlimitedly free document signing just so happens to be Inkless’s most spellbinding ingredient—a shiv-lord-Killer-SMB-Taming-Gauntlet that aims squarely at the throat, or at least the subscription-scoring ribs, of SMB staples like DocuSign.

Unfortunately, my friends, the rub is that we all would prefer to pretend to believe otherwise. DocuSign has a well-documented history of employing patent lawsuits as a brutal tool to relentlessly crush their competitors.

DocuSign’s legal threat against Nieman Lab’s Michael Luo is a particularly embarrassing, odious, and dangerous misreading of recent IP law. Often, these are claims of trademark infringement, copyright infringement, and unfair competition. 

Considering the hundreds of millions of dollars companies such as DocuSign have invested in building their brand name and proprietary technology over decades, the sudden appearance of a free competitor with nearly identical functionality can be perceived as a grave threat. 

The below notice attempts to provide a complete explanation for each of Luo’s alleged “false or misleading” statements related to DocuSign’s IPO. This kind of development would be, sadly, far short of Luo’s claimed public relations stunts of creating Inkless as a free-of-cost rival to DocuSign’s “extortionately high charges,” quite dangerous or misleading in a commercial context clearly intended to accomplish the Lanham Act’s banned practices.

In countless ways, prospective neighbors should recognize that this saga represents a microcosm of an arcane, surreptitious, and increasingly pernicious war being fought in these tech gulags, outside the context of this dispute. 

Pedaling furiously counterclockwise just to their immediate left are the thirty to forty challengers, if they’re not all dozing off at the wheel, legacy firms with 70-90% market share who’ve developed before, or still throwing billions down the toilet on kooky, costly, sunk-cost boondoggles in their own, closed, in-house tech. 

To be fair to these behemoths, these mega-projects aren’t all that bad. Like most people in the private sector, they are not the villains that we—the public sector—create them to be. In reality, they are less focused on the other side’s intellectual property and more on defending their own genre against all blue-chip intellectual properties and commercial practices from adversaries they view as existential threats. 

Indie developers and smaller studios, empowered by open-source toolsets and generative AI solutions that make development more accessible, faster, and cheaper, have the potential to dethrone today’s titans.

Indeed, their remarkable capacity for rapid prototyping is a significant advantage. They are truly exceptional at transforming the gaming landscape for various species, enabling non-developers to quickly and effortlessly create and publish applications that previously required significant individual time, resources, and a fully developed military. The creation of all this software, facilitated by the new democratization of software development, serves as an incredible engine for innovation that benefits the public good. 

It is that same engine, though, that throws up new, never-before-seen threats to the status quo, intellectual property law, and competitive paradigm. Just how much worse would the downstream experience have to be for whatever limit the upstream experience would have to be bettered before we’d accept an experience as miserable as the one offered by even such a technically still free, alternative downstream still allowed across that clearly cumbersome-seeming but still somewhat obvious upstream/downstream that DOT literally drew a line in the sand? Deeply negative, well-founded criticism simply would not pass the test, even though it deserves protection as a matter of public commentary. 

So realistically, where are you going to draw that line, though? 

Lead photo by Carolyn Berndt—Unsplash

Adieu from Inkless, perhaps Michael Luo, principal architect for the Inkless project, whom we admired, rose deeply amazed by how much code has already been poured onto Inkless and onto building way farther on top of Inkless to make Expand It Much More user-friendly. That whole Administrative State enactment prescribes a very expensive, long-term federal court shootout—if not an outright costly, multi-year game of tag between the incumbent and the new would-be niche player. 

The long-term positive impact of this unique case could be historic, establishing, in short order for the very first time ever, key precedents on how IP should and shouldn’t be used and thus, how innovation, especially innovation fueled by AI, should be free to flourish in equitable, rapidly advancing digital markets. We were particularly thrilled to have this particular case to watch for all of you—like us—who have been tracking the future of the software development ecosystem, the future of intellectual property law, and the eventual creation of our decades-long quest for free and open-source digital widgets.