DocuSign, a platform that provides digital signature services for documents, has sent a legal notice to Michael Luo, a developer who built a website offering a free alternative with a similar feature suite. 

Luo built a free e-sign tool using ChatGPT, Cursor, and Lovable—platforms that help developers write code using natural language prompts. He built a product called Inkless in two days, which lets users sign unlimited documents for free.

“Just as DocuSign respects the intellectual property rights of third parties, we expect third parties to do the same with our intellectual property,” the company said in a cease-and-desist letter sent to Luo. The company said it is also concerned about how Luo was “disseminating” false and misleading statements regarding its product. This likely refers to Luo expressing his inspiration to create a free alternative to Docusign’s high costs. 

Source: x.com/AzianMike

“I never stole anything from DocuSign or made misleading statements,” Luo said. “They basically got scared that I created a free e-sign tool.” 

Luo added that despite receiving the legal notice, he is continuing to build the platform and ship new features to make the “free product even better”. 

DocuSign allows users to sign and send back unlimited documents for free. However, if one is collecting signatures, they can only send three documents with a free account. 

Over the last few months, using AI to build applications has quickly gained popularity, and platforms serving these capabilities have observed unprecedented growth rates. Andrej Karpathy, a former researcher at OpenAI, calls this phenomenon ‘vibe coding’. 

Aside from various safety and privacy concerns for developers creating AI-based apps, receiving legal notices from other developers or companies is now an added concern. 

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