Someone Rebuilt Photoshop With AI. What Can Adobe Still Own? | Invent Anything Talks

About this episode

Someone used AI coding agents to rebuild Photoshop from scratch, and copyright may not be able to stop it. So what can a software company still own? Seth Cronin talks with his ipCapital Group colleague Mike D'Andrea about the AI-built Adobe clones (ArtCraft's PhotoCraft and its sibling apps). Copyright protects the code you wrote, the way it protects the words and recording of a song. A patent protects how a feature works, whoever writes the code. They walk through the Adobe patents behind Content-Aware Fill and Generative Fill (and read the actual claim), how a clean-room rebuild works, and who a patent really stops: individual users, enterprises or competitors. Mike's practical takeaway: run the test on your own product. Have AI rebuild it feature for feature, see what it couldn't do, and sort what's left into two piles: what's visible from outside, which a patent can cover, and what isn't, which can stay a trade secret. If someone rebuilt your product next week, what would still be yours? Tell us in the comments. Mike and Seth aren't lawyers. This is a conversation about invention and business, not legal advice, and not a view on whether any project infringes any patent. Mike's article, "Someone Cloned Photoshop in a Week. Copyright Can't Stop It. Patents Can." (Oct. 11, 2026): https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/someone-cloned-photoshop-week-copyright-cant-stop-patents-d-andrea-jd3ne/ CHAPTERS 0:00 Someone rebuilt Photoshop 1:00 What copyright can't stop 2:13 Mike D'Andrea on what caught his attention 2:40 How the story spread 3:23 Copyright protects the song 4:10 The idea vs. the recording 5:39 Adobe's fill patents 6:30 Turn the gondola into a bird 7:17 The clean-room rebuild 8:49 Reading the actual claim 9:29 From ones and zeros back to ideas 11:46 Does AI end the first-mover advantage? 13:02 Run the test yourself 14:13 Who a patent actually stops 15:27 Competitors, not customers 16:09 The FilmCraft review 17:26 Why Napster lost 17:53 When a patent comes into play 19:09 Reverse engineer your own software 19:48 Write the spec for every way it could be built CORRECTIONS "Future Seth" pops in a few times with fixes we found after recording: the Word, Excel and PowerPoint clones came out Oct. 7, a few days before Mike's article; PhotoCraft hasn't built Generative Fill yet; REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) is a separate project, and ArtCraft's developer says he doesn't use it or decompiled binaries; the Premiere-style clone is FilmCraft; and DaVinci Resolve's free version isn't open source (it's free proprietary software, available since 2011). SOURCES PhotoCraft (ArtCraft): https://github.com/storytold/photocraft PhotoCraft's own parity assessment: https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/target-app-parity.md PhotoCraft's gaps list (Generative Fill not yet built): https://github.com/storytold/photocraft/blob/main/docs/gaps.md ArtCraft's Office-style apps (repos created Oct. 7, 2026): https://github.com/storytold/wordcraft · https://github.com/storytold/gridcraft · https://github.com/storytold/deckcraft FilmCraft: https://github.com/storytold/filmcraft REA, a separate reverse-engineering project (ArtCraft says it doesn't use it): https://github.com/morluto/rea Fireship, "Every app on Earth is now open source... whether it likes it or not" (Oct. 12, 2026): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wajoP_5Cpw8 US 10,706,509 B2, Adobe Inc., content-aware fill with a user-customized sampling region (granted July 7, 2020): https://patents.google.com/patent/US10706509B2/en US 12,462,456 B2, Adobe Inc., non-destructive generative image editing (granted Nov. 4, 2025): https://patents.google.com/patent/US12462456B2/en Gizmodo (Oct. 7, 2026): https://gizmodo.com/someone-vibe-coded-a-free-knockoff-of-adobe-creative-suite-2000823322 Vice (Oct. 9, 2026): https://www.vice.com/en/article/everything-we-know-about-the-free-adobe-clones-built-with-ai-do-they-actually-work/ Decrypt (Oct. 14, 2026): https://decrypt.co/380991/developer-cloned-photoshop-ai-just-did-same-microsoft-office Creative Bloq: https://www.creativebloq.com/news/i-tried-those-free-ai-coded-adobe-creative-cloud-clones-and-they-have-some-big-problems DaVinci Resolve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DaVinci_Resolve Hacker News discussion of ArtCraft (Oct. 4, 2026): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49958850 Invent Anything Talks, from Invent Anything Hosted by Seth Cronin | ipCapital Group, an IP strategy consulting firm Recorded October 15, 2026.