Ask HN: What to do when a Chinese startup clones your website? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to do when a Chinese startup clones your website?

131 pointsbflesch128 comments

Dear HN, I'm CEO of a Germany-based eSports startup and we have a problem.

Today we were approached by a Chinese user of our website who told us that a China-based startup has launched a direct clone of our website aimed at the Chinese market.

Our website https://strivewire.com is a host of for-money eSports tournaments in the Hearthstone vertical, but we are working on expanding to other games as well.

The website in question is a very obvious clone of ours and has both .com and .cn domains: - www.haogegebisai.com - www.chosengamer.com

Basically they copied all the design and even our logo down to the actual URLs.

I've added their CEO on WeChat and inquired about this, and he said they are big fans of our startup. But he also mentioned that they already have investors. Their website launched two days ago and already has a bunch of activity.

We've talked about this internally and hope to be able to gain this startup as a Chinese subsidiary, but we are still unsure if this will actually work out.

From a legal standpoint we are very unsure how much you can actually do in such a case. Should we just wait it out? Our should we aim to litigate to put pressure on their investors? I have some experience in international litigation in cybercrime cases, but from a practical perspective it is very likely to bind a lot of resources and focus.

Another huge problem for us is that we are in talks with a very large Chinese IT company (triple-digit $Bn market cap), and if there is a clone growing in their backyard they might pass on us.

It'd be great if people with more experience in these things could give us some advice.

Thanks, Benjamin

TL;DR: Chinese startup is cloning our business, unsure what to do

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Where to start? You won't win putting legal pressure on any Chinese startup since that is an empty threat, but you also won't win talking to any big Chinese IT company. The startup won't care about the threat of legal action and the big company will simply clone your product once you convince them the market has potential.

If your goal is making money and/or securing a partnership you have to put yourself into a position of strength. The best way to do this is to launch an actual Chinese competitor yourself. This should cost no more than 10k USD per month assuming you can leverage your existing code, which makes it much cheaper than going the legal route. Feel free to contact me (contact info in profile) if you need help or introductions to people who can actually make this a reality for you in a week or two. I'm in Beijing and have done three startups in China and can put you in touch with people here who can actually help you.

A live product from you poses an existential threat to your competitors and keeps the big IT company from delaying in perpetuity (the typical modus operandi for big players here is to have middle management rush to agreement on the general principles of possible cooperation and then stalling and never doing anything more substantial -- the delay means they aren't sure if it is worth their while to clone you yet). But the threat of your getting actual traction matters because growth puts a deadline on your willingness to accept other people stalling, and your presence starts imposing actual costs on the startup. Those guys will need to change their branding at a minimum since they can't build an independent brand with you in the market, and once they know you will play hardball you will find them a lot more amenable to compromise if you want to go that route. With that said, if your market reception is good you may not even want to continue talking with them, since most Chinese startups are really inefficient and you can probably blow them out of the market anyway.

Thank you very much. Your advice sounds on point, and it is maybe even a bit too realistic to really reduce our stress levels.

We're really not sure what to expect from the Chinese market, and if our resources aren't better spent on US / EU only. We'd be interested to explore that option, though. Maybe there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. I will contact you next week if it is fine with you.

We believe for-money eSports tournaments will be the next online poker craze allover the world, because it addresses the basic instincs of competition of a generation of (mostly male) gamers that grow older and have more disposable income.

Thanks for offering your expertise.

I've been in China from 2004-2014 and built a startup there that was sold to one of their internet giant.

I can confirm that the parent is on point. Imo, your best bet - if you dont want to give up the Chinese market - would be to raise from a reputable Chinese investor. Without that you wont have much pull with any partner you find in China and they will happily stall and then copy your stuff. That is completly "fair game" to them and most wont even comprehend what your trying to tell them - a bit like the guy telling you that he admires/like what you've done after you asked him why they copied your stuff as-is...

If you want to chat feel free to contact me, email in profile.

Really interesting advice. Starting a Chinese version is a very smart reaction, since by creating the clone the copiers have actually lowered the cost of creating a Chinese business for the legitimate owners.

All of the work they did creating the clone becomes transformed into the work the real owners would have to do translating and proving the idea of a Chinese version to themselves or investors.

Sort of a jui jitsu move.

Starting a venture in China is not that easy as a European compared to a Chinese. The strategy may work if one can get good support. The reverse is also true, it is no that easy to open a business in Europe as a Chinese.

Jui jitsu can go both ways.

I would say that unless China is your market focus on R&D / marketing / customer service in your primary markets and worry about that first. You can grow there while the folks in China will have troubles addressing anyone beyond their borders.

As for cloning your site into Chinese it's probably harder than you think and even still your site could be blocked with the right payoff to the government. When I was managing bitbucket.org a Chinese company approached us to license the technology and setup a mirror in China -- we refused and almost immediately bitbucket.org was blocked in China. A few weeks later a clone of bitbucket.org showed up with far less features.

It took many months of effort, however after working with the Australian Embassy and several lawyers to contact the Chinese government we were able to file a position with the Ministry of Technology (or Information, cannot remember exactly) and then a few days later our site was unblocked.

After it was all said and done, in the end we decided to focus on markets that are more approachable (western) since we could better service those markets as they matched our identity better.

Yes it seems definitely easier said than done.

Nothing like some "realpolitik" for breakfast.

> since most Chinese startups are really inefficient

I'm curious, why do you think this happens?

There are a few places where you can lodge strong protest and send legal notice:

State Intellectual Property Office of China http://english.sipo.gov.cn/lxfs/

China Internet Network Information Center http://www1.cnnic.cn/PublicS/hyzl/

You can send them emails or even better call them. They all should have people who can communicate in English effectively. Getting in contact with them will help you put pressure on the offender, and also gather info for next move.

The best move is to hire someone from China to do some leg work for you, if that's necessary. No need for lawyers at first. There are many Chinese freelancers active in various international elance type sites. Also, http://www.witmart.com/ is reputable, operating from China.

China, at least the central government, is trying hard to implement tougher policies on protecting intellectual properties. The problems are mostly at the local level. If you know how to get the offenders' attention with effective threats on legal action, they are actually _very_ afraid of being caught. The cut-throat business competitions in China force them to avoid legal trouble and damage to their company's reputations, if they are legit startup trying to make it big, not some college students just playing around (in this case then you don't need to worry too much anyway).

Also wholesale copying western ideas is a widespread popular practice, I feel you are fighting the wrong battle. There is no way you can prevent somebody else (meaning hundreds if the idea is really good) in China doing the same cloning shit. Also conquering the China market needs many many other types of fighting, and preventing cloning is the least you need to worry about.

Thanks your advice, kev6168! I will try to get in touch with those two authorities on Monday and maybe they can clear up the leverage we have.

If you look at our website you see that we're using cheap bootstrap, so they are not really cloning our design asset, but the whole product / UX. They add some value for users by providing Chinese translations.

They told us they already have investors, and it seems at least two people are working on this. Unfortunately I was unable to find any info about company registration or the actual investor.

I sincerely hope that we can somehow work with them so we don't have to waste resources in fighting / worrying.

oh lots of 'fightings' are needed. Those fightings are very strange and pointless work to a westerner, but actually are the necessary and normal things to do in the Chinese business environment, things like 1. thorough research on whether it's in your best interests to operate in china now, _really important_, 2. much _much_ more carefully than you would do in Europe to examine your potential partners' credentials and validity of their claims, 3. establish connections with government officials (no, you don't need to go crazy on bribe or shady stuff, just good relationship and name recognition), 4, find capable and trusty locals to work together.

The key for anyone to make it in China is to understand that although China is utterly different from the west, it is _NOT_ a random and chaos place. It has its own well-oiled system running for the most time successfully for millenniums! It's scary to foreigners because it's so different so people tend to avoid it altogether. But in fact every issue has a well established way to be dealt with, obvious to locals but not obvious to a foreigner. So getting there and doing the right moves, you might emerge victorious.

Also in comparison to other industries, internet-related intellectual property protection is much easier to enforce by the Chinese central and local government, because they can order ISPs and Cloud service providers to pull plugs on the perpetrators web sites with enough poking from you or your liaison in China. Power to the censors and GFW related technologies! :) So be confident you will find ways to solve the problem. Good luck with your venture.

>Another huge problem for us is that we are in talks with a very large Chinese IT company (triple-digit $Bn market cap), and if there is a clone growing in their backyard they might pass on us.

If what I've read about doing business in China holds a sliver of truth - both from stories linked here and elsewhere - it's not a chance they will pass on you but almost a given they will pass on you. I'm almost so suspicious of business practices in that market that I'd be willing to wager a small sum that maybe somebody in the very large Chinese IT company actually prompted another entity to get the clone up and running, or at least is aware of the situation.

If there's a way to take your idea and leave you nothing, I get the feeling that is exactly the path that will be taken. Unfortunately I can't help with direct advice to address, but I do wish you the best in your efforts to stamp out that terribly dishonest approach.

Thanks for your assessment. I haven't thought about it from that angle. That's a bit upsetting as I am sure they have access to much larger resources than we do.

The thing is that I don't know who the investor behind this business is. If I knew it is a smallish business angel then there would be no reason to worry. On the other hand if they are in Chinese YC we have a problem :|

If you can find a way to innovate in a manner that isn't easily copyable I think you can win. Sorry if that isn't much help. The Chinese are experts at copying but it doesn't work for everything at any single point in time.

I had this happen to a client. The Chinese company was literally hot-linking to everything. I used a site sucker to grab the site they had put up to tell this.

So we changed the domain name, moved the site.

We then replaced the assets under the domain name they were using with assets that might offend folks when looked at.

Not everyone can change the domain though.

You can use clodeflare to protect your CDN, being used by third party.

Good idea. At the time I had no idea CloudFlare existed.

You could have set your server to only send offensive images when the referer for the assets is their website. Then you should be able to continue using your website as normal.

At the time we were using a GoDaddy shared solution and didn't have access to change a lot of the config.

then someone hotlinking to your site were the least of your worries then ;)

We're behind cloudflare and hosted on AWS. They're not hotlinking anything, but they copied the whole site 1:1. Please see my "real" submission with links to the sites: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455670

You'd be amazed what an Nginx configuration serving a conditional message in favor of freedom of expression and self-determination for Taiwan can accomplish. Not much for international politics, but it will resolving the hotlinking problem very, very quickly.

I'm surprised this didn't come up with the github script tag DDOS. I know they changed content to try to encourage them to stop, but it was an inconvenience to users, like alert() calls, so of course it was no where near as effective as this.

> I'm surprised this didn't come up with the github script tag DDOS.

The main Chinese-Github DDOS was the Chinese Goverment/Great Firewall of China was it intercepting Chinese websites for non-chinese IPs, and inserting a script that DDOSed Github. Chinese users weren't relevant here.

That's a good point. I just want to be clear that we are not looking for ways to weaponize their or even our own website :)

Just trying to get some input on a tricky situation. Should we expand to China earlier than planned? Should we ignore it? etc pp

The only thing the Chinese respect is constant execution. You have to out execute them every day and constantly beat them in the market, in order to achieve a position of strength from which you can structure the deals you want. Despite what some other users have posted here, there's almost 0 respect for trademark or copyright law especially if you're a foreign company.

Out of curiosity, what makes "What to do when a Chinese startup clones your website?" different from "What to do when another startup clones your website?" Is it just a matter of legal jurisdiction? Or is there some other element here that makes it more nefarious?

When a Chinese group does it, you can't sue them. You can't compel their ISP to block them. You can't file a patent or trademark or any other protection for your prior art where it matters. And in many cases, you can't even talk to them, because unlike many programmers from non-English speaking countries, they may really not know English, and/or there may be no intersection in the communication services that you and they are using.

There aren't a lot of other countries that share all those difficult aspects yet still have plenty of capable programmers.

Chinese customs are very proactive on brand defence. You simply need to have your trademark registered with them.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danharris/2015/10/12/how-to-prot...

"simply" is the key word here.

Just as 'simply' as you'd need to register a US trademark in Europe, for example.

Just because you have a mark registered in the US, doesn't mean China (or any other jurisdiction) will magically know about it.

There are solutions and structures in place - proper business practices dictate that you inform yourself and react appropriately.

We've registered the trademark everywhere, but the actual process takes so long we haven't heard back from the agency yet. And it only covers our brand name and logo, which is only infringed on in a very minor way.

Our brand isn't mentioned either in the marketing copy nor in the sourcecode.

I would believe you but their copycat car industry is a direct refutation of such "proactive brand defence" you claim exists.

You're free to believe your hunches. The reality is different. We've manufactured and exported brand-name products from China for over 30 years.

In our experience, when a trademark is registered, Chinese customs is very proactive in seizing / destroying infringing property.

The domestic market is definitely another story, but there are controls in place for the export market.

The onus is on the brand owner to register their trademark - no different to registering a mark in any other jurisdiction.

Legitimate business has been conducted with China for centuries, and China has every reason to defend foreign brands in order to protect its manufacturing industry.

> The domestic market is definitely another story, but there are controls in place for the export market.

I believe the domestic market is what's at stake for the OP. haogegebisai is Chinese for "good older brother tournament" and that site is all in Chinese

Yes, we wouldn't want to give it away without a fight. Chinese people are crazy for gambling, and our business is on the right side of a very, very fine line between gambling and skill-based gaming.

Thanks for the translation! I thought the gege was standing for GG (good game), a part of eSports slang. For the rest my Chinese is too rusty :/

Oh you might be right about it being slang. My Chinese isn't great. I just like to pretend it is on the internet haha! Their website uses the characters 好哥哥 (haogege) and I don't see 比赛 (bisai) written anywhere. Maybe they changed it after getting the domain.

You've got to know the Chinese trademark office exists, and you have to do it before your Chinese competitor does. There is a cottage industry in China of Chinese companies squatting in popular western trade marks via the trademark office. If the publicity is extra bad, you might get relief from the government, but there is no legal basis for that relief. (Incidentally, their was an article yesterday in Chinese investment firms taking well known international brands and using the name with a Chinese city pretended, like Shenzhen Blackrock...).

A small startup usually won't register trademarks in markets they don't operate in. This wasn't a problem before since those markets weren't interested anyways. But given the whole Internet industry in China is basically built around shanzhai-style copying (much safer than doing original design and developing original IP), we are gong to see a lot more of is in the future.

The prevalence of "Chibson" knock-off Gibson guitars that have arrived in the United States indicates that China is more than willing to manufacture and export other people's name brand products without more than superficial policing. It would appear the trademark and brand protection policing is an indication of the other workmanship that can be expected from the nation.

It's not China specific though, surely it would be the same in pretty much any non-English speaking country? What happens if a company in Romania/Bulgaria/Nigeria/Chile clones your US startup?

Even in terms of legal jurisdictions if a company in Australia clones it, and hosts and develops everything in Australia, you may need to hire an Australian legal team to fight it.

Not sure about Nigeria but you can absolutely seek legal recourse in Romania, Bulgaria or Chile with the aid of a local, English-speaking lawyer. All of these countries have well developed legal systems.

Ok - great. A competitor can open and register their company in Panama. Then what?

If they conduct business in the United States, it may be possible to seek legal recourse in the United States.

Nigeria is an English speaking(not native) country. Her legal system is modeled after that of England. And you can sue anybody, it is left for court to decide if your case has merit.

The Chinese Internet/tech industry is basically used to, even addicted to, copying. It's in the culture from the VCs on down. When given task X, the designers are told just to find something decent abroad to copy.

So the point is, a Chinese startup is much more likely to copy your website than a Nigerian, Russian, Romanian, Vietnamese, etc... startup.

I live in China, I've been here 15 years. My wife is an IP lawyer. I'm also German by third citizenship. My advice is: forget China, work on other markets, totally ignore the situation.

Honestly, the chances you are going to get decent cash from e-sports here are 1 in a million. Every wangba (internet cafe) has pirated titles. Few pay for games. Lots of servers are openly running hacked. New TVs here come with built in pirated content Netflix clones. Nobody cares.

Take it from me, there just isn't have a legal or commercial environment here that is likely to favor your business model.

Try to figure out how they do it, and feed them with porn and anti chinese propaganda. If they do it manually then pray for them because they have a shitty life.

Write some markov chains that spew out text about Tiananmen square. Actually don't, they might be ripping you off but that might get them killed.

+1 for using markov chains.

I'm trying to work out why retaliation with porn / tragedy propaganda is even vaguely acceptable.

HN would typically be aghast if you served NSFW content potentially to unexpecting audiences (..think of the children!), or even with the real life analog of becoming vigilante on someone who wronged you.

There seems to be the underlying notion that: because it's China, any riposte is acceptable. Again, HN would typically be aghast if you drew sweeping stereotypes over 1B+ people.

There are multiple solutions.

If someone is hotlinking your content, block their requests.

Lodge DMCA requests to remove their SE listing.

If you have a product and a brand that is being copied, Chinese customs are very pro-active on brand defense. Register your brand / trademark: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danharris/2015/10/12/how-to-prot...

Innovate and update more often. Copying, legal or otherwise happens all the time, in all jurisdictions. Ratinally weigh up the real damage their site is causing, and act accordingly.

Because in the absence of law and order, when the social contract is broken we as humans feel the need for justice.

If justice could be served using legal channels, then it would. As it is in the Free World. Given the parent's examples of why legal channels are unavailable, vigilantism is the automatic next best thing.

Legal channels often serve as the path of least resistance compared to vigilante acts in other cases. Their ineffectiveness in cases like this push people to do what they feel they must.

That and it's really funny. You're ripping me off? Surprise! Your site's made of porn now! It's enjoyable in a somewhat twisted way, a la schadenfreude.

I don't know if I would call legal channels "ineffective" and I'm not anarchist enough to say that you "must" be a vigilante when they don't work. But yeah, sometimes it's really enjoyable to get back at people.

There's nothing wrong with being morally wrong. (Just as long as you're not hurting anyone, in my opinion.)

They're not hotlinking us, so these approaches wouldn't work in our case.

Furthermore I think (e)Sports is a rather apolitical thing so I wouldn't like to find myself on some Chinese blacklist, as we definitely want to expand in the asian markets.

> we definitely want to expand in the asian markets.

Is China required or could you settle with Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc?

You might want to investigate the experiences of other businesses who have tried to sell within China. China's judicial system is worse than ours.

I wouldn't pump much time or money into tip toeing around their rules. Ultimately they can just block and clone you. Consider that China's blocking of FB, Twitter, and Google allow them to create their own copies of these sites that create jobs and earn money within China. China likes to say that these sites don't play by the rules, but it seems when you operate in China the goalposts are always moving. Personally I think that's because any government that is not by the people is unstable. That's up to them to decide, however.

South Korea is huge for eSports so definitely also a huge target for us. But I am not sure that you can play a role in China from outside.

The current interest in China (and our FOMO) is mainly driven by potential investors or acquirers. We've nearly finished our app with which we hope to bring eSports for-money tournaments to a whole new level.

In our type of business everyone is moving goalposts all the time, we have had interesting experiences with regulators in EU and US so I am unsure if Chinese bureaucracy can really top this.

Obviously, when structuring international business in that region Hong Kong or Singapore are prime locations, but I don't think the big vision can be implemented without having native speakers both in CN and SK.

As a German company, a lot of our "good old manufacturing" businesses have written case study over case study about expansion to China, with very mixed results. But I feel we're kind of forced into that decision right now, because growth can be explosive.

It's a common strategy. It has nothing specifically to do with China. I don't think I've ever seen HN posts saying think of the children.

Here's a popular post about a guy doing it, I'm not sure where I first found this post, it might have been HN. Either way I'm pretty sure I've seen some of his stuff linked on HN. http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/1011 He wrote several followup posts with metrics and stuff.

For example 3 people here say they use it as a strategy, and nothing about China: http://ask.metafilter.com/4302/Is-there-any-etiquette-to-hot...

This accepted answer with 17 upvotes recommends it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3990337/how-to-protect-ag...

Also see http://i.imgur.com/WDDH8wj.jpg http://krisalis.org/weblog/?p=1137

Messages about Tiananmen and other "censored" topics will allegedly get the website automatically banned by the Great Firewall. I've heard that some sites suffering from Chinese spam just put that somewhere in their webpage and have the traffic magically simmer down.

> There seems to be the underlying notion that: because it's China, any riposte is acceptable

I disagree. Rather, its: "Because its not anywhere else, you have no option to defend the business you have created for yourself and your employees."

This has very little to do with China and more to do with the company has little other options given the circumstances.

If I were a web developer of said clone company, and I noticed hotlink protection had been enabled (easily, 301s, 404s), I would have already scraped all of the content on the page (new content notwithstanding), and onError I would serve up the copy of the content I had saved locally.

The only thing I could imagine you doing besides the retaliatory measures listed above is removing the site from SERPs. However, Baidu won't respect your wishes.

Just put a mod rewrite rule in that 404's if the referrer url is their domain. It's a fairly standard hotlinking defense.

I tried to tell more details in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455670

Basically they imitated the full design and even the URL routes. The "logo" has parts of our logo.

There are no hotlinks used.

What they are doing serves the Chinese market, which we didn't do yet (so it is a positive thing), but we don't have the resources to really compete with them yet.

Happened to me. Frustrating experience but afterwards you learned very well that you need to create a product and/or business model with a strong lock-in, not just a nice site or app.

Good point, so you propose we don't lose focus. The only thing is that they are adding value for our Chinese users by being Chinese-language, thereby filling a gap we currently can't address.

Is Chinese language so hard to add? I'm living in Taiwan, perhaps I can help.

Thanks for offering your help! We ditched our translations because i18n takes so much time and we learned that most players apart from Russians and Chinese don't really need it. Also, the implementation using i18n-next was a huge PITA.

It'd be great if I could ping you in the next days if we decide to move into that direction again.

Sure, you can reach me at stillastudent on google's email service. I'm not familiar with i18n-next but have tried things like crowdin [1] before and it seemed straightforward from the translator's side.

[1] https://crowdin.com/

yes -- 'what stops a third party from duplicating your model' is a good question to ask before starting a company.

People will put money into their accounts on our site and have an online balance, that is a huge factor in stickyness imo (same as with online poker).

We haven't tested their backend logic which is a huge part of our competitive advantage to other platforms, and mainly assessed the thread by visually comparing the sites.

TBH it's very lazy of them to just copy your fairly standard bootstrap design and generic lighting bolt logo. If they just used some other similar template and chose some other logo but otherwise had the same business, they would be your chinese competitor vs. your chinese clone.

Maybe the most efficient measure you can do with your scarce startup resources is to treat them as a competitor and enter the chinese market earlier if it's practical. If someone makes their own VRBO or AirBNB website for china and choose to make their own logo and standard web design, are they an AirBNB clone or competitor?

You're the first to point out our shitty design :) That was one of the things that shocked me most: Why on earth would they pick our default bootstrap template if there are so many better ones? They even cloned the background gradients of the current match boxes.

The ICP license they're using in non-commercial. 京ICP备16007973号-3

Note the 备 which means non-commercial.

Pretty equivalent to a blog, or basic homepage.

Were they to try to commercialise what they/you plan to do, they'd need to apply for an ICP license via a different route, for online gaming (and as you alluded to, potentially betting). That would be a route paved in hell for any small startup.

Dismiss this as a non-threat, both as a commercially viable startup and/or as a ruse of the large company you're currently talking to. Don't waste your time with it.

What design did they copy? As far as I can see you are both just using Twitter Bootstrap? The logo - is that the lightning icon?

What is the background functionality? Are you competing in the same market?

If you are worried about looking similar to other sites then spend some time on a more distinctive design than Bootstrap.

I think you taking the high road and aim for the "gain this startup as a Chinese subsidiary" route is the win-win situation here. Of course, I can only read so much from your description, and maybe some things don't apply in your case. Temper everything I say with your knowledge of your Chinese userbase (if any).

I mean sure, it might look like an affront on the work you've put in your site, but in the end, you've also found another group doing what you're also doing, probably just as dedicated as you are. Depending on the mutual language skills (maybe even consider using a telephone interpreter service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telephone_interpreting), you might be able to find common ground and work together towards a collaboration agreement or outright acquisition -- whatever it is, just make sure to have it in writing that your company came up with the concept and design. Win-win for both sides, and that contract is then legally binding.

Even more, if you're in talks with a very large Chinese company, having Chinese collaborators might actually work in your favor.

TL;DR: You might have more to gain by working on a collaboration deal first. Just never lose sight of the fact that, in the end, they were stealing.

Thanks for your encouraging advice. Your last point really hits home. I have too limited knowledge of the Chinese business world to know whether this behavior is standard operating procedure, or if it is very, very large red flag to not sign any written deals with such business men.

As you said, the huge bonus is that they are dedicated to eSports as well and have put substantial effort into capturing our (potential) Chinese user base. Thank you as well for the pointer to phone interpreting services, I would've tried to leverage some friends in China, but this seems like a good alternative.

Well if by clone you also mean copies your content? You could probably file some complaints with major search engines. Also may be able to file complaints via DMCA. If they are using any US based payment processors, you could send complaints in to them.

That's pretty much all you can do. Try to remove from search engines and complain online a lot until people (your clients) notice - so they are aware. Litigation in China... forget about that.

I'm just thinking how amazingly fun it would be to spend a few years of your life on a legal case, in another country, in another language and spending vast sums of money in the certain knowledge that you'll loose :-)

They translated everything into Chinese language, there is no way for us to check if that is in fact our text. Furthermore most of our content is user-generated (except the UI controls).

I am sure they use Chinese payment processors which are not directly integrated into the flow right now.

This is what ends up happening when you don't have an economic moat [1]. If you want to stay on top, you'll need to out-innovate your competitor and give your market a strong reason to stick with you over them. Do or die.

[1]: http://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/05/economicmoat.asp

I think OP understands the "moat" concept based on his comment here [1]. Also based on this comment and others of his, he seems mostly anxious and worried about the implications of someone near-cloning his front end.

He's just asking around to find what his options are.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11458359

You should probably ignore this and just get back to work.

You've got plenty of competition on your side of the world. Stop looking for competition else where.

If I were this "very large" Chinese IT company and I really wanted to buy your business, I'd create a clone to give me better negotiating leverage.

Edit: just to clarify - I personally wouldn't do this, because it is possibly illegal and absolutely unethical. But very large companies (in China and elsewhere) are not known for being ethical.

Unfortunately it hasn't progressed so far that we are actually negotiating yet. But the perspective is there.

I can't say our website is very artistic, but here in Germany those laws can be enforced with much strictness, and people just wouldn't imitate you like that.

Maybe this is the payback for what the Samwer brothers have done to silicon valley entrepreneurs..

How certain are you that their site has a genuine flurry of activity/users?

If I were a Chinese clone with this strategy, I would try to simulate that activity as soon as possible to make it seem like a legitimate threat. Can you get in touch with any would-be users within China who speak English and Chinese to gauge whether or not this site is legitimate before worrying too much? It seems you are short on facts at this point.

Very good point. We will have a look at that. They only joined two days ago and all their events are password locked, which makes it hard to gauge real activity.

If they do for-money events then they most likely send around money through some payment apps which is hard to track for us.

We don't have very many Chinese users at hand but I will ask in the team to get more info on their marketing activities.

If you do go into acquisition mode, I'd take a good hard look at their numbers. My pessimistic point of view is it'd be next to impossible for you to verify anything, even if you were Chinese, without some inside information. The protections you're used to just don't exist there yet.

Trevelyan advise spot on about startup local company. Fight on their own turf and it also opens new market for you. With locals on side you can also do better quality research on competitors.

Take kev6168 advice and do your paperwork: trademark and copyright registrations, company registration. With that in hand, or at least started, you can then contact their service providers, like aliyun, and advise of your intended legal action against that clone and their providers.

Above all dont lose focus on your own product. Defending can be a vacuum of time and energy and your own product gets lost in the process. Yes you have to defend, but best defense is a better product and brand awareness.

Cloning/knockoffs is an issue globally and happens in lots of industries. Get over it. Ignore commenters/ppl with vitriolic rhetoric and emotional responses (i.e. the trolls) - you need a clear head to get thru this unscathed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11455670 is a repost with more context

Yes, that is the post where I tried to tell the whole story. This thread is my faulty first submission :/

When UMeng cloned Flurry, I could be wrong but I don't believe we did anything, and I'm pretty sure that was the right call. Any lengthy legal dispute will distract you from other important things; legal disputes that are likely to go nowhere are likely to distract you for no benefit whatsoever.

I empathize - I was a bit annoyed by the first version of UMeng, which was a pretty close copy of Flurry's web design and feature set. But if your situation is anything like ours was, you'll see the companies evolve away from each other over time as you each adapt to your respective markets - and you probably didn't have the staff and cultural knowledge to support the Chinese market anyway.

How do you deal with your competitors in the US? i.e. https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/esports-hero (raised $1m)

I feel like you're better off building out your core product and finding user traction in your markets instead of worrying about the plethora of competitors that exist out there. I imagine that if I found one, there are probably many more.

German working at a startup in Beijing here. That's a daft case of C2C (copy to china) you've got on your hands there.

You probably won't be able to gain them as a Chinese subsidiary, they'll think you're delusional, hell, that sounds delusional to me.

Them having investors (if they do), doesn't mean much if anything. C2Cs of startups with traction are generally seen as a safe bet by investors, hell, there's teams specializing on it. Money is sloshing around, the silliest things are getting funded.

Litigating is probably pointless. Best case they get scared, drop the thing and another C2C gets sent the code they have.

Clones are to be expected, and as other comments have said, it might even be the Chinese IT company you're dealing with that started the thing, or maybe they've started building something internally. They're probably looking to screw you over as well.

Really, if you're looking to compete in China, you break out your copy of Sun Tsu and leaf through your Machiavelli. Out-engineer them, get some boots on the ground, find some Chinese to work with, lob some nuisances their way, grow in China and squash them. That'll put you in a stronger negotiation position with Tencent/Baidu/Ali/Whoever as well. Your advantage is that whilst chinese coders are cheap, and they can throw 20 engineers at the problem, most of them aren't very good. If you don't allow them to grow more than you do, and you're pushing features whilst they're accruing tech debt, they will loose that war of attrition eventually. Especially if you go for things that are hard.

Good luck man.

PS: If your business plan looks like the work of a paranoid madman, you're on the right track to compete in the land far east.

Thanks for your blunt advice, much appreciated. It really shocked me because we don't have any significant cash flows at the moment, so they must be buying into our vision (which is a good thing).

Let's hope we can keep the pace and don't waste our potential. Best of luck to you as well, will ping you when I ever put foot to Beijing again.

It's a nice city, wonderful air.

If finances permit, I'd still do some Chinese registrations though, just so you're covered on that front. I recommend at least getting a small foothold over there, just in case that once you're big, they decide that haogege is chinese and legal, and you're not.

If it makes you feel better, lots of Chinese are just as clueless about the "West" as we are about China. Met a guy at an event last Thursday who asked me and a friend about the feasibility of selling phone cases in Europe and the US. To be fair, they are a big fashion accessory in China, but really only in China. We told him that if he thinks that going into a saturated market with a low margin product people don't care about that gets replaced maybe once a year sounds like a fun time to him, he is welcome to try. I'm not sure whether he got it.

There's also the thing that really competent people over here would probably not care to copy a German eSports startup 1-to-1. They might have some mediocre PHP programmers and probably someone who knows enough frontend stuff to copy over all the assets. If you drop features, you should watch out for how long it takes them to duplicate them. If it takes as long as it took you to write them, be worried. If takes far longer for them to step up, you've got an edge. If it's instant, you might want to redouble on your security.

>> But he also mentioned that they already have investors.

He's bluffing. The activity could be paid for.

He wants to look strong, either to dissuade you from competing in the same market, or for you start negotiating with him, giving him the advantage.

But it's not like you can sit on your hands either.

Go right ahead and add Chinese translation to your website, I say. You can then use the same i18n infrastructure and hire Vietnamese, Indonesian, Tagalog translators and expand to the rest of South East Asia. Do Traditional Chinese as well, and get into Taiwan and Hong Kong. Translators from upwork.com should be quite cheap. Be careful to only send the translatable message files, though, don't send the code - I've heard of people getting their code ripped this way.

Try do that in a month.

Then you have them surrounded, and you can negotiate with them from a position of strength.

You can send them a grateful email thanking them for introducing you to the Asian market.

Send a bottle of European wine as your regards.

I like your leadership attitude :-) From the other people commenting in this thread I figured that cooperation is not a realistic goal, so we will try to up our Asia game.

But we also need some people from the local eSports community to work with/for us.

Kudos though for actually building something worth being copied :)

At first it would seem like a very bad thing, but if you think about it, they are merely reinforcing your idea. I say give them the finger and just focus on making the best of your idea no matter what those guys are doing.

I wish you all the best for that!

"Lions aren't concerned about the opinions of sheep"

Feels good to hear. Our site has equally large parts of logic on client / server side so I am unsure if they can really out-execute us. But the first mover advantage is there, and we currently can't cover Chinese language.

Working hard on bringing the other stuff on the road, so your advice bodes well. Thanks again!

Lets put evil Chinese people aside (joke/sarcasm).

I can replicate your business 100% and I'm not in China. What are you going to do?

Food for thought. I don't think you would clone it in such an obvious fashion.

Several other projects tried to do it, and we currently have some SV VC-fueled competitors. But I don't think they have the roadmap we do.

Funny thing is we spent the better part of last year VC-shopping and everyone passed on us. Some shit VC from Berlin forwarded all info to the CEO of EU's largest eSports business and they all said our business idea sucks.

So until some college buddy of a VC has the same idea and gets easy money (I'm looking at you USV) the whole pay-for-money thing still has to grow.

From a technical perspective the implementation of user-friendly real-time tournaments was really hard to get right and can't easily be copied.

I think your answered your question: From a technical perspective the implementation of user-friendly real-time tournaments was really hard to get right.

So you have your "secret sauce" (that is real-time tournaments). You just need to make your design not to be plain bootstrap so that it does look like you cloned somebody's else website.

Hey, Benjamin. It's a hard subject you've pointed out. It never happened to me still, I remember when I was on a conference from @archdaily creator David Basulto, he was telling his experience when a Chinese blog starts to replicate his content to the Chinese market, exactly what happened to you. Was quite interesting because he tried everything to pull his Chinese cloned website down with no luck at all, he even went to China to see if he could do anything. At the end he hired his Chinese copycat, proposing to he become part of the Arch Daily's team as a Chinese correspondent, which the Chinese guy accepted. I really don't now how much they've copied you and how they are operating, but have a similar strategy could help you :D all the best,

Pedro H.

Here's something you could try.

1. Find some reputable investors active in China. Start talks with them.

2. Contact the CEO and say "Thanks for pointing out to us the value of the Chinese market. We will now 1. move into the Chinese market (mention your talks to investors) and 2. proceed to sue you and your investors (who our legal team is contacting now). The alternative is that we set up a licensing deal (or that you pay us a 1-time fee to make this go away).

Long term though my guess is that you should focus on your market and forget about China.

(It is possible I've watched too much House of Cards lately ;)

eSports, really? Is that even legal in Germany?

http://www.gamblingsites.org/laws/germany/

There's some room.

While "c'est du chinois" is really not a valid excuse these days, with so many chinese people/students available all across Europe, ready (and hungry) to help Western companies deal with China's local systems/language, it should be noted that having Chinese competitors has not prevented Google/Facebook/Amazon from making their billions.

Focus should primarily remain on product and users.

Sorry for the double submission, I now added the text to this post as well.

The thing is that they created the site from scratch but it is exactly like our site only directly aimed at Chinese users.

Our website is www.strivewire.com, and they use www.haogegebisai.com

They are not hotlinking anything, and we're shying away from an open confrontation. Just wanted to know if you know of some good strategies to approach this issue.

Fortunately, I was running an image site and they hot linked my images. So I only served users with their referrer thumbnails instead of full size images. I also used image magick through PHP to append a footer with my site URL and logo stuck on the bottom. Free advertising win!

The best solution would be to acquire it, but that would lead to companies in china copying other companies websites and products in turn starting an entire chain of copycat blackmails. The situation is definitely hard. But a temporary solution is definitely acquiring the firm.

Think good way, they create a market for it. If those customer don't satisfy they will moved to your site. Still need to remember 30 days development e.g will not same with your previous development days and also no matter money and developer they hired, time is essence.

Step 1 (going well so far): put their URL on the front page of HN, launching an effective DDOS on their unsuspecting infrastructure. Their site is already creaking under the load. And I'm sure we can all contribute a few more random clicks to eat up their bandwidth ;-)

I see we're working on our own demise ;)

When you can't go legal, Go illegal. Hire a hacker and get the site down.

Problem is, we're not providing the Chinese userbase any better solution. They have Chinese translations, whereas we're an English-only website.

Furthermore they are hosted on AliBaba's cloud (from what I was able to see), so it looks like a more professional and IT-affine implementation.

There's a dude in India that ripped off my entire business model including branding. I have no idea what to do about that.

We can relate to that. What makes us a bit anxious is the fact that they are backed by investors. We have no idea who did invest and how much. This info would help us to assess how much of a threat they are.

Do you know what would be nice ? A way to encrypt the data before viewing to the user and the js will decrypt the data by calling a websocket api to give the password. This way for each specific websocket session you encrypt and decrypt the data differently. Also you can hide recognizable information in the data so when copied you will search the history to find who did it.

That would not work, would be a poor user experience, would be technically infeasible, and would be ineffective.

You can't publish content to the public and prevent copies being made. That's the lesson we need to take away from the DRM nonsense that we went through (and to some extent, are still going through).

Do you have any (high) political connections in Germany? You could try to ask for a (huge) favor - have someone in the German consulate ask their Chinese counterparts for a(another huge) favor, and get the Chinese govt to shut them down. A long shot, but if you have the right friends, it might work.

I thought with .com domains you could have them deregistered for fraud?

one question comes to my mind "if your product copied by Tencent,what should you do?" this question often asked in China.

Here's another perspective on this issue, that might be a bit unpopular, but I feel needs to be said:

Why do you feel entitled to do something relatively copy-able and not be copied? Because you're European?

Patents and that sort of legal protection apply to discoveries and inventions (and even then, the rules change with the Chinese). To be blunt, you're making a website for people to organize around video games. I'm not trying to belittle what you're doing (admittedly a huge former fan of competitive Starcraft on ICCup, CS and Halo PC on Xfire, etc) but come on you're not splitting the atom in any sense.

Compete and beat the clones. They're not going to go away, that's reality. Did you know that Facebook has the exact same problem you do with Renren?

So how can you compete? Understand your users better to offer superior customer service; stay on top of new features; build a network effect into your product. Though I'm thinking it already has one, since tournaments need people, and people will congregate on the best platform. I know e-sports is huge (and growing) in Europe, and I'd find it quite surprising if eventually the winning platform for these people to organize tournaments is on a Chinese site!

Best of luck Benjamin, I do wish you the best. I don't think there's an easy answer for you, just stay pragmatic given the realities of what you're up against.

I would just find security flaws in their software and use them to appropriate their client base. Most Chinesw clones are thrown together.

It's not like they will be able to do much about it. If they do, you can use it as a bargining chip and go after them for infringing on your copyright.

Parasite companies in China think that they have an advantage by not having to follow US laws, but what they don't realize is that it can also work against them.

digital millennium copyright act notice: http://www.whoishostingthis.com/resources/dmca/

I don't think US copyright law will be very helpful here.

It can at least pull them out of search results to dent any organic/paid traffic they are trying to drive to their site.

We're currently not focusing on the Chinese market, and afaik they are mainly focusing on it. The website is in Chinese language, but 100% looks and feels like ours.

I assume the Chinese company is hosting in China but if not from that link:

>as the server is in a country that has a notice and takedown system, including the United States and any EU country

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