Ask HN: A copycat sells a rip-off using stolen sources, what do I do?
Basically, some dude in India has taken our product, slightly redesigned the UI and is now selling it as a "saas" app. (we have an option to buy our product with the source codes, and he was probably working for one of our Indian customers and has stolen the sources).
He also launched a website where 70% of the text is stolen from our website.
He used a restrictive "robots.txt" so he cannot be found online, using phone-sales and marketplaces like "capterra" to acquire customers.
But he was dumb enough not to hide his "whois" and list his personal phone number on his website. I decided to contact him (probably a mistake), sending a scary "cease and desist" PDF-letter with screenshots of his website and everything, letting him know that this is copyright infringement, IP violation and my company is hiring an attorney to fight him.
He replied and even ADMITTED that he copied everything, but claims he used a freely-downloadable "trial" version of our product to build upon (which is not true, our trial version is a half-assed demo, not a real product) and this is his "hobby". After a couple of emails (I basically called him a liar 1-2 times, and he replied with a "go ahead, sue me").
So. What do I do?
My 1st reaction was to hire a US/UK lawyer (my company is in the UK) but then I thought of hiring an Indian local attorney maybe? And let the lawyer contact him and maybe file criminal charges/lawsuit etc?
I guess I will have no problem proving that my website IS the original one? ("whois" history goes back to 2005, "archive.org" snapshots etc, I also have all the source codes in an online repo that is several years old etc.)
PS. My product - https://www.jitbit.com/helpdesk/ His product - http://noveldesk.com
PPS. He probably rushed into changing the copy on his pages, but we made dozens of screenshots of the stolen content etc. Is that enough? What else could I do?
PPPS. we're a small bootstrapped company, so I don't have a zillion $$$ to spend on this, couple of grand tops :(