Fun times, fun times. We got a few people fired, but that was about it.
Then, about 2 years after they'd canceled, our support department got a strange email from a user that was having problems. At first, the support rep didn't understand the issue and asked the user for screenshots of the problem. Sure enough, the screen shots looked exactly like our old product, which had been decommissioned over a year prior. It even had our support email address and phone number on it. It turns out the version of the software they developed in-house started by scraping our site, renaming all the .html files to .aspx and then making the dynamic parts be data driven.
When we called them on it, they basically threatened to use lawyers to put us out of business if we pursued the issue, so I guess our management decided to drop it. We did make them change the support email and phone number.
This is why we can't have nice things. Darned lawyers. Can't live with them, can't live without them
Really?
As Cardinal Richelieu said[1] about 400 years ago: Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him
1. the attribution of this quote is disputed
Some day people will say the same of software engineers.
Patent trolls are one example of this - where they may deliberately select weaker defendants (instead of going after the bigco "infringers") so ensure they hold the upper hand in the financial power imbalance.
There was nothing we'd done as a company that was actionable.
A lawyer can screw you badly, but if you want to screw a lawyer you need another lawyer. If taken as a category, they never lose.