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Comment by jacquesm | Hacker News Reader

Of course it isn't horrible advice, legal affairs are dealt with by lawyers and courts. If you have a product out there in the market you should go to bat for it.

And yes, it might make your company fail. But that goes for a well funded competitor outright copying your product as well.

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The trick is getting an objective assessment of how strong the case is, the risks, opportunity cost, etc. There are a lot of lawyers who are perfectly happy to tilt at windmills for $500 an hour until you run out of money.

Yes, that's true. But presumably OP has a lawyer, after all they run a business.

Legal action is fine as long as you have the time and money to do it

For the looks of it, in this case they should either not do it at all or just wait until they have enough money to do it

Even large companies wait for the right timing to sue

I know a company that had copied some images from Instacart. Instacart knew about it, but they waited until Uber acquired the company, then they sued Uber

Legal action is incredibly expensive and time consuming, especially in the US

What are the indicators you're seeing in this story that legal fees would have a real ROI? I think it's good to be skeptical of paying elective legal fees.

This would require millions in legal fees.

Not it won't. If it is an outright copy (that's relatively easy to prove) you can have an injunction issued, besides that the bad press alone might get them to back off. I've brought a lawsuit like that and won << $100K.

How many hours in legal fees did you pay for your attorneys?

A few hundred in total. What helped is that they actually did copy text verbatim, so it was very easy to prove. Their defense: they stole it but not from us... go figure. Needless to say that didn't land very well with the judge.

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