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Comment by powera | Hacker News Reader

Second edit: The article reads much better now with commentary about the lawsuit.

As it stands, this article is mostly linkbait/self-promotion.

The title is very misleading; this article isn't about a trend, it's really about one startup (that the author of the post is an advisor for) getting sued. It's full of meaningless promotional statements like "Touch of Modern actually seeks out modern products exclusively, to the exclusion of the standard bourgeois bohemian hipsterdom of Fab", yet never even comments on what the lawsuit is about.

Just because a company is small doesn't mean that anybody suing it is "abusing the system". If you're saying the lawsuit is baseless and designed to just penalize the startup, say SOMETHING about what the lawsuit is, don't just say how awesome your product is.

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Edited: The suit claims violation of trademark and trade dress infringement, improper use of IP (apparently the UI) and ironically, unfair competition. While there are similarities between some pages of the design, I find it difficult to believe Fab can claim all right to the use of Helvetica, or industry-standard design elements like checkout buttons.

The only thing I got out of this rather lightweight article was "Business models shouldn't be copyrightable or patentable -- yet today's lawsuit seems to indicate that some entrepreneurs believe they are"

This insinuates Fab.com is suing because Touch of Modern has a similar business model.

However, I now sense this is deflecting the real truth, which is that more than just a business model and the use of Helvetica is being copied.

It's more direct than that, screen shots from the suit: http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/15/fab-lawsuit-touch-of-modern... (iPad app popup warning)

Wow.

If I were Pad, I would at the very least get legal advice the minute I saw that.

It may be without the bounds of what is legal, but it is certainly unethical, and it pretty much voids anything the OP wrote about this. This isn't a brave little start-up, this is a bunch of cheap-ass copycats with zero originality.

I'm really curious that people are having this reaction. I looked at the side-by-side pics and saw two fairly generic e-commerce layouts with a few small similarities, but just as many differences. My immediate reaction was, "Huh? There's no case here."

A lot of HN commenters are having the opposite reaction, not just you, and so I suppose you all might be onto something. But I still don't see it myself.

I have the same reaction you (and Garry Tan) do. Having a members-only upscale e-commerce wasn't invented by Fab, Gilt Groupe was doing it four years before Fab was founded. There aren't that many variations on what a members-only-bouncer page can look like.

Aside from the choice of layout of the product page, which itself is generic, I don't see anything in common. Having the time remaining in the header bar has been commonplace on flash sale sites (Groupon and clones) since before Fab was ever founded.

E-commerce layouts have been studied in depth, it wouldn't surprise me if the layout choices (like repeating the add to cart button at the top and bottom) by Fab were not arbitrary but based on known best-practices.

Garry - like most here, I really respect your opinion but you should consider whether you're letting your relationship with the team bias your view.

I was with you until I saw the screenshots in the TC post. The first one with the same layout right down to the seal of authenticity below it - this is way more than using common industry recognized design elements (like Fab using Pinterest's grid layout for example). This is close to Samwer brothers territory here.

They're also not doing themselves any favors with their response to Fab. Raising a lot of money and having scale doesn't automatically make Fab a villain. The claim on using open source frameworks is just bizarre/irrelevant.

Most of all, this doesn't pass the sniff test for me. At a quick glance, I could have easily mistaken this site for something built out of Fab. If I were Fab, I feel I would be angry and want them to stop copying my work directly.

"At a quick glance, I could have easily mistaken this site for something built out of Fab. If I were Fab, I feel I would be angry and want them to stop copying my work directly." -- If someone built competing search engine with a text box & search button, would you be confusing it with Google ?. Shouldn't people knowledge enough to differentiate & recognize brands by quality of service offered by them?. There are many clones of Instagram, Groupon, Airbnb. Systrom of Instagram told techcrunch,

"There might be 10 clones here, [but] there are also 20 clones from the United States right? You know, being copied is something that I think that every successful company will go through. Our biggest defensible asset really is our community, and I think that’s the thing that you’re not going to find on any of these replicas." (http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/06/instagrams-kevin-systrom-on...)

and Instagram didn't sue their clones !!.

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