Ask HN: What to do when competitor copies your app (exact design) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What to do when competitor copies your app (exact design)

39 pointslunaru47 comments

We run Ronin (http://www.roninapp.com) - an online invoicing and client management app.

When I was browsing around, I ran into these guys: http://www.net2invoice.com/ who have basically copied our application asset for asset. We haven't updated our site screenshots recently, but their screenshots are dead on to the current version of our app. Even the sign up chart and marketing copy are the same!

As I understand it, we can only retain our copyright if we intend to enforce it. What's the best approach at this point?

I remember this happening to StackOverflow at some point as well - was there a resolution on that?

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Hmm, big chunks of verbatim text. We regularly have this sort of thing happen to us:

    http://www.google.com/search?q="someone+who+is+not+one+of+your+founders"

It's annoying to be plagiarized, but possibly no more than annoying. I.e. the more slavishly someone copies you, the less dangerous they probably are.

(In our case, copying chunks of our site is so common that searching for them is a handy technique for keeping track of the ever-increasing list of YC clones. That search turned up two new ones I didn't even know about.

This one

    http://www.google.com/search?q="intellectual+property+agreements+that+overlap"

turned up two more.)

I'm an attorney and I've done quite a bit of work relating to copyright law, so I'll chime in.

Copyright to your work is established immediately when your work becomes fixed in its ultimate form. You don't have to worry about losing it.

Assuming that your site existed before theirs, they MAY be found to be infringing. Emphasis on "may" because you don't have a copyright on ideas, only on the expression of the ideas, and it has been ruled that the "look" of a site isn't protected. So, for a court to rule that the they are infringing, it will have to find that significant portions of the copy, code, or presentation must be a near duplicate.

I haven't viewed the two source files or CSS, so I can't even an opinion on the significance of the replication in this case.

Regardless, there are several reasons why pursuing this in court may not be a good idea. First, your copyright isn't registered, so you have the burden of proving that your site existed first. To do this you'll have to meet with an attorney several times, file to have their ISP provide evidence that you will need to prove you case, suffer through the other side's discovery, depositions, etc. Basically, it will waste a lot of time. Second, even if you win you will have to show that you suffered some loss due to the infringement, and any monetary award will be based that loss. You're loss would likely be found to be the percentage of their revenue derived from infringing on your copyright. It appears that in this case, that would be negligible.

All this being said, it wouldn't hurt to have a lawyer write a cease and desist letter, and another if necessary. At the very least, that will force them to reword there sales copy, and rework their markup.

I think at this point we're leaning toward the C&D. Is it absolutely necessary to have a lawyer do this or can we just contact them directly?

Right now our inclination is to just "shake hands" with them, tell them what they did was not cool, and ask them to change their direction.

It isn't absolutely necessary, but having an attorney send the letter will amplify the force of your demands. Also, as mentioned below, if you decide to contact them yourselves, you may unknowingly produce evidence that can later be used against you, or you may lose your head and make a threat you shouldn't make.

It shouldn't take an attorney more than one billable hour. Having an attorney send the letter may save you money, if you consider how long it would take you to research and write, depending on at what rate you value your time.

One thing, and you probably already know this, when you say "ask them to change their direction," don't expect to succeed in keeping them from competing with you. They have a right to express the idea that you are expressing, they just have to write their own copy and markup to legally do so.

get a lawyer. - do it badly and you risk being sued yourself.

Use the one that Apple sent to Microsoft when they were suing for the look and feel of Windows being a rip of MacOS.

As I understand it, we can only retain our copyright if we intend to enforce it.

Copyright is not the same as Trademark. You must enforce trademarks, not copyrights. Copyright is much stronger than trademark.

If they've directly copied from your application, you have very solid grounds for a lawsuit. I would go see a lawyer. In a strong copyright case (e.g. where you can prove you wrote it), a lawyer will take the case for nothing. Or, even if you're paying out of pocket, you will win if you can prove you wrote it. And when you win your competitor will pay your court costs and damages.

You aren't going to make a killing, but your winnings will give you another month or two of runway, and will shut down a competitor that shouldn't be allowed to survive.

I'm anti-lawsuit on pretty much every count except for copyright infringement (and I have been involved in a copyright infringement case in the past; $30k settlement). It's just nasty business for someone to steal your labor like that and pass it off as their own.

Joe,

You use "will" in your third paragraph a lot. Lawyers don't generally take cases for nothing just because a win is almost guaranteed (especially not over copyright). They take cases pro bono when they either expect to get massive publicity or massive payout. (i.e. the ambulance chasers exist because they are almost always suing insurance companies who settle)

You also state that the company will pay costs + damages. Again, the judge can rule that they must, but it's incredibly hard to enforce. Looking at the names of the founders, at first guess i don't believe they are in the US. So to start, you'd have to do searches of various company databases to find where to even file papers. It's non trivial and will add up.

OP: remember, whilst you may have a very solid case to win an infringement, remember the old adage: "never sue someone who cannot pay". You may, however, be able to get a c&d out pretty cheaply, and this sometimes shuts people down fast enough when it's obvious there is infringement.

You're quite right on all counts. I assumed a US violator. The game changes dramatically when things are outside of US jurisdiction.

C&D probably is the best choice here. (You have to do that anyway as the first step in a lawsuit. You must act to minimize the damages as soon as you are aware of the violation.)

Joe,

Ignore this if you want, but - if you made $30k on the settlement, and legal fees on a reasonable case with a lawyer who will insist on doing discovery and prep can't be less than $20k, did that qualify as a win for you?

Legal fees were about 15k, due to a pre-existing relationship between my publisher and the lawyer. It never went to trial, however. It was settled rather quickly. It was a very clear case, and the companies legal staff pretty much just made some grouchy noises and then came back with a settlement offer.

Yes, it counts as a win for me. It shut down the violations, and it cost an evil company time and money. Had it been a less egregiously nasty company, I probably would have been satisfied with a C&D. The violation in my case cost me very little (the materials in question were already available for free on the web, and their products were not competing with mine).

So, maybe my own past experience, and the specifics of that experience, makes me more trigger-happy on the subject than is prudent.

Yeah.

15K to get out with a pre-trial deal, doing not much more than send letters back and forth, some discovery and agreeing a settlement deal.

scratches head and wonders why he's not a lawyer

The only lawyers I know wish they were building tech startups. Might be a symptom of the culture here in the valley.

Thanks. It looks like they have a parent company that's been in business for a while. It's odd that an established company would rip-off other people's work like that.

Not that odd. About 5 years ago a certain subsidiary of a megacorp chaired by Uncle Rupert ripped about 60% of one of our sites (including the bugs).

Pursuing it became such a circus that after a time our CEO decided the effort was better spent improving our product. This turned out to be a good choice in the end as the impostors went nowhere and we went on to capture > 50% of the market.

Edit:

Sayeth PG: "The more slavishly someone copies you, the less dangerous they probably are."

Experience indicates this is nearly universally true, and today we devote considerably more resources to out-marketing, partnering with or acquiring businesses with winning points of difference.

It reminds me of the AOL.com redesign which was extremely similar to the Yahoo! frontpage at the time. http://i12.tinypic.com/2cyocw9.jpg

My copyright suit was with a major tech corporation that had been in business for 20+ years. They have since gone bankrupt, but it's not at all surprising to me that an established company would do something nasty.

you can also sue their customers

modding me down doesn't make it false

If you remember SCO made exactly the same threat, and though it didn't work out that way, it is still a legal recourse where the infringer is outside of jurisdiction but the customers aren't

SCO made the threat because companies were using Linux code under what they claimed was an invalid license. It's very unlikely there would be any grounds for suing someone who uses a website.

Not only that, you'd have to find their customers. I'm going to guess that just asking them "Hey, who are your customers?" won't be very productive (and, if they do answer because they want to brag, since they're plain ol' liars, they'd probably make up some really impressive sounding customers; big names who've actually never even heard of the company).

Of course, contacting their customers (if you can identify them), to let them know that the service is a crappy imitation of the real deal might be a useful pursuit. Maybe. One would have to be very careful about the tone of the letter.

your copyright covers your text, design (html and css), and code, so unless you're claiming that they actually stole your code (and then translated it to what looks like asp.net) or are using direct copies of your css or html, i don't think you really have a leg to stand on, legally.

someone creating something from scratch that looks like (or "inspired by") your site is not infringing on your copyright at all. looking at screenshots on the two sites, i can see some similarities, but enough differences that it doesn't look like it was directly copied. to be honest, though, neither design looks that unique. one could say you copied the signup chart on your site from 37signals or any of the other dozen sites that look like it since it's so popular.

i think your best bet is just to move on and try to be better than your competition. you can try to call them out publicly, but it will just give them free publicity and drive traffic to their site.

another +1 to parent's last sentence. If they can copy your site easily, hackers here can probably copy it in a weekend (StackOverflow, cough). Keep moving forward, improve with features until they can no longer keep up copying (unless your functionality/service is trivial, then too bad). Improve your reputation and marketing, and if you are truly better, it will be like StackOverflow and it's wannabe.

to tell you the truth, both sites look like a slightly modified basecamp to me.

I agree. I am big fan of Basecamp and they both look like basecamp and freshbooks combined. Ronin has some less features to offer but Net2Invoice is similar to basecamp. I wonder if 37 signals know this.

They have, in fact, copied large portions of my HTML, CSS, and even image assets pixel for pixel.

A tip for the future: most image formats have some sort of header field you can stick copyright info into. Open a GIF or JPEG saved by Photoshop in text editor to see what I mean. Showing that another site is serving files with your (c) inside them is pretty damning.

Are you sure?

+1 to that. Also I wouldn't worry too much, their sites are noticeably less polished than Ronin. Also, there is a suspicious lack of company info, etc - a WHOIS on the domain returns a private registration which is strange for an invoicing business. Hearing that they develop in C# - or rather their offshore team in Pakistan does - does not fill me with confidence either. A lot of question marks.

I wouldn't worry about it. Just ignore them.

Looking at http://net2apps.com/Product.aspx, they obviously were directly copying some of your graphics/design at one point. It looks like they've moved away somewhat.

You probably have a case, but I'm skeptical you'd recoup the cost of prosecuting it (in legal fees and in distracting yourself from executing.) Best case scenario is that they decide it's too much of a hassle and fold up shop; if they decide to fight they could change the infringing aspects and still compete with the same basic idea.

I doubt any company that stoops to this sort of thing is capable of out-executing you, so if I were you I would focus on doing your thing and let it sort itself out.

Yeah, I was using their app to check out how much of the HTML and CSS was a direct copy.

End result: I'm not too worried about execution vs. execution. It's more the shock factor of being copied blatantly.

Oh well... "Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery"

IANAL, but here's my bit of non-legal advice -- DMCA them.

We once nuked a Romanian cloner who copied our app -- our lawyer wrote a DMCA complaint to Google, ShareIt and his hosting company. As a result, the cloner was thrown out of Google, and ShareIt / Element5 blocked all his products (some of them were clones of other authors' apps).

Wow, that's pretty blatant. Are you in contact with them? What have they said? Definitely talk to a lawyer about this. Any idea how they managed to copy your application?

Edit. Also, do you have any proof that your work was written prior to theirs? WHOIS shows both domains registered within 6 days (which is curious in its own right), but theirs was first (though that doesn't necessarily mean anything in the first place). IANAL, but I believe the burden of proof is on you to show that your work was created prior to theirs.

Seems like their done by http://net2apps.com/ and their description is "IT Outsourcing & Rapid Application Development"

http://net2apps.com/Product.aspx wonder if the other two products are 1:1 from other services as well...

And their frontpage is a imiatiton of Co-Op http://coopapp.com/ vs http://www.net2invoice.com/

You need to talk to a lawyer. What you retain, how you enforce, etc all vary.

Know a good one in the bay area?

i've been recommended three. email me 'off list' - james at imaj.es

While it's certainly lame to find that somebody has cloned your application, I don't think you should spend any time worrying about these guys.

Your Business is the important thing to think about, and there's nothing these guys can do to touch that. They can't duplicate the marketing you've put in, the goodwill of your established customer base, or your reputation in general. All they can do is put out an application, and start from scratch just like you did back when you launched. You executed well. Chances are they won't.

As developers, we tend to think in terms of code, so seeing a feature-by-feature clone of our software is hard to take. Trust me though, if you're at all successful you'll see plenty more of these clones popping up. Think of how many Basecamp and Fogbugz clones are out there. 37 Signals and Fog Creek are not in the least way threatened by them, and don't spend even a minute fretting about them. I'd advise you to follow their lead.

Back when I was looking into outsourcing, friends told me that whomever I hire outside the country, make sure it is very clear that:

A) They do NOT use any GPL'd code in the work they do.

B) They do not COPY any competitor or other product in the process.

Apparently people hire outside companies to develop software and end up getting "borrowed" products in return.

Just a thought.

Well, as I remember, Stack Overflow just kind of let it happen. Didn't hurt them none.

But in your case? IANAL, but get a lawyer.

Stack overflow also has had enormous industry cred from the get-go. Most startups don't have that foundation to build upon.

http://www.roninapp.com/site/signup vs. http://www.net2invoice.com/Select-Plan.aspx

shows better your claim

I review your site and theirs. Functionality is different. I was looking into their contract and project management feature. It looks pretty good. I dont see that as a feature for ur app.

"Imitation is the sincerest of flattery." --Charles Caleb Colton

Sue them before they sue you. And get a good lawyer.

Another note: sometimes these carbon-copy sites are not to compete with you for customers, but to scam some potential investors. "Look, we're real!"

(This may not be the case here, if as appears to be the case it's associated with a longer-lived development shop. But it's something to keep in mind.)

Did they take your source code? That'd be a clear copyright case.

Mimicking your look and feel closely but not exactly is a much murkier case. Lifting a few graphics or paragraphs is technically a copyright violation but what are your damages?

You do not have to enforce your copyrights to retain them; that's trademarks. If they were using your company or product names in a manner that caused confusion among customers, you'd have a trademark case. (If they mimicked the distinctive appearance of your product so much that it caused confusion, there could be a 'trade dress' trademark case. But as elegant as your interface looks, I think you'd have a hard time proving customers look at it and think 'Ronin'.)

I think your best strategy is to outcompete them as a more reliable, innovative, above-board app. That might entail completely ignoring them, or (if you have excellent evidence they simply copied you with little original development), making the case that they are a cheap knockoff in relevant forums, just so that any customer comparing you both knows the story.

Ouch, I'm not sure what to say other than that sucks!

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