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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.

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.

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

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.