3 ms·

Thanks your advice, kev6168! I will try to get in touch with those two authorities on Monday and maybe they can clear up the leverage we have. If you look at o

by bflesch 11y ago

Thanks your advice, kev6168! I will try to get in touch with those two authorities on Monday and maybe they can clear up the leverage we have. If you look at our website you see that we're using cheap bootstrap, so they are not really cloning our design asset, but the whole product / UX. They add some value for users by providing Chinese translations. They told us they already have investors, and it seems at least two people are working on this. Unfortunately I was unable to find any info about company registration or the actual investor. I sincerely hope that we can somehow work with them so we don't have to waste resources in fighting / worrying.

kev6168 11y ago
oh lots of 'fightings' are needed. Those fightings are very strange and pointless work to a westerner, but actually are the necessary and normal things to do in the Chinese business environment, things like 1. thorough research on whether it's in your best interests to operate in china now, _really important_, 2. much _much_ more carefully than you would do in Europe to examine your potential partners' credentials and validity of their claims, 3. establish connections with government officials (no, you don't need to go crazy on bribe or shady stuff, just good relationship and name recognition), 4, find capable and trusty locals to work together. The key for anyone to make it in China is to understand that although China is utterly different from the west, it is _NOT_ a random and chaos place. It has its own well-oiled system running for the most time successfully for millenniums! It's scary to foreigners because it's so different so people tend to avoid it altogether. But in fact every issue has a well established way to be dealt with, obvious to locals but not obvious to a foreigner. So getting there and doing the right moves, you might emerge victorious. Also in comparison to other industries, internet-related intellectual property protection is much easier to enforce by the Chinese central and local government, because they can order ISPs and Cloud service providers to pull plugs on the perpetrators web sites with enough poking from you or your liaison in China. Power to the censors and GFW related technologies! :) So be confident you will find ways to solve the problem. Good luck with your venture.

by bflesch 11y ago

kev6168 11y ago

oh lots of 'fightings' are needed. Those fightings are very strange and pointless work to a westerner, but actually are the necessary and normal things to do in the Chinese business environment, things like 1. thorough research on whether it's in your best interests to operate in china now, _really important_, 2. much _much_ more carefully than you would do in Europe to examine your potential partners' credentials and validity of their claims, 3. establish connections with government officials (no, you don't need to go crazy on bribe or shady stuff, just good relationship and name recognition), 4, find capable and trusty locals to work together. The key for anyone to make it in China is to understand that although China is utterly different from the west, it is _NOT_ a random and chaos place. It has its own well-oiled system running for the most time successfully for millenniums! It's scary to foreigners because it's so different so people tend to avoid it altogether. But in fact every issue has a well established way to be dealt with, obvious to locals but not obvious to a foreigner. So getting there and doing the right moves, you might emerge victorious. Also in comparison to other industries, internet-related intellectual property protection is much easier to enforce by the Chinese central and local government, because they can order ISPs and Cloud service providers to pull plugs on the perpetrators web sites with enough poking from you or your liaison in China. Power to the censors and GFW related technologies! :) So be confident you will find ways to solve the problem. Good luck with your venture.