4 ms·
Ask HN: A copycat sells a rip-off using stolen sources, what do I do?
One of my customers has just showed me a 100% rip-off of our product.
Basically, some dude in India has taken our product, slightly redesigned the UI and is now selling it as a "saas" app. (we have an option to buy our product with the source codes, and he was probably working for one of our Indian customers and has stolen the sources).
He also launched a website where 70% of the text is stolen from our website.
He used a restrictive "robots.txt" so he cannot be found online, using phone-sales and marketplaces like "capterra" to acquire customers.
But he was dumb enough not to hide his "whois" and list his personal phone number on his website. I decided to contact him (probably a mistake), sending a scary "cease and desist" PDF-letter with screenshots of his website and everything, letting him know that this is copyright infringement, IP violation and my company is hiring an attorney to fight him.
He replied and even ADMITTED that he copied everything, but claims he used a freely-downloadable "trial" version of our product to build upon (which is not true, our trial version is a half-assed demo, not a real product) and this is his "hobby". After a couple of emails (I basically called him a liar 1-2 times, and he replied with a "go ahead, sue me").
So. What do I do?
My 1st reaction was to hire a US/UK lawyer (my company is in the UK) but then I thought of hiring an Indian local attorney maybe? And let the lawyer contact him and maybe file criminal charges/lawsuit etc?
I guess I will have no problem proving that my website IS the original one? ("whois" history goes back to 2005, "archive.org" snapshots etc, I also have all the source codes in an online repo that is several years old etc.)
PS. My product - https://www.jitbit.com/helpdesk/ His product - http://noveldesk.com
PPS. He probably rushed into changing the copy on his pages, but we made dozens of screenshots of the stolen content etc. Is that enough? What else could I do?
PPPS. we're a small bootstrapped company, so I don't have a zillion $$$ to spend on this, couple of grand tops :(
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- patio11 10y agoYour competent attorney will probably, after they get done with the facepalming about you bluffing and getting called on it, tell you that enforcing a judgement internationally will cost you six figures. DMCA requests are cheaper, if there is something on his site which is definitely your property. Find 1+ vendors who are necessary to keep the site on the Internet and which operate in jurisdictions where IP is customarily granted lots of respect by courts; send them DMCA takedown notices. I wouldn't spend more than 20 minutes on this. I feel for you; it sucks to have one's work ripped off. This is, unfortunately, basically built in to the model with downloadable software. It is unlikely that devoting huge amounts of your time and attention to this will be more beneficial for your business than devoting huge amounts of your time and attention to selling more software. If it's more an urge to get-back-to-not-being-violated, I very much understand the impulse (as someone who sold downloadable software and had many permutations of this happen), but there is almost certainly another area of life or the world which would be more rewarded by your attention than this.
- jitbit 10y agoHowdy Patrick, Alex from Jitbit here, we met at BoS & Microconf couple times Yeah, he's using Amazon AWS so I should file a DMCA notice to them and Godaddy, thanks for the idea! And you're probably right, we should not spend too much money/effort on this. And we definitely should dump the downloadable version, switching to "SaaS only", hah Appreciate the advice.
- inputcoffee 10y agoHis site seems to be down already. Did it already work?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jitbit 10y agoYeah, seems like he took it down. Not sure if it was b/c of this thread)
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]