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I had such a project that was making about $15k/mo at its peak -- it was me and my wife, barring a couple of spot contributions from contractors. It depended on

I had such a project that was making about $15k/mo at its peak -- it was me and my wife, barring a couple of spot contributions from contractors. It depended on data from a sole data source, a Fortune 100 company, which eventually cut us off by sending a C&D threatening to sue under the CFAA, Copyright Act, and various other statutes. They claimed we breached the contract entered automatically by using their site, as their Terms of Service states that "no automated or manual method" (i.e., no method at all) can be used to access their content and their footer states that use of the site constitutes agreement (this is called "browsewrap"). The way we accessed data was much lower-impact than the way our clients accessed the data previously and I'm fully convinced that we saved them tens of thousands in maintenance and bandwidth costs. No other data source is capable of providing the content we needed. We were forced to shut down. We knew this was a possible eventuality and our ToS explicitly disclaimed responsibility for it. Our site required users to check both a checkbox and click OK on a dialog box that served only to inform that they used the product at their own risk, nothing was guaranteed, and no refunds of any kind would be furnished. When we shut down, many angry users demanded refunds and issued chargebacks, often after months of successful use, despite the clear and unambiguous language which confronted them several times and required their affirmative assent before they were allowed to purchase anything. Before we were forced to shut down, other people had caught on to the market and started copying us. We had about a year where we were in it by ourselves. Once serious competitors showed up, they ate our lunch by using a sophisticated spam network to promote their offerings, which were sloppily made by offshore contractors and far worse than our offering in every way, technical and aesthetic. I refused to engage in similar tactics and felt righteous about it, but it sure cost us a lot of money. They somehow brokered deals with the niche forums that had blacklisted us from day one (or just outspammed their moderation capacity), afraid that we may eventually expand into something that would threaten them directly (which I now plan to do, some day). Perhaps we could've prevented the copycats by acquiring software patents. These competitors pushed the envelope to the point where it became a visible PR issue and the F100 was forced to respond by C&D'ing every site that operated in the sector I launched and instructing their users to never use anything not distributed directly by the company itself again. Now, about 16 months post-shutdown, I still get emails from business owners who depended on us begging me to turn the service back on, and saying that their business has been seriously hurt by our absence. Some of the people in this thread evidently picked much better niches than I did.

shiftpgdn 10y ago
Would you be willing to sell the site/code to somebody who is willing to take the risk? A Fortune 100 in the US can't touch a Lithuanian Corporation. :)
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I've been varying degrees of open to this over the months. At the moment I don't think I have the time resources to arrange something, but if you want to shoot me an email at my_username @gmail.com, we can keep the communication channel open that way and I'll ping you when/if it changes.
jimnotgym 10y ago
Was there any possibility of agreeing a license for the data from the Fortune 100?
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Our lawyer sent them a proposal. They sat on it for 4 weeks before they said they weren't interested in issuing a license.
mywittyname 10y ago
I usually don't do this, but couldn't you have the customers set up some sort of proxy to acquire the data from the F100? So give them a piece of software that they run on their local network to grab the data and configure your SaaS to point to the customer's site to get it. Perhaps you've considered this and it wouldn't work for some reason or another. But I thought I'd offer some unsolicited advice.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  I wanted to do this, and in fact thought of doing it before the takedown occurred, but after the takedown, our lawyer advised me that doing so could be construed as conspiracy to violate the CFAA. He thought it could give them incentive to try to field criminal charges (the CFAA defines both criminal and civil penalties, and as one may expect, the F100 is very well-connected and surely could get a federal prosecutor interested), so I didn't pursue it. As much as I wanted my business to be able to live on, I wanted to stay out of prison more. The only option would've been to abandon all US assets and essentially go into exile in a state where the law was more friendly and the F100 would have a harder time getting me shut down (and there are very few jurisdictions without a law substantially derived from the CFAA; the wording of the Telecommunications Act in many Commonwealth nations gives marginally more protection). I didn't think that was a very good option for a relatively small business, I wouldn't have been able to afford it at the time anyway, and it would've had meteoric impacts on my family, so I didn't do it. On top of that, The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload have proven that the long arm of American corporatism knows no borders. To their credit, however, Sweden did seem to hold out a long time. They had to be threatened with sanctions from the WTO in order to take down TPB. At that point, Sweden ignored their own law and pushed through a sham trial against TPB's proprietors, who went into exile in non-extradition countries, from which they were eventually stopped at border crossings and extradited to serve time in Sweden. Can't hide from Mickey Mouse. The most ironic part of this is that the world's largest companies regularly violate the same rules with impunity. Google, for example, routinely and flagrantly violates the CFAA and the Copyright Act, going by the standards that are applied to everyone non-Google. However, Google has been sued over this and won, with their use specifically ruled fair, because they're Google -- and that's essentially the reasoning the judges give if you read the decisions, talking about how it's a "transformative use" that has changed the world, etc. etc. Judges have declined to apply the same logic in later rulings (Ticketmaster v. RMG), on the basis that the defendant was not Google. The moral of the story appears to be break rules and get too big to fail fast, and then you can do whatever you want. If you don't big enough fast enough, you will be destroyed by a large company that's afraid of you.

shiftpgdn 10y ago

Would you be willing to sell the site/code to somebody who is willing to take the risk? A Fortune 100 in the US can't touch a Lithuanian Corporation. :)

cookiecaper 10y ago
I've been varying degrees of open to this over the months. At the moment I don't think I have the time resources to arrange something, but if you want to shoot me an email at my_username @gmail.com, we can keep the communication channel open that way and I'll ping you when/if it changes.

jimnotgym 10y ago

Was there any possibility of agreeing a license for the data from the Fortune 100?

cookiecaper 10y ago
Our lawyer sent them a proposal. They sat on it for 4 weeks before they said they weren't interested in issuing a license.

mywittyname 10y ago

I usually don't do this, but couldn't you have the customers set up some sort of proxy to acquire the data from the F100? So give them a piece of software that they run on their local network to grab the data and configure your SaaS to point to the customer's site to get it. Perhaps you've considered this and it wouldn't work for some reason or another. But I thought I'd offer some unsolicited advice.

cookiecaper 10y ago
I wanted to do this, and in fact thought of doing it before the takedown occurred, but after the takedown, our lawyer advised me that doing so could be construed as conspiracy to violate the CFAA. He thought it could give them incentive to try to field criminal charges (the CFAA defines both criminal and civil penalties, and as one may expect, the F100 is very well-connected and surely could get a federal prosecutor interested), so I didn't pursue it. As much as I wanted my business to be able to live on, I wanted to stay out of prison more. The only option would've been to abandon all US assets and essentially go into exile in a state where the law was more friendly and the F100 would have a harder time getting me shut down (and there are very few jurisdictions without a law substantially derived from the CFAA; the wording of the Telecommunications Act in many Commonwealth nations gives marginally more protection). I didn't think that was a very good option for a relatively small business, I wouldn't have been able to afford it at the time anyway, and it would've had meteoric impacts on my family, so I didn't do it. On top of that, The Pirate Bay and MegaUpload have proven that the long arm of American corporatism knows no borders. To their credit, however, Sweden did seem to hold out a long time. They had to be threatened with sanctions from the WTO in order to take down TPB. At that point, Sweden ignored their own law and pushed through a sham trial against TPB's proprietors, who went into exile in non-extradition countries, from which they were eventually stopped at border crossings and extradited to serve time in Sweden. Can't hide from Mickey Mouse. The most ironic part of this is that the world's largest companies regularly violate the same rules with impunity. Google, for example, routinely and flagrantly violates the CFAA and the Copyright Act, going by the standards that are applied to everyone non-Google. However, Google has been sued over this and won, with their use specifically ruled fair, because they're Google -- and that's essentially the reasoning the judges give if you read the decisions, talking about how it's a "transformative use" that has changed the world, etc. etc. Judges have declined to apply the same logic in later rulings (Ticketmaster v. RMG), on the basis that the defendant was not Google. The moral of the story appears to be break rules and get too big to fail fast, and then you can do whatever you want. If you don't big enough fast enough, you will be destroyed by a large company that's afraid of you.