
Ask HN: Are Product Ripoffs by Large Companies Legal? - tenpoundhammer
There is a lot of nuance to the subject, but there seems to be an obvious trend where large companies build a platform and then steal the ideas of smaller developers and incorporate it into the platform. It appears to my untrained eye to be anti-competitive and monopolistic.<p>A small for instance is Apple created Night Shift for IOS which is incredibly similar to F.lux which had been around for years ( but blocked from the AppStore).<p>Is this behavior legal? Does the HN community feel that it&#x27;s ethical?
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PaulHoule
It is legal unless your product is patented or a copyright violation is
involved. It is never a bad idea to file a provisional patent application
which costs $60 and gives you the intimidation value of saying your product is
patent pending.

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nnn1234
Ethical it's not. Leagality if fluid. Also who is going to sue? Strictly
speaking is it illegal sure. No one of the customers cares enough to sue( has
arbitration agreements) , the other firms are doing a cost benefit analysis

