
What to do when someone steals your startup idea - case study - standrews
http://blog.pipedrive.com/2013/07/what-to-do-when-someone-steals-your-startup-idea/
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belorn
A very misleading title. The blog post doesn't describe an entity who copies
an _idea_ and goes to form their own company and produce competing products.

Rather, this is the simple case of a "potential businesses party" who copied
front-end code, design (obviously), and images. They also redirected traffic
of an associated domain. So, beyond blatantly doing copyright infringement,
they are also breaking fair trade competition/fraud laws and depending on
jurisdictions, trademark (established through use in the marketplace rather
than registration).

 _What you can do to protect yourself_ against such activities is simple, send
a cease and desist letter, file a complaint to consumer protection agency (if
you've got one), and possibly send the issue to the local police.

Their suggestion of registered trademark, watermarks, and (meh) patents might
increase the reward money from a law suit and increase win chances in court,
but it won't actually "protect" you against entities who already willingly
commits copyright infringement.

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antr
I was about to comment the same thing.

I've yet to see I company going bust because someone copied their front-end,
icons or flat design.

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Aqueous
If they blatantly stole your idea - don't worry. The type of people who can't
think originally enough to come up with their own idea are probably not going
to execute it well either.

The same principle applies when someone else has the same idea as you at the
same time, and you catch wind of it right in the middle of your implementation
of that idea. It might be slightly more difficult, since you arrived at the
same good idea independently of each other. Just focus on executing better.

Ideas are a dime a dozen - they aren't worth anything in and of themselves.

If they blatantly copy your code, as is the case here, then it becomes
slightly worse, an actual legal issue. But again I wouldn't worry too much
since I'm willing to bet that they aren't that good at coding either.

~~~
throwa
Trying telling that to the the Winklevoss twins and see if they agree.

~~~
Aqueous
Having a hard time feeling sorry for the Winklevoss twins. The market paid
them more than what they were worth.

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girvo
I'm planning on skipping this pain, and open sourcing our base code. If
someone wants to copy us, go ahead, but our machine learning and data analysis
services are going to be hard to build: its taken me two years to get even
close to launching ;)

Other upshot is I get to give back to the FOSS community: couldnt have built
it without them.

As the saying goes, if you can be copied that easily: you've built a feature,
not a business!

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gz5
very hard (impossible?) to copy the most important parts of a startup:

\+ business model innovation \+ go to market strategy \+ execution, focus and
efficiency \+ iteration \+ user/customer care and cultivation \+ brand
integrity and trust \+ vision \+ interfaces \+ partnerships \+ etc

~~~
skriticos2
I agree. At least 80% of your start-up depends on execution. You do need a
good idea, but that's just the beginning and you can borrow heavily here
(that's how progress works most of the time, improve on existing concepts).
When someone 'steals' your idea and then does a terrible job at executing it,
then I don't see a problem. You can just do better and prevail.

I have (supposedly) good ideas all the time, but not the time to execute most
of them without totally loosing my focus. I'd actually be quite honored if
someone would 'steal' some of them and execute them well as most of these
ideas arise from some issue I encounter that needs fixing.

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dochtman
Might want to update your nginx, pretty sure this one is vulnerable.

Oh, and your site is down.

~~~
standrews
#2 position here was a bit of a surprise, but site looks to be accessible for
most.

~~~
culshaw
Server dooown, get reliable hosting :)

~~~
tajur
fixing the bottlenecks. sorry :) our blog hadn't been designed to scale well.

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grimborg
Don't worry. Ideas are worthless. Implementation, marketing, etc. is what
matters. Focus on that. You should be chosen because you're the best, not
because you're the only one.

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viennacoder
I would suggest that, even if someone copies your front end code, don't worry
about it. Run your own race. A business who just copies (instead of
innovating) wont last long.

I would worry about a google penalty for duplicate content across the two
sites. If they are really copying your code wholesale you can screw them over
by defining the canonical urls for various pages (as your own domains).

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natejenkins
"If possible, look into patenting key components of your software – this
offers more protection than copyright. More on that here."

While I agree that having your site copied verbatim sucks, I don't think
contributing to the giant pile that is our current patent system is the way
forward.

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bayesianhorse
Ideas are almost worthless, implementation and execution is what counts.

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tgodard
PipeDrive... sounds like a great name for an adult film.

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nfoz
There's no such thing as a stolen idea.

Especially not for a startup.

