
Ask HN: A copycat sells a rip-off using stolen sources, what do I do? - jitbit
One of my customers has just showed me a 100% rip-off of our product.<p>Basically, some dude in India has taken our product, slightly redesigned the UI and is now selling it as a &quot;saas&quot; 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).<p>He also launched a website where 70% of the text is stolen from our website.<p>He used a restrictive &quot;robots.txt&quot; so he cannot be found online, using phone-sales and marketplaces like &quot;capterra&quot; to acquire customers.<p>But he was dumb enough not to hide his &quot;whois&quot; and list his personal phone number on his website. I decided to contact him (probably a mistake), sending a scary &quot;cease and desist&quot; 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.<p>He replied and even ADMITTED that he copied everything, but claims he used a freely-downloadable &quot;trial&quot; 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 &quot;hobby&quot;. After a couple of emails (I basically called him a liar 1-2 times, and he replied with a &quot;go ahead, sue me&quot;).<p>So. What do I do?<p>My 1st reaction was to hire a US&#x2F;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&#x2F;lawsuit etc?<p>I guess I will have no problem proving that my website IS the original one? (&quot;whois&quot; history goes back to 2005, &quot;archive.org&quot; snapshots etc, I also have all the source codes in an online repo that is several years old etc.)<p>PS. My product - https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.jitbit.com&#x2F;helpdesk&#x2F; His product - http:&#x2F;&#x2F;noveldesk.com<p>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?<p>PPPS. we&#x27;re a small bootstrapped company, so I don&#x27;t have a zillion $$$ to spend on this, couple of grand tops :(
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patio11
Your 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.

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jitbit
Howdy 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.

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inputcoffee
His site seems to be down already. Did it already work?

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jitbit
Yeah, seems like he took it down. Not sure if it was b/c of this thread)

