How was Machinio impacting your business? They appear to act as a metasearch engine and were scraping listings/imagery without permission. As you don't publicize the dealer contact info, presumably buyers still ended up on your site and you were still able to broker the deal?
My guess is by acting as a central authority for all used equipment deals (bootstrapped by scraping listings from many sources), they were able to use the existence of the listings to better convince future dealers to just list directly with them instead of your business? e.g. increased exposure for dealers, Machinio doesn't take a commission, so dealers just pay a flat rate to gain exposure?
At the end of the day, I have to assume the litigation was over them stealing dealers by disintermediating you? Because otherwise I'm guessing they'd just argue they were providing you free exposure.
My guess is by acting as a central authority for all used equipment deals (bootstrapped by scraping listings from many sources), they were able to use the existence of the listings to better convince future dealers to just list directly with them instead of your business? e.g. increased exposure for dealers, Machinio doesn't take a commission, so dealers just pay a flat rate to gain exposure?
At the end of the day, I have to assume the litigation was over them stealing dealers by disintermediating you? Because otherwise I'm guessing they'd just argue they were providing you free exposure.