What to do when someone steals your startup idea - case study
blog.pipedrive.com
blog.pipedrive.com
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.
I've yet to see I company going bust because someone copied their front-end, icons or flat design.
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.
* Ideas != execution. They may be excellent executors but not good at ideas (Apple in the early days).
* If they beat you to market see what works for them and what doesn't.
* If you beat them to market use them as an example that the market is viable (competition is good for business).
* If they do execution well, hire their best executors. It takes a company to embrace an idea, but a single person to execute part of that idea well; hire that person.
* It is not stealing to learn from someone else's failures. Competitors are market sensors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horizontal_gene_transfer
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!
+ 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
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.
I was at a conference on the weekend and after a few people found out what I was doing they were interested in talking to me about the idea.
Im more than happy to talk about it. I will out execute them like crazy and I have been in this space for years. If anything I can learn more from them.
I hate when people are like, I have a idea that I cant/dont want to talk about. Its ridiculous, as its been said 100's of times before. Ideas are worth nothing
Oh, and your site is down.
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).
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.
Especially not for a startup.