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Well, one of YC's guidelines is "don't worry about your competitors". This is a guideline for practical rather than moral reasons. Worrying about your competitors wastes your time and energy.

So (dodging the moral and legal questions), this behavior may be counterproductive.

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I'm a big fan of the "don't worry about your competitor" mantra. But at the same time, it'd be silly not to pay attention and to learn from your competitors failures/successes. Doing so, IMO is quite productive.

You can pay attention but not worry. The two are closely related but not the same thing :-)

Totally agree. I think we're saying the same thing (that was my intent anyways :|

Sorry, I thought you was conflating worrying with paying attention. My bad!

Completely agree. If this is true, I'd never want to invest in the bunch of muppets who were wasting time on this.

Conversely, it's probably now RAISED the profile of the competitor, made them look like more a threat than they really were.

Maybe I've just nailed it, and it it's secretly the 500 Startups company who're behind it. If they are, that's pretty clever.

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