Call your lawyer. This is not the venue for such a complaint, but the courts may very well be.
Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
41–50 of 107 posts
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#42Stop talking about it and call a law firm. Your local Bar Association will be able to give you a list of firms/attorneys that practice in this area, or your existing lawyer may have a recommendation. Many law firms will give you a short consultation for free. Bring a succinct written summary of the facts with you that briefly describes the product, how you discovered the issue, and what you found when you investigate…
Unless you have tons of funding and lawyers already on retainer, this is horrible advice Legal fees will drain your funds faster than anything else and you will probably not see any benefits from it In fact it might be what makes your company fail (taking away the focus from building your business)
Of course it isn't horrible advice, legal affairs are dealt with by lawyers and courts. If you have a product out there in the market you should go to bat for it.
And yes, it might make your company fail. But that goes for a well funded competitor outright copying your product as well.
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#43Stop talking about it and call a law firm. Your local Bar Association will be able to give you a list of firms/attorneys that practice in this area, or your existing lawyer may have a recommendation. Many law firms will give you a short consultation for free. Bring a succinct written summary of the facts with you that briefly describes the product, how you discovered the issue, and what you found when you investigate…
If you go this route be sure to grab evidence now. Screenshots, logs and anything you can to show the product similarities and IP issues. Before they change stuff and try to erase it.
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unless you have tons of funding and lawyers already on retainer, this is horrible advice Legal fees will drain your funds faster than anything else and you will probably not see any benefits from it In fact it might be what makes your company fail (taking away the focus from building your business)
Of course it isn't horrible advice, legal affairs are dealt with by lawyers and courts. If you have a product out there in the market you should go to bat for it. And yes, it might make your company fail. But that goes for a well funded competitor outright copying your product as well.
This would require millions in legal fees.
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#45What does you being female have to do with the issue at hand?
That YC is advertising itself as 'female founder friendly' and to fund a bunch of - presumably, too little data - guys to copy the product of a female applicant that got rejected would be a strong move in the wrong direction.
But: since the OP doesn't supply any information at all all you can do is speculate about whether or not that is what happened.
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#46Very sorry to hear this. Did you have any copyright to the apis or the code? Or even a ToS on your slack channel? IANAL so wouldn't hurt to speak to a lawyer. Also sorry I am not good reading the signals - why would being a female founder make you angrier than a non female founder? Id be angry as F too if a clone of my hard work appeared out of no where!
> Did you have any copyright to the apis or the code? Any code that's written from scratch is automatically assigned copyright to the creator or their employer at the time of creation. API's are probably considered copyrighted by the courts but getting any kind of remedy for that will be exceedingly difficult after Google vs. Oracle. > Id be angry as F too if a clone of my hard work appeared out of no where! This hap…
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Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#47[flagged]
I think it’s fair. When a clone of your product is funded by the same entity that rejected yours, it's only logical to assess the differences that do exist.
Had she said “as a first-time founder,” I doubt the victim card argument would be raised.
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
Of course it isn't horrible advice, legal affairs are dealt with by lawyers and courts. If you have a product out there in the market you should go to bat for it. And yes, it might make your company fail. But that goes for a well funded competitor outright copying your product as well.
This would require millions in legal fees.
Not it won't. If it is an outright copy (that's relatively easy to prove) you can have an injunction issued, besides that the bad press alone might get them to back off. I've brought a lawsuit like that and won << $100K.
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#49Stop talking about it and call a law firm. Your local Bar Association will be able to give you a list of firms/attorneys that practice in this area, or your existing lawyer may have a recommendation. Many law firms will give you a short consultation for free. Bring a succinct written summary of the facts with you that briefly describes the product, how you discovered the issue, and what you found when you investigate…
Pretty wild how much "just execute better" posts there are, one wonders if its the common response to a situation like this, from this community, and what that says about trustworthiness in general of YC "founder" types!
YC isn't responsible for the actions of the founders of every start-up that they fund. Even worse: after funding them they have very limited ability to influence the companies they funded, after all, YC has a small minority stake and founders could just ignore them. Obviously YC can cut them off from further capital and blackball them but that may not be sufficient.
Re: Ask HN: YC company copied our product, what can we do?
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
> considering your competitors' employees already infiltrated your slack channel. It was a public community slack channel. There may have been proprietary/protected information shared in there but in my naive opinion (NAL!) that wouldn't be protected by trade secrets if it was shared publicly. Some things could still be protected by copyright or trademark but it's pretty unlikely. It's possible copying the API could…
Litigation is about more than the legal argument alone, and the legal arguments often turn on specific facts that may seem general on casual inspection. Other factors to consider include cost, embarrassing facts that may emerge during discovery, and reputational damage. That's why cases are often settled on the eve of trial, sometimes for significant sums. Getting a professional opinion on the options is generally be…
The 'Eve of Trial', how appropriate.