A very misleading title. The blog post doesn't describe an entity who copies an idea and goes to form their own company and produce competing products.
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.
See your point on the title, could have worded it differently indeed. But it was more than front-end code and icons, they had copied the workflow and user experience we had been working on for more than a year, so it was not just a catchy headline.
If they blatantly stole your idea - don't worry. The type of people who can't think originally enough to come up with their own idea are probably not going to execute it well either.
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.
>The type of people who can't think originally enough to come up with their own idea are probably not going to execute it well 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.
I'm planning on skipping this pain, and open sourcing our base code. If someone wants to copy us, go ahead, but our machine learning and data analysis services are going to be hard to build: its taken me two years to get even close to launching ;)
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!
very hard (impossible?) to copy the most important parts of a startup:
+ 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 agree. At least 80% of your start-up depends on execution. You do need a good idea, but that's just the beginning and you can borrow heavily here (that's how progress works most of the time, improve on existing concepts). When someone 'steals' your idea and then does a terrible job at executing it, then I don't see a problem. You can just do better and prevail.
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
Don't worry. Ideas are worthless. Implementation, marketing, etc. is what matters. Focus on that. You should be chosen because you're the best, not because you're the only one.
I would suggest that, even if someone copies your front end code, don't worry about it. Run your own race. A business who just copies (instead of innovating) wont last long.
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).
"If possible, look into patenting key components of your software – this offers more protection than copyright. More on that here."
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.
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.