Hello everyone I have a slight problem, I started my website on the 5th March 2006 and on the 12th April 2006 someone registered a different domain name, but the site has the exact same concept as mine. I found it very odd that this person started a site almost exactly the same as mine a month after I started my site. So I contacted him asking him why he copied my site and he claimed he never. So I showed him proof that my website was started before his and he claimed that he came up with the idea over a year ago and that he was waiting for the .eu domains to become available. I then asked him for proof of this, which he said he had and I never heard from him since. Basically I need to know what I should do now, because he claims he has proof that he did not copy my site, but he wont show it to me. I don’t really want to go to his service provider and so on, because h could be telling the truth. So what should I do? Any advice would be great! Thanks
Well, unless he copied you verbatim (like your text on your pages), there's not much you can do. For instance, eBay can't forbid anyone else from running online auction sites. Shawn can't forbid anyone else (like Link Vault) from creating a co-op. Unless you were granted a patent for your concept, there's not much you can do about it.
What Dastar said. It's one of those reasons why you should never talk about or launch anything until its ready for prime time. You can rent 10 freelancers for a grand to copy a concept in a day, kick in your ads and you can beat anything that just launched. So next time, make sure you are ready with it for prime time. That way there's way less incentive for copycats because they're so far behind already.
That's right Tops30. All I did to talk about my new site was say how different it was and how exciting it was without revealing the concept or site details. Once it was complete then I let it rip and now it is doing well.
There is nothing you can do, unless you had a business process patent for some process on your site. you are SOL.
What is the URL of your site? What is the URL of the copy? Seeing both may help us assess the situation. Roger
You can't copyright an idea... you can only copyright the execution of that idea. So I don't think there will be much you can do about it.
what if the freelancer himself starts a new site exactly like yours after he's done with our project ? thats what im afraid. NDA doesnot really work
NDA only works if the freelancer perceives you will actually take action. But to avoid such a situation you: 1. Only use people you trust. 2. Never let them do a complete job, i.e. modularize it so they;re all working on a piece of the puzzle. you put it together and that's when it becomes worth something. A piece on its own will be useless.
yeah, that's not a very pleasant thing to have happened, but you can't be sure that the other guy didn't genuinely have his idea independently. (only ways I can thing: check your logs for something suspicious, check for verbatim copies).