Ask HN: Should I ignore a cease and desist letter from our competition?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1668184

by cullenking • 16 years ago

16 21 16 years ago

news.ycombinator.com

Our main competitor, mapmyride, sent us a cease and desist letter a while back demanding we remove our account importation feature. The feature downloaded all (or select) mapped routes from the users mapmyride account, and imported them into ours. It was done tastefully, with adequate time outs between requests and all that. Their objection was in our supposed violation of their TOS. Of course that's a load of bull, since I never agreed to their TOS. However, we pulled the feature as we were afraid of their legal budget.

Now that we have many more users (but still legal budget), I am less afraid of the consequences. However, I won't re-implement the functionality if it has a reasonable chance of tying me up in court, or otherwise wasting time/money. Does anyone have any experience with this? I understand most of you aren't lawyers and your advice isn't a substitute for adequate legal council, yadayadayada, but your input is definitely appreciated.

One last note: they can easily ban our servers IP and keep us from doing this. However, we are considering reimplementing the feature as a desktop application and making it generic enough to just archive a users content from a variety of these sites. No IP bans, and each user is violating their TOS. Our users are clamoring for this functionality, as many have 200+ mapped routes tied up on the site.

cperciva• 16 years ago

If you access their servers without their permission and without accepting their terms of service, you put yourself at risk of a lawsuit or possibly even criminal charges depending on how zealous your local prosecutors are (so far the question of whether TOS violations can constitute criminal unauthorized access to computer systems is an open question legally). This is particularly true if they take technical measures, such as banning IP addresses, in an attempt to keep you out and you circumvent those measures -- to make an offline analogy, it's much easier to prove a case of trespassing if said trespass involved climbing over a 15' fence.

If you merely provide a tool which your customers use, things are much less problematic. The only way I could see this causing difficulties would be if they claimed that they owned the copyright on their users' data, but it seems to me that it would be very difficult to make such an argument stand up.

So my non-lawyerly input is that if you should definitely not access their servers directly, but providing code to allow your customers to access their own data is probably fine.

cullenking5• 16 years ago

That was my assumption. They never took any technical measures to prevent us from doing it, they just sent us a letter. Calling it a cease and desist is a bit generous, as it wasn't crafted very well, or by a lawyer.

I am not worried about arguing over copyright, considering that ultimately, if the user created the map using Google's maps, then Google trumps all. If it was created by uploading a log file, then it's more gray, but, the user provided a file created by hardware they own, and MMR is merely representing it on a map. I can't imagine they can successfully pursue a copyright case.

Thanks for the input!

oldgregg• 16 years ago

Congrats on taking on mapmyride -- I used mapmywalk recently and their "new" UI is quite rubbish -- I use GMaps now but it certainly lacks some features.

The desktop concept seems like a lovely idea-- but just be careful about getting too caught up in it. Desktop software (cross-platform?) can be a serious time sink. Make a better product and you won't need to import their data. For the users who are begging for it maybe try to hack together some desktop software with a scripting language -- don't worry about making it too polished, just make it work with as minimal as work as possible. Stay focused on the core user experience and you'll find plenty of users regardless.

BTW, you can take some pleasure in knowing they wouldn't be calling in the lawyers if they really had confidence in their product.

cullenking5• 16 years ago

I have no intentions of this being a nice, well supported and regularly maintained piece of software. It would be a single days work to hack together a ruby/nokogiri page scraping client and a simple UI. Application phones home to get new regexes or whatnot in the case that the UI changes on the pages to be scraped.

But, your point is well taken. I am fond of SaaS rather than installable software for a reason!

ScottWhigham2• 16 years ago

"BTW, you can take some pleasure in knowing they wouldn't be calling in the lawyers if they really had confidence in their product."

I'm sorry but that isn't remotely close to real life, is it? Look - they are calling in the lawyers because a competitor is making itself more attractive to mapmyride's customers by using mapmyrides' services against their TOS. They are smart to call in the lawyers - it would be foolish not to. Also, who can say when/whether OP's company could "accidently" submit too many requests too quickly thus incapacitating mapmyride's servers?

lelele3• 16 years ago

He doesn't need a desktop app. A Javascript app (thus client-side) would suffice.

semanticist2• 16 years ago

Same origin policy would stop it from scraping MMR's site unless it was hosted there.

cullenking5• 16 years ago

I am pretty sure that origin policies would prevent this from working. I considered using Adobe Air, but, it's probably easier to just bundle a ruby desktop app with a simple UI. nokogiri trumps all when it comes to screen scraping!

ScottWhigham2• 16 years ago

OP - couple of things:

1) I know now who mapmyride is but who are you? What is your company? You don't mention it which, IMO, is a mistake. I've typed mapmyride now 4-5 times yet don't know your company's name at all.

2) No, I think you were right to pay attention to the C&D. Are you in a high margin business and you are the key player? For example, you are one of four companies worldwide making a product that people "have to have" and you can charge 1000% of your cost? Those are the types of businesses that can easily afford to ignore C&Ds. In businesses where there are a small set of customers and you have to fight, fight, fight to get every single customer, your time is better spent in customer acquisition, marketing, and feature dev than in the attorney's office or the courtroom.

You can listen to all the folks who suggest dodgy tactics but how will you feel if you accept such advice and later get sued? It won't matter that it was the customers' IP addresses that accessed the server, will it? You'll be the one not focusing on customer acquisition, etc b/c you'll be in court. Where will the marketing budget go? To the attorney. Doesn't matter if you were right/wrong, does it?

And what if mapmyride (there, I said it again - I'm going to go to that site now!) decides to send C&D letters to your customers? Or to sue your customers?

cullenking5• 16 years ago

Thanks for pointing out my lack of reference to our site. http://ridewithgps.com

mapmyride is the key player in the market, in terms of userbase and, recently, a $5 million A round. I am more wary now they have VC's, who may be more aggressive than mmr ever would have been in other circumstances. At least, that's my assumption.

I can't imagine MMR would sue their own customers over it, that would be downright suicidal as far as public opinion goes. However, that is duly noted.

I wonder if I can convince a particularly feisty/intrepid user to maintain this piece of software, pulling the risk away from us primarily ;) Hmmm. Thanks for the advice, definitely something to think about.

MortenK• 16 years ago

This has "don't do it" written all over. If i were mapmyride, i'd find your screenscraping to be dodgy and opportunistic. If i found this thread and saw you contemplating how to avoid their cease and desist and not get caught, i would be royally pissed off.

When you piss on business people, especially the ones with 5 mill in the bank, dont be surprised when they come after you on grounds of principles.

stoney2• 16 years ago

Maybe make the desktop application open source? That may remove a lot of the headache for you if you can find a keen customer to develop/support it.

Good luck taking on mapmyride. Mapmyrun (the runner's equivalent) has got worse and worse over the years, I'm sure you can do better!

cullenking5• 16 years ago

This is a consideration. I just would need a willing, competent and feisty user to take on the project! I'll have to consider it.

stoney2• 16 years ago

Or maybe the Google cache can give you what you want...

http://www.mapmyride.com/view_route?r=488106908

Becomes:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:_kV756J...

CatalystFactory• 16 years ago

(1) You should never "ignore" a cease and desist letter. I would have it reviewed by an experienced lawyer in the field perhaps over lunch (to save on legal costs) and get their input on the risk and likelihood of getting sued. Then I'd go back and make a business decision on whether that risk makes sense vs. giving your users what they want.

(2) If they can ban you via IP, they should be doing that already. I wonder why they aren't.

(Disclaimer: None of the above is legal advice or forms an attorney client relationship. The statements above are only for informational purposes and should be used at your own risk.)

markbernard• 16 years ago

No matter what you do, if they want to pursue it you will end up in court. Even if their claims are baseless you still have to show up in front of a judge. The judge will then decide if it goes to trial or not. So you will be paying legal fees if you want to re-implement the feature as is.

Also, violating a site's terms of service is not illegal. It will just get you banned. Facebook tried to bring someone to court over terms of service(and other items) and the terms of service part was dropped by the court.

what• 16 years ago

Their robots.txt allows all bots access to all pages and the ToS says that users retain "full ownership of any and all of his or her User Content and any intellectual property rights or other proprietary rights associated with said User Content." Doesn't that mean that you can scrape the content for the user?

carbocation• 16 years ago

No, it means that the user retains rights to their own data. It says nothing about a competitor's right to access their servers ad lib.

Ask HN: Should I ignore a cease and desist letter from our competition?

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