Ask HN: What should you do when a China-based startup clones your website?

10 points by bflesch 10y ago ↗ HN

Dear HN,

I'm CEO of a Germany-based eSports startup and we have a problem.

Today we were approached by a Chinese user of our website who told us that a China-based startup has launched a direct clone of our website aimed at the Chinese market.

Our website https://strivewire.com is a host of for-money eSports tournaments in the Hearthstone vertical, but we are working on expanding to other games as well.

The website in question is a very obvious clone of ours and has both .com and .cn domains: - www.haogegebisai.com - www.chosengamer.com

Basically they copied all the design and even our logo down to the actual URLs.

I've added their CEO on WeChat and inquired about this, and he said they are big fans of our startup. But he also mentioned that they already have investors. Their website launched two days ago and already has a bunch of activity.

We've talked about this internally and hope to be able to gain this startup as a Chinese subsidiary, but we are still unsure if this will actually work out.

From a legal standpoint we are very unsure how much you can actually do in such a case. Should we just wait it out? Our should we aim to litigate to put pressure on their investors? I have some experience in international litigation in cybercrime cases, but from a practical perspective it is very likely to bind a lot of resources and focus.

Another huge problem for us is that we are in talks with a very large Chinese IT company (triple-digit $Bn market cap), and if there is a clone growing in their backyard they might pass on us.

It'd be great if people with more experience in these things could give us some advice.

Thanks, Benjamin

TL;DR: Chinese startup is cloning our business, unsure what to do

3 comments

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bflesch 10y ago ↗

One more point: We've applied for a trademark on our logo which includes the blue flash icon a couple of months ago, but the process is not completed yet by the government agency in charge.

Some background on our startup: We have secured regulatory approval for real-money 1v1-matches and are rolling this out for US / EU in the coming weeks. We are working on an app aswell. The large US VCs think we suck, but we're doing it anyways.

thehorbach 10y ago ↗

The problem from a legal stand point is the fact that China does not support the international IP laws, which probably in your case means that you cannot put any legal pressure on them and as a startup without funding it might be a bad decision as you might have to put in a lot of capital in paying lawyers and all the fees around it. I would suggest that you try to convince them, that it's better for them to be a subsidiary of yours or just simply out-hustle them!

Thanks, that's what we feared. China is a huge market in eSports and a direct copy really hurts. We hope for the best..