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

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.

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.

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?

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!

(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.)

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.

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?