EULA Infringement

[patrickmore]

Hello,

I create and distribute a solution.

I have a client that is moving to a competitor as they require a service that i do not offer at present. Fair enough.

I received a request to export data from my solution and was happy to oblige.

Half way through exporting the data i realized that the email containing the request stated that the client had been told exporting the data would be complex due to the number of fields and layouts.

Problem is the email specified exactly the number of fields in the specific file.

This is very clear evidence that my competitor has cracked the solution.

This is of course the reason EULA exist so any advice on the best way to proceed with this as this solution is large and took 5 years to develop?

I am not a happy developer right now.

best

Patrick

[Colin Keefe]

Without knowing the actual contents of the EULA, or what you want as a best outcome, or what your tolerance for being involved in legal battles is, it's hard to offer best advice. Besides which, few of us here are actual lawyers.

I think your best bet is to retain the services of a lawyer to at least explore these questions. By and large legal action should be a last resort, since it's pricey; most of the time the only winners are the lawyers themselves. But a lawyer with EULA experience could at least advise as to what your options are - legal avenues, arbitration avenues, or simply walking away. Good, solid advice is worth the couple hundred bucks it'll cost.

You should at least try to assess the scope of the problem, anyway... some of which you can do yourself.

- does this competitor obtain any advantage by having exposure to your source code?

- is that advantage significant enough to damage your business?

- is the damage significant enough to warrant legal action?

- what legal actions are available to you through the EULA?

etc.

[Steven H. Blackwell]

Interesting situation.

There are any number of ways to look at the architectural structure of a FileMaker Pro file including the various Design Functions that FileMAker Pro itself provides.

So, the EULAmay not actually come into play here.But I suspect, as I think you do, that the competitor did look at your system. Depending on how tightly you locked it down, it may have been very easy to extract a lot of metadata from the file.

Please keep us posted about this.

Steven

[patrickmore]

Thank you both.

What would be the best practice in terms of agreements and contracts with clients to make sure my solution is covered by the law and make sure my clients are clear on the best way to conduct themselves?

best

Patrick

[Vaughan]

"I have a client that is moving to a competitor as they require a service that i do not offer at present."

Why not spend your time and money into improving your solution, instead of putting it into litigation?

[patrickmore]

Hi Vaughan,

This is unfortunately the reason we find ourselves in this situation. Rather than upgrading our rather large and complex FileMaker 6 solution we have spent the past 2 1/2 years rebuilding from scratch and really looking at the entire business structure of our clients rather than the 2 or 3 elements that most people provide, we have also moved over to a seperation model to take full advantage of the new relational structure to improve performance and compete with the growing number or web based solutions that are easily accessible on the move but provide poor performance (records in web based solutions take 10 seconds to open a record compared to less than 1 in our new model), the results are beautiful but the release is in two months.

We will not be taking legal action, but our competitor needs to realize that this was unacceptable and unlawful.

It is very bad business practice to place your client in a situation that leaves them open to legal action. Which is what they have done.

We have some of there clients waiting to switch over to our new version and would certainly not place them in such a situation. We expect the same.

We have no issue with them switching as the other company provides website design (we do not) and a poor database solution, the core of our business is clients that require a well designed database solution that directly assists with the day to day running of there business like ours. The clients in question are rather naive and have crossed over from another industry so lack some of the basic understanding of standard industry practices which means they have not used the solution as it was intended. This will come back and bite them in the future, should they survive.

That said our client handed them our files, they cracked them and we may now incur damages if the competitor who has reverse engineered our solution integrates elements into there currently rather poor database solution.

At the end of the day an EULA is there for a reason, if nothing is done when you are faced with a blatant violation what is the point of having it in the first place?

We are obliged in this case to notify the client of this infringement and would simply like the company in question to be more responsible and professional. We also need them to know that we mean business should they infringe on our intellectual property (in our upcoming release).

It is that upcoming release i now want to focus on protecting which is why i replied to Steven regarding his statement that the EULA may not apply as i assume there are other things that should be put in place to protect against such an eventuality.

hope this makes sense.

Thanks again.

Best wishes,

Patrick

[Steven H. Blackwell]

What would be the best practice in terms of agreements and contracts with clients to make sure my solution is covered by the law and make sure my clients are clear on the best way to conduct themselves?

We should take up this discussion off-line sometime towards the end of the month after the dust settles from the Developer conference.

Steven

[Lee Smith]

We should take up this discussion off-line

Hi Steven,

I'm sure you have your reasons for wanting to go private, however, I have been following this discussion with great interest, as I'm sure other have been too.

Lee

[Steven H. Blackwell]

It's just too complex to cover on something like this Forum. Maybe I need to do a paer or something. At the Developer Conference (formerly known as Devcon) right now. But when I get back maybe I can focus on this.

Steven

[patrickmore]

At this point i have already had to act, but would be interested in any correspondence relating to the protection of future solutions.

Many thanks, i think this effects everybody anyway!

[LaRetta]

At the Developer Conference (formerly known as Devcon) right now.

Formerly known? I hope we aren't being asked to change the name we call the conference; I'm still struggling with calling FM developer edition 'Advanced' which STILL confuses many many people. What hon-yok decided on THAT name change, anyway? If they change the name of the conference, I sure hope they don't name it Developer Conference and expect us not to STILL shorten it to DevCon. :smile2:

[TKnTexas]

This is a topic I am very interested in following. Taking it private leaves me out of the loop. I am in the process of developing my products to start up my own business.

I am very concerned on how to protect my property. Just my little bit to the thread.

[mr_vodka]

I'm still struggling with calling FM developer edition 'Advanced' which STILL confuses many many people.

*Ewwwww shudders* I absolutely can not STAND that name. It should have been left for server only. D@mn you Marketing!!!

What hon-yok decided on THAT name change, anyway?

:mickey:

[LaRetta]

:laugh2: Oh, John is S-P-U-N-K-Y tonight!! But yep, I figured they either had Mickey decide the name or used a dartboard filled with already-taken Filemaker names. :jester: