Consultant hires engineer to make an "exact clone" of LibraryThing
Cole Consulting recently posted a request on GetAFreelancer.com for an engineer to produce "an exact clone" of LibraryThing, giving $100-300 as its desired price. An Indian engineer won the bid at $260. (The engineer gave his hourly as $10, which makes for 26 hours of programming. I wish him good luck with that!)
Some things for Mr. Cole to consider:
Some things for Mr. Cole to consider:
- People can of course makes sites like LibraryThing in many ways, but an "exact clone" would certainly infringe on my intellectual property.
- I have added a strong anti-reverse engineering clause to the terms of service. These terms are enforceable in New York and Texas (Cole's whereabouts are variously given). I'm not sure about Amritsar.
- LibraryThing is social software. You'd need to clone a lot more than the code...
posted by Tim at 3:17 PM
25 Comments:
Incidentally, the site went down at 3:00 under a cripling wave of traffic (a spider?). I will see what I can do to prevent that.
Good grief. Some people!
As you say, it isn't just about the software though. Much good may his exact clone of that do him if he gets it...
Good luck, but I'm sad to say you only have as many rights those you can afford to defend.
I will refrain from cursing, but that's just crazy.
Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. *big shrug*
Tim, the fact that they're looking for a cheap clone is exactly why they're going to fail. What makes LibraryThing special is Tim Spalding - namely, your dedication, your developer skills, and especially the willingness and zest with which you solicit and implement user ideas.
I have no idea whether this pathetic attempt to "clone" your idea is actionable, but I do think they're going to fall flat on their corporate face.
Sheesh.
It means that LibraryThing is attractive and interesting to other business owners. It's a good sign. You will soon or later be offered a lot of money to sell the site. LibraryThing is unique, I agree with chamekke, because of YOU, and the social aspect of us users building somehow a book-lovers family. LibraryThing is just great and no one will be able to copy it. You win.
I see that Cole consulting claims to have been established in 1995 and to assist people with e-commerce, web development, and so on. And yet their own website is pathetic. The "products" tag leads to a page that says only "coming soon", either because they have no products beyond the one they're planning to steal from you, or because their claim to be able to handle web development is an overstatement of their actual abilities. Or both, of course.
I wouldn't worry about these people. Any firm that isn't willing to put in the work themselves is not going to come up with a credible alternative. And an exact clone, as you point out, would be theft. (And very unpopular, which is kinda a problem with social software...)
I've had a look at the "terms and conditions" and spotted a typo:
In the following sentence, "LibraryThing retains all rights, title, and interest in the and to its software, and any rights no granted in these terms are reserved by LibraryThing."
It should read "any rights NOT granted".
I know it means exactly the same thing, except to a lawyer, which is what you're going to be wanting to hire. I'm sure Cole Consulting has one. The slime-molds.
Speaking as an intellectual property attorney, and a new LibraryThing fan, I will cheerfully research all possible (free) remedies.
Anybody who clones Librarything by somehow getting a copy of the code will be breaking the law.
Anybody who clones Librarything by making something which works the same way is doing nothing wrong at all I'm afraid. Unless you manage to get some patents - and last I checked not too many places besides USA allow patents on software.
Personally I wouldn't worry about it. You're the first and you have the momentum and the support from us. Just keep ahead and keep focused.
I wouldn't be too concerned Tim, every few Days librarything gets better; you must be spending a fantastic amount of time on it. Even if Cole catches up to where librarything is now, by that time librarything will be far better. They're aiming at a swiftly moving target that has a strong community - a community that will no doubt now have a great distaste towards Cole Consulting.
"The engineer gave his hourly as $10, which makes for 26 hours of programming."
i don't usually laugh out loud, but this was close. that's incredibly amusing. 26 hours. programming of the highest quality too, i imagine! well, at least the attempt will feed a couple of people in india.
maybe those guys should change their name to "clone consulting". their website is pitiful. you have nothing to fear.
More on the "Clone Wars."
I don't think it's a real issue either. It's a joke really. If someone wanted to beat LibraryThing they wouldn't start by looking for a $300 bid. I also agree about the website.
There are some limits on imitating software. There are certainly patents—I'm not required to disclose this for one year. There are computer security laws (you can look at the binaries for MSWord easily, but getting my source code would require hacking my server). There are copyright laws—a truly slavish copy could run up against this. There are unfair competition laws. Finally, there is the terms of service agreement. Anti-reverse-engineering clauses are a little dicey—there are court decisions both ways as well as legislation I'm not up on—but it's a threat to him and to an attempt to copy it closely. It would make me think twice. If I have a case, I'll pursue it. It's going to be hard to find a lawyer that'll work for $10/hour.
Incidentally, I have to ask my lawyer about how I can do this, but I am not trying to get at Reader2, Bibliophil (which software would be a focus of prior art interest anyway), Listall, etc. I think it's totally fair for them to compete and win. LibraryThing was not the first service with book-lists. Nor will it be the last.
But the $260 "exact clone" guy—he pisses me off! :)
Okay, back to focus. He can't copy the site if I work faster than him!
this thing is hilarious! :)
somebody should put out a bid to write an exact clone of linux...or perhaps adobe photoshop.
no doubt some indian programmer will take that up for $300 or so! ;)
I've thought about it... from a "this is a neat idea, but I could improve it" point of view, rather than "lets code a cheap knockoff and stick adwords on top".
The thing is, as you implied the value is in the community, not the codebase; there's no point doing the development work if there's someone already entrenched in that space (think ebay, del.icio.us, or Photoshop's mindshare among designers).
Although communities have been known to decamp en masse, it's (a) rare and (b) almost always a political decision (eg the site owner loses interest, the community gets overrun by trolls, the core of the community jump ship), not a technical one (that site's got dynamic threads! I'm going there!).
Therefore IMO it's not worth anyone else doing the development work, even if they think they've got a better design. I think you're going to have this niche to yourself (barring a few also-rans) until someone comes up with a truly novel spin on it.
Robert Reese has a good blog expansion on the problems of "cloning" social software like LibraryThing. Clearly you have to do something transformative, "redefine the problem" as Paul Graham says of startup ideas.
Wow! Thanks to that web site, now everyone can have a LibraryThing for the holidays! :^)
Seriously, I note that following posting on that web site: a job for $40 "C++ Assignment / Small Program". Sigh. Yet another web site to patrol for students outsourcing their homeworks.
Eldridge Cleaver once said: "Slow motion will get you there faster".
(Quote ["])Okay, back to focus. He can't copy the site if I work faster than him!(Unquote ["])
The flow and growth of LT cannot be cloned. People based evolving software has no DNA---it cannot be replicated.
Remember this: When the maker of a mirror program looks into the mirror he will see you....
Thanks for "Library Thing"!! I can't imagine using any other site to catalogue my books and be involved with other people who enjoy books!
You really should take every step you can to protect the property though!
I hope I'm not the only person who's distressed by an anti-reverse engineering clause in the TOS. My first reaction when I saw this post was "CANCEL ACCOUNT CANCEL ACCOUNT". I'm not going cancel my account but I hope you might reconsider that clause. It's the first step down a slippery slope.
This clause punishes all of your users, and yet is not even effective in punishing Cole. So no one may sign up "in order to reverse-engineer its features"; this clause also intends to have the effect that I can't look at the page source, or I can't try to figure out why something is not working. [When I add a rating, the green stars show up, but when I follow a link from my page, and then hit the back button, the newly-added ratings disappear until I reload.] I could take a look at your javascript to see if a small tweak could help with this (I'm not sure if it could), but your clause either forbids that (if I fail), makes the information confidential between you and me (not an arrangement I'm inclined to sign up for), or at the very least ruins my spirit for offering these small kindnesses, since the clause suggests that you would not offer such kindnesses in return.
I'm going to be adding a rating system to a site I'm working on soon. Did you write your rating system's JavaScript component from scratch, or did you look around to see how other people did the same thing? At the very least you consulted free tutorials or a book; and in any case this is somewhat a clone of behavior that has earlier been seen in Netflix and in iTunes (though your implementation is simpler and may well be entirely your work, I don't know).
Your dedication, long hours and fast work have certainly driven the explosive growth and success of this site, but I'm sure you have also inevitably drawn on the commons of shared code and information. Aren't you using IndexData's GPL's yaz software? You wouldn't have gotten very far without that, at the beginning. This is what makes it exciting to work on the web: people make fabulous things and then are even more excited to find that some small breakthrough of theirs has been a component of bigger breakthroughs by other people.
You are likely right in saying that an "exact clone" might infringe your copyrights, but in that case you would have ample legal recourse anyway.
Cole Consulting is small potatoes; even if they secretly copied your entire source code in a way that you could never prove, they would still not have the growing momentum, dedicated community or (I believe) entrenched name-recognition or `mindshare' that LibraryThing has. There were social library sites before LT, and there will be more in the future.
You have a loyal community. Don't alienate us by punitively trying to prevent activities that are either a) already illegal, so you have recourse against them; or b) already legal, so no litany of "strong clauses" will prevent them. I feel like even responding to this job posting -- for $300! -- is a gross overreaction. As if someone posted on their blog somewhere that they were going to tag all their books with every tag in use, to see how many tags it took to break the system; and you added a clause to the TOS saying "you may not add too many tags to try to break the system." It's a waste of your time and energy. All you need to look out for, in terms of your "property" in LT, is making sure that you're bought out by the right company -- i.e. by more of a Yahoo! than by an AOL or MSN. You're going to do fine without crap that your super-geeky early adopters, and these are really the more precious resource.
Good luck to him. I've emailed you before about some very poor areas of UI design on your site, with suggestions how to fix them (I had some mockups half done as well) but you never replied.
So if another site comes along which can make the user experience better - good luck to them! LibraryThing is great, but can be painful to use.
HI,
Do you have anymore infomation on this guy...
He is now plaing to clone our website:
http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/PHP/www-librarything-com-clone.html
This man WILL be stoped!
Jeremy Baines
I cannot believe it.
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