I posted the other day about a couple of sites that seemed to be ripping off other sites. I also talked about some of the experiences I had when developing ACCBoards.Com and the other commercial web sites I created. Here’s the so-called final update on those stories and some of my thoughts about winning the blog wars.
In the prior post I said that I was looking forward to the war of words between Jason Calacanis and the guy Jason says ripped off the look and feel of Weblogs, Inc. There were some words exchanged but not the shootout at the not-OK Corral that I was expecting. Today, Jason posted a “final update” on his blog. He has nothing good to say about the other guys, so I suspect this story isn’t over.
The other story I mentioned, involving JKOnTheRun and a site he was formerly associated with, seems to have been resolved satisfactorily. JK emailed me that the other site changed their slogan shortly after he posted the story. There was some heated discussion in the comments to JK’s original post, but as best I can tell, the only argumentative comments were from someone who seems to be going out of her way to take shots at JK. One thing I learned from developing message board sites is that there is always (and I mean always) someone who sees it the other way. That makes for a lot of carping, but it also creates the back and forth that message board sites and blogs need to thrive.
As I mentioned in my earlier post, the “borrowing” of ideas and design from blogs is going to be a continuing problem as the blogosphere expands and matures. I don’t know what the answer is, but I suspect we will be better off policing ourselves that letting the lawmakers and lawyers do it for us. Here’s why.
The blog situation will probably follow the same pattern as the message boards did 5-6 years ago. After I founded and developed ACCBoards.Com into the most popular ACC sports site on the net, lots of people tried to copy the idea. At least one group rippped off the entire look and feel. It pissed me off greatly at the time. But because I had the traffic and, at that time, a partnership with JP Sports (who televised most of the ACC football games) and Raycom Sports (who did the basketball games), those copycat sites didn’t appreciably impact our business. But imagine if I had been a little slower to line up the deals- imagine if I was still in the early growing stages of ACCBoards.Com when someone ripped off the concept and design. Then I might have been royally screwed.
And here’s the problem. There’s just not that much to be done about it. There is a very low barrier to entry for web sites, message boards and blogs. It is cheap (sometime as cheap as free) and relatively easy to create a web site or blog. It’s even easier when you begin with the idea of replicating a concept. If your name is relatively unique, you can often stop someone from using your name (assuming you have perfected the intellectual property rights to that name via prior use and/or appropriate trademark and other similar filings, which most people have not done). You can probably keep someone from completely recreating your site (though they can come pretty close if they are careful- think generic soda, etc). But after spending thousands (at least) in legal fees, all you’ve accomplished is to force them make minor revisions to their web site which remains, in all substantive ways, a copy of yours.
So what do you do?
1) Get there first. Once the need has been filled, it takes an evolutionary advance to get people to move. Flickr is one example of such an advance (at the expense of Shutterfly, etc.), but those are few and far between. It’s much easier just to be first.
2) Market and market well so (like JK and the phrase, OnTheRun) people associate a phrase with your site and you. I didn’t realize this at the time, but the fact that people associate me with ACCBoards.Com and, accordingly, with sports web sites was very helpful to me in protecting ACCBoards.Com and launching other sites.
3) Make the deals with other vertical sites that embed you as the leader in the area (my JP Sports and Raycom deals created a barrier to traffic growth that otherwise would not have existed).
It’s hard and expensive to win by lawyer. It’s cheaper and better to win by planning and execution.
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