A Copyright Story …

Please indulge me while I tell you an interesting story …

One fine day (27th September 2007) last year, we were going through our ActiveCiti usage stats when we noticed that there was a sharp spike in the incoming traffic.

Excitedly, we dug into the analysis of the traffic – hoping to find lots of people using ActiveCiti to plan and manage their events online. Imagine our disappointment when we realised that all the traffic was coming from a single I.P. address.

On some further investigation, we were completely shocked to learn that the statistics were getting generated from a local desktop machine and not our servers online. It struck us then that someone was busy saving ActiveCiti pages on their desktops and running them from it.

The stats would start getting generated at about 10 in the morning everyday and the last ping from the particular I.P. address would come at around 6 in the evening. Strangely, the I.P. address was static and was active on our website only on week days – Monday to Friday.

We decided to dig deeper …

After quite a bit of analysis and tracking ActiveCiti logs and usage, we found out that a firm called Web Minds India from Nasik was happily cloning the website to sell to a Malaysian guy called Peter Foo. (Please don’t ask how we found it – its a long story – but we have all the evidence … which is now with the cops …)

As it turned out, the Peter Foo guy was himself a member on ActiveCiti along with a couple of developers from the Web Minds India company. We suspect he signed up initially innocently, liked the idea of ActiveCiti and wanted it all for himself. And to get this, went and hired this firm to clone the website for him.

Just to get things clear … We wouldn’t have cared much if they just copied the concept and idea and implemented it all from scratch …

Ethics aside, this company was pretty lazy…
They decided to download all our pages and just change “ActiveCiti” to their product name called “Xogether”. The UI, CSS, Javascript — everything! Completely ripped off.
(Please see the attached screens below. We can easily have a spot the difference challenge going on here …)

We could just login to the project by typing the URL of the company and check their progress out daily. Thats how we got all the screenshots. (More evidence with the cops)
We were definitely angry (to put it mildly) with this blatant copying.

We headed off to the “Asian School of Cyber Laws” here in Pune who directed us to our current (very brilliant) cyber crime lawyer – Mr. Gaurav Jachak. Under his counsel, we filed a case with the police under 3 sections of the Indian IT Act. The case was presented in front of a judge here in Pune and he was convinced enough to direct the police to arrest the partners of the accused firm in Nasik. All this happened rather quickly…

Though the next steps dragged on for quite a bit, the cops finally made a trip down to Nasik and landed up at the company’s (Web Minds India) office.
By this time however, they had already signed off the ActiveCiti clone project and the Xogether website was live. (We filed the case in November 07. The cops went to Nasik sometime in Feb 08)

On questioning, the partners admitted to everything – including the blatant copying of the website. They were eventually arrested and were given about 5 days of police custody in Pune.
Their company (of more than 20 employees at the time of their arrest) has since, closed down.

But as with most cases, this one too is still on – and will be a while before any results can be expected. So, watch this space for more …

Why are we telling you this now you ask?
Well, a local newspaper published a detailed report of this today — and thus we decided that it was better you heard it from us rather than third party sources.

Images below:

The index pages of the sites. (click to enlarge)

The login pages. The similarity in the text is uncanny. (click to enlarge)

The best part about cloning a website. All the help comes along with it – intact and free of cost!
(click to enlarge)