I used to work at a small company that made a SaaS product for a niche HR function. One of our largest customers, a bank whose ATMs you likely see every day if you're in the US, decided to drop our service in favor of a solution built in-house. We were disappointed, but had to let them go.

Then, about 2 years after they'd canceled, our support department got a strange email from a user that was having problems. At first, the support rep didn't understand the issue and asked the user for screenshots of the problem. Sure enough, the screen shots looked exactly like our old product, which had been decommissioned over a year prior. It even had our support email address and phone number on it. It turns out the version of the software they developed in-house started by scraping our site, renaming all the .html files to .aspx and then making the dynamic parts be data driven.

When we called them on it, they basically threatened to use lawyers to put us out of business if we pursued the issue, so I guess our management decided to drop it. We did make them change the support email and phone number.

> When we called them on it, they basically threatened to use lawyers to put us out of business if we pursued the issue, so I guess our management decided to drop it. We did make them change the support email and phone number.

This is why we can't have nice things. Darned lawyers. Can't live with them, can't live without them

To be fair ...saying you'd use lawyers to put someone out of business makes no sense unless the company had done something that the lawyers could go after. Hating on lawyers for being aimed at a company is like hating the court system for being available. The bigco's lawyers arent doing this of their own motivation. I'm' sure there was other stuff going on that made the op's company back down.

Yet another believer in the Just world hypothesis...

As Cardinal Richelieu said[1] about 400 years ago: Give me six lines written by the most honest man in the world, and I will find enough in them to hang him

1. the attribution of this quote is disputed

In this case, I believe the threat was twofold. They'd drag out proceedings so that we couldn't have afforded to make it to a judgment. But they'd also threaten to cancel a deal with one of our other large customers if they didn't cancel with us. Knowing basically our customer list and how much those customers paid for the software, it wasn't much work to infer the company's somewhat tenuous financial situation. They guessed, correctly, that we'd drop it rather than risk the company's future on a successful lawsuit that, win or lose, would likely mean the loss of a significant customer.

There was nothing we'd done as a company that was actionable.

I wouldn't assume so: a larger company can afford to sink a lot more money into litigation, so they could effectively bleed the small company dry defending even a frivolous lawsuit.

Patent trolls are one example of this - where they may deliberately select weaker defendants (instead of going after the bigco "infringers") so ensure they hold the upper hand in the financial power imbalance.

I was only kidding. You can say that of any profession.

Some day people will say the same of software engineers.

"This is why we can't have nice things. Darned lawyers. Can't live with them, can't live without them"

A lawyer can screw you badly, but if you want to screw a lawyer you need another lawyer. If taken as a category, they never lose.

>can't live without them

Really?

Without lawyers, Google would need to actually secure their data, rather than counting on lawyers to clean up the mess they made here.

you could have put their ip in a firewall or rate limited their access to mess with them.

One does not simply "mess with" an international bank.