Unfortunately and surprisingly alarming alltogether, socialenginemods was a target of copyright infringement (or the more nasty "ripoff" term) a number of times. I don't know if the uniqueness, creativity or the complexity of our products caused them to be an attractive target for the "ripoff", instead of what is considered fair competition, which is "using your own brains". While not mentioning specifics, our ideas, design ideas and direct code was stolen and copied multiple number of times, which is a reason we have a close attorney to handle this stuff.

It seems socialenginemods was not the only target, and this practice becomes somewhat a common.

SE scene is alarmingly plagued with IP violations, ultimately, this sounds like "tragedy of the commons" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons), the original developer looses money, for paying attorney fees, time, for handling these issues, both of which could be invested in delivering more products to the customers, with high quality standards. The customer is usually scammed by these copied products, as they have many bugs and problems, which may drive the customer to insanity, failing to receive adequate support from these companies, eventually causing him to

A) drop the products and buy the "original product" (which "looks similar")

B) get frustrated and disappointed, and abandon the SE platform or the whole social project at all.

None of these are neither beneficial for the customer, which looses time and money, nor for all 3rd pary developers, which loose customers, time, money and nerves.

In addition, this negetively affects the Webligo SocialEngine Brand, which becomes associated with copyright infringement, scam and "bad taste" in general.

What is the solution?

Once a thief always a thief. Apparently, to protect the customer, 3rd party developers, and the SocialEngine Brand, companies suspected in these violations should be permanently banned from the SE scene, regardless of when legal charges will be pressed against these companies.

The latest cases being discussed here are the scam MODULES2BUY.com and SEMODULE.com