← Back to context

Comment by Thaxll

5 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can't leave a compagny and create a similar project copy pasting the same design / idea that you knew while working in the previous compagny.

9 comments

Thaxll

Reply
hathawsh  5 years ago

That's essentially how Zoom was built. Eric Yuan took everything he learned from supporting WebEx and built a new company and product that does the same thing as WebEx.

https://slidebean.com/blog/startups-zoom-company-story-eric-...

  • jollybean  5 years ago

    Building a new product and company is totally fine. But copying designs is not. And code of course. With 'know-how' it gets trickier. But Zoom doesn't look like a clone, rather just 'another product'. Possibly better.

daniel-thompson  5 years ago

If any of the following are true, you can:

- The company's version is not sufficiently original. IANAL but there are many sites that do something similar to replit, as shown in the blog post.

- Your version is sufficiently limited that it falls under fair use, or sufficiently minimal that it falls under the "de minimus" exception*. The guy made his project by himself in 4 days, and explicitly mentions that it does not have, and he has no intention of adding, the features it would need to compete in the marketplace with replit.

* https://www.jgschwartzlawblog.com/the-de-minimis-copyright-e...

paxys  5 years ago

You cannot copy the actual source code.

Designs may or may not be covered by copyright depending on how specific they are.

There is no protection on ideas.

You can most definitely leave a company and start a competitor doing exactly what you were doing in your previous role. California laws specifically encourage that, and that is the main reason why Silicon Valley exists.

teraflop  5 years ago

I'm really curious what makes you so confident about this.

If nothing else, your conflation of "design" and "idea" doesn't make much sense, because the two are treated vastly differently by the legal system.

Dma54rhs  5 years ago

Maybe in idealistic world but almost every successful tech company is a blatant "stealing of ideas", thinking otherwise is naive snd won't bring you far.