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Shopify has accused a rival of creating a “thinly disguised knockoff” of the e-commerce platform’s software. In a lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Shopify claimed that Shopline—a subsidiary of Chinese technology company Joyy Inc.—copied its Dawn program.
Dawn allows Shopify users to create a customizable online storefront through templates. According to the suit, Shopline copied Dawn with its own product, called Seed. Shopify said that Dawn’s file structure, layout, file names, function names, lines of code and icon codes can be found in Seed.
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The Canadian e-commerce platform also claimed the Shopify name still appears in the code of various versions of Seed, and that a Chinese webpage hosted by Joyy with the title “Seed Theme” still carries headers reading “dawn-test.”
“By copying, modifying and distributing its Dawn knockoff in the United States, Shopline has engaged in widespread and willful infringement of Shopify’s copyrights in Dawn,” the lawsuit said. Shopify said that because of this, Shopline’s merchant clients are also guilty of infringement by association.
Shopify requested a court order blocking Shopline’s infringement, as well as unspecified monetary damages.
This isn’t Shopify’s first time contending with trademark issues. Last year, the e-commerce platform tangled with a patent troll—Dallas-based Lower48, which provides data analysis and portfolio management for the oil and gas industry—which claimed that Shopify’s features infringed on their own patented technologies.
Shopify asked a judge to make Lower48 disclose all third-party interests in the suit, saying those entities may have a vested interest in the outcome of the case. Patent trolls try to exploit intellectual property for financial gain, often filing patents as a means to sue rivals.
This latest lawsuit comes just days after Shopify reported a 23 percent increase in revenue for Q1 compared to last year. But the company’s outlook for the remainder of the year projected revenue growth at a high-teens percentage rate on a year-over-year basis. As a result, investors could be looking at Shopify’s lowest quarterly revenue growth in two years.
Requests for comment from Shopify and Joyy were not immediately returned.