Ask HN: Should I ignore a cease and desist letter from our competition?
Our main competitor, mapmyride, sent us a cease and desist letter a while back demanding we remove our account importation feature.  The feature downloaded all (or select) mapped routes from the users mapmyride account, and imported them into ours.  It was done tastefully, with adequate time outs between requests and all that.  Their objection was in our supposed violation of their TOS.  Of course that's a load of bull, since I never agreed to their TOS.  However, we pulled the feature as we were afraid of their legal budget.<p>Now that we have many more users (but still legal budget), I am less afraid of the consequences.  However, I won't re-implement the functionality if it has a reasonable chance of tying me up in court, or otherwise wasting time/money.  Does anyone have any experience with this?  I understand most of you aren't lawyers and your advice isn't a substitute for adequate legal council, yadayadayada, but your input is definitely appreciated.<p>One last note: they can easily ban our servers IP and keep us from doing this.  However, we are considering reimplementing the feature as a desktop application and making it generic enough to just archive a users content from a variety of these sites.  No IP bans, and each user is violating their TOS.  Our users are clamoring for this functionality, as many have 200+ mapped routes tied up on the site.