Cudo accuses Buyii in copyright infringement

Group buying industry in Australia becomes more and more interesting. In addition to the legal fight between GroupOn and Scoopon we may see one more battle.
One of group buying web site, Cudo.com.au sent “cease and desists” letter to Buyii.com.au, a web site that aggregates daily deals from several sources. Cudo requested Buyii to stop use of it’s content including logo, photos, texts. Cudo management consider that such use violates their copywrite and that Buyii compete with Cudo in term of search engine optimization. According Cudo CEO, Billy Tucker, when users search for the word “Cudo”, Buyii shows up in the first few results with the description, “Cudo’s daily deals plus more deals from other daily deal sites on one page”. I have checked it, today in Google Australia Buyii appears 5th in organic search results. Quite an interesting story, now I start to care about getting a letter from GroupOn, because this blog appears 1st if you search for StarDeals 🙂

However, Buyii founder refuses to comply with Cudo’s demands and plan to show Cudo’s deals in the future, while did some changes in the site design (like removed Cudo’s logo from their home page).

Would be interesting to see how the conflict develops.

More details can be found in SmartCompany’s article

9 Replies to “Cudo accuses Buyii in copyright infringement”

  1. I don’t think you’ll get a letter from GroupOn, since you don’t have the star-deals site in an iframe on your site, which seems to be the biggest problem Cudo have with Buyii.

    Our site, Dealsguide, hasn’t had this problem (and neither have Allthedeals or Dealsmix as far as I know), so I doubt you will…plus GroupOn is a very different company to Cudo/Microsoft, they have an affiliate program and welcome aggregators with open arms!

  2. Agree with Jackson Bates re: our site whatsonoffer doesn’t have this problem as aggregators can only assist with traffic through the sites, showing the wider online browser community to many great offers available to them in their area.

    Aggregator sites are great, although I can see the angst Cudo may have as the daily deal market is saturated with numerous clones and it wants to remain in prime position on SEO’s, although clone sites is something our site is not prone to as we operate quite differently so we have not yet experienced this issue.

  3. Not sure why Buyii is trying to get media attention using the letter they have received from Cudo in January 2011 just asking them to take Cudo off the Buyii website. We at DealsMix (Australian Daily Deals Aggregator) work closely with all daily deal providers. We received a similar letter from Cudo in November 2010 and clearly respected Cudo’s request by taking them off our DealsMix.com.au website. Someone should really try teaching some new techniques to Buyii so they can make positive publicity. Buyii may have already realized that negative publicity is not the best thing and they have a long way to catch up with other deal aggregators. Companies like healthy competition and I don’t disagree with Cudo’s response and everyone would agree after looking at few other domains Buyii owns. Buyii have recently purchased dealmix.com.au, which sounds similar to our domain with missing the letter “s”. Buyii redirects any traffic from dealmix.com.au to buyii.com.au. Also, buyii owns domain dealguide.com.au and this is again similar to competitor dealsguide.com.au (the “s” factor again). Now, I will leave it up to readers to judge. Not sure how many more “s” factor websites are owned by buyii.

    Cheers,

    DealsMix

  4. Interesting response Dealsmix. We don’t like commentating on competitors but I guess this does deserve a response. You may want to look at Google Insight and Nielsen traffic stats to actually see how far behind DEALSMIX is compared to the 2 top aggregators (which is pretty obvious who they are). Also, I count 12 deals live on Dealsmix vs the 34 Buyii currently has. So who is going to need to play catchup here?

    Negative publicity. The support was overwhelming positive in Buyii’s favour as we were highlighting copyright and fair use issues with the case. In fact, traffic was boosted up 300% that week over the previous week and continues to be retained.

    Anyway, looks like you are just stalking Buyii post across the web now. I’ll take that as a complement. Looks like we may have *another* jealous competitor.

  5. Good for Buyii if your traffic raised by 300%. Looks like your response is still incomplete…..there is no comment about the “s” factor. Not sure why buyii is purchasing all domains close to their competitor domains and redirecting traffic. May be Buyii is just feeling in-secured!!! Anyway users are still being diverted from dealmix to buyii website. Is Buyii is trying to take advantage of misspells?

  6. Feel free to write to us if you have issues with the domain. Zhen will address that as he manages the domain portfolio. A blog comment isn’t the proper way to communicate would you agree? Would be also good to have a chat and you can give us feedback on our Buyii site too since we got a bit of catching up to do?

    Thanks, Dev

  7. I know this is an old post, but it’s pretty funny to see the bickering.

    Buyii is a clear leader in AU for daily deal aggregating. Good on them for using the Cudo letter to their advantage. Looking around the web, it’s clear to see they benefited greatly from it!

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