identical software launched by US competitor

Patent Attorney

The first three questions you should ask and find the answers to are 1) do you have patents or other IP to protect your software; 2) if you do, where are your patents or other IP - in other words, which country(ies); and 3) where is the alleged infringement occurring? Patents and other IP are territorial, meaning, you only have protection in a particular country if you have patents in those countries. Copyright protection may be different - you should check what options you have with an IP professional. As for knowing if they actually copied your code, you can possibly purchase their software and effectively reverse engineer it.

Lawyer

Hello and good morning! First of all: You have to be fast! I assume you not to have a patent as we cannot apply software for a patent in Europe.
But of course the competitor's software might be a copyright infringement; depends on their source code.
The copyrights are local, that's correct. But the USA are member of the WIPO; therefore your source code should be protected via the WCT.
You can find out whether the code is copied using a "Software-Besichtigungs-Anspruch" by German law. Does the competitor distribute its software in Germany too?

There are many topics to be cleared, so you should ask a specialized attorney. Feel free to contact us for a preliminary estimate as basis for further decisions.

Lawyer

The first issue for me is to be sure that your code as been used for the new software or not.

If they only copied your idea, this cannot be considered as an infringement at all.

Technically it is possible to make a reverse engineering in some computer languages, in clear you can find the source code using disassembler, but keep in mind that the resulting code will never be the same than the original one. If you protected the source code you have to show that the result of the code used by the US company is exactly the same as the one you protected or that it is the one resulting of the use of a disassembler and you will be able to fight on the copyright issue from the date you made the software available to the public, not the patent is you did not fill one in time in USA.

If you never copyrighted the source code to avoid other to understand how the software was built and only considered that it was better for your business to use the trade secret protection, you are in a difficult position now.

At last, you are in better position that your competitor in USA, as you know better than him how the code was built, and you should maybe consider, if the IP doors are closed for a legal action, to build a version 2 of your software with innovative options, claim for a patent it in USA, and in Europe (only if there is a technical issue resolved by your computer software), and at least copyright a part of the code of the main core and keep some other effective parts of the code secret, to be able to gain in both protection patent, copyright and the trade secret protection.

We often recommend this cross protection to avoid your competitor to access your business at no cost.

The main core of the software have to be well protected, and the code of many features of the software keep secret and protected only by the trade secret law.

You can also try to protect your software in the other interresting markets available for registration, to avoid your competitor to reach them before you.

So hurry up, there is no time to lose anymore for a well done protection.