Comparing My Source Code To Competitors

Are they stealing my source code?

[peschong]

I am interested in comparing and checking for any code, or source code duplications or similarities between my sites and my competitors.

Is there a program out there or something I can do to find out?

[Marshall]

You could try something like copyscape.com, but I don't know how effective they are. Besides, unless there is something very proprietary to your code and/or you have a copyright of the exact code, proving it was "stolen" could be very, very difficult.

[Dabrowski]

I don't know of a way. You can't Google search on external JS, the only way you could do it would be to write a spider and download it all.

Then you'd have to compare it manually, unless it's character perfect you can't reliably compare it automatically, they'd only need to shuffle a couple of functions around and it would be 'significantly different' to any text comparitor.

And then you have the difficulty of proving it, if you want to validate an input box for example, there's only so many ways you can do it. I could write my own code, copyright it, but it would probably be identical, or almost to 100's of code snippets before it.

Sorry I can't be more helpful.

[edited by: encyclo at 4:36 pm (utc) on June 4, 2007]
[edit reason] moved from another location [/edit]