Shopify settled its copyright lawsuit against Shopline after the rival e-commerce platform agreed to stop distributing an allegedly cloned version of its Dawn theme and pay Shopify an undisclosed amount.
The story began in May 2024, when Shopify sued Shopline, a Singapore-based subsidiary of the Chinese technology company JOYY Inc, in federal court over illegally copying its software to build its own e-commerce platform. Shopify said in the lawsuit that Shopline created a “thinly disguised knockoff” of its Dawn theme, which it claims “forms the backbone of the way an e-commerce site appears and functions.”
The lawsuit even says that the “Shopify” name still appears in the code of various versions of Seed that Shopline is distributing, and that Shopify found a Chinese webpage hosted by JOYY with the title “Seed Theme” that still carries headers reading “dawn-test” — which is just plain sloppy! Shopline deserved to lose this case for its lazy copyright infringement, if nothing else.
Shopline denied the allegations and argued that Dawn was not copyrightable because it was built with code that is “publicly available, widely known and routinely used across the web.” Though apparently that argument didn’t hold up well in court.
Shopify general counsel Jean Niehaus said about the settlement:
“Shopline copied our Dawn theme, rebranded it, and sold it against us. We took them to court and they’ve been ordered to stop and to pay us. Open source is built on trust and we’ll defend that every time someone treats it as a free pass to steal.”
Though technically, despite Shopify and its leadership using the term “open source” to describe the Dawn theme (including in its developer changelog and Unite keynote), it’s not really open source, according to criteria established by the Open Source Initiative. Because Shopify puts restrictions on how and where the theme’s code can be used, Dawn actually falls under the category of “source-available” software — though that nuance wasn’t enough to save Shopline, since Dawn’s license explicitly outlines restricted uses right next to the code.
Either way, kids — don’t steal from Shopify! That’s the lesson they’d like you to take from this.
