Dear Magento community, our clients and partners,
I would like to address Plumrocket’s allegations regarding our Accelerated Mobile Pages extension for Magento 2. First of all, I’d like to say that I appreciate the concern of the Magento community with this situation. We as well were very much surprised and bewildered by these baseless accusations. This is how we saw the events unfolding:
- On August 7, 2018 we purchased the AMP extension for Magento 1 from Plumrocket store. We bought it to install and use on our own store, which we did.
- On July 22, 2019 we released our own AMP integration for Magento 2 stores. The entire extension was designed and developed by our team. Our goal was to create a very simple & user-friendly AMP integration with M2 that is easy to set up and get started with.
- On August 18, 2019 we received a notice from Google that our product page with AMP module for Magento 2 was removed from Google’s search index due to the DMCA complaint from Plumrocket Inc, which was submitted on August 15, 2019. See the complaint here https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/19048567.
- We wanted to contact Plumrocket team directly to discuss this matter, but after browsing the notices at lumendatabase.org, we realized that over the time they had submitted multiple complaints against other websites, which made us wonder about their tactics and intentions. (you can find their other complaints here: https://www.lumendatabase.org/notices/search?utf8=✓&sort_by=date_received+desc&sender_name=Plumrocket+Inc&sender_name-require-all=true).
- On August 20, 2019 we received an email from our hosting provider notifying us that Plumrocket Inc had submitted the DMCA complaint against us and we had 96 hours to investigate this and respond. We also received the same complaint from Plumrocket directly.
- Even though these allegations felt completely unjustified, we took them very seriously. On August 20, 2019 we purchased their AMP Magento 2 extension to conduct an internal investigation and compare their extension with ours. We appointed a team of engineers who performed manual and automated code analysis to look for similarities.
- As a result of our investigation, we didn’t find any copy-paste code, nor did we find any substantial similarities in the code. The two extensions have different architecture, they have different approach for AMP theme implementation and they have different code. We even did a visual comparison of the back-end as well as front-end interfaces of the extensions, and they look very different.
- Now, with a renewed confidence in our extension and our code, we asked our law firm to prepare a DMCA counter-notice, which we submitted to our hosting provider on August 23, 2019. (Though, we still had to remove our AMP extension page from our site in order to comply with the law under DMCA, until our hosting provider processes the counter-notice).
- On August 23, 2019, our AMP extension was published on Magento Marketplace.
At MageWorx we’ve always been and remain committed to our customers and our partners, as well as to the quality of all software that we build. That is why in this open letter we tried to be as transparent as possible in order to help shed light on this unfortunate situation.
If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me directly at [email protected]
Vitali Dudin,
CEO, MageWorx