Shopify settles copyright lawsuit against rival Shopline

Shopify has settled a lawsuit that accused a rival company of copying its software to build a competing platform.

The E-commerce giant has officially settled its copyright lawsuit against rival platform Shopline, a subsidiary of the Chinese technology company JOYY Inc.

Shopify and Shopline, a subsidiary of technology company ‌JOYY Inc, in a filing in federal court in Manhattan, opens new tab on Tuesday asked a judge to bar the latter from distributing its software after the companies agreed to resolve the litigation.

The companies' joint court filing said that other terms of the settlement were confidential.

"Shopline copied our Dawn theme, rebranded it, and sold it against us," Shopify general counsel Jean Niehaus said in a statement. "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."

JOYY, which is headquartered in Singapore and focuses on ‌social-media technology, acquired Shopline in 2022.

Shopify said in its 2024 lawsuit that Shopline copied its Dawn storefront template technology to power competing e-commerce services.

It said that Dawn "forms the backbone of the way an e-commerce site appears and functions," and that Shopline's Seed software copied it "wholesale."

Dawn is Shopify's open-source reference theme, built for speed and flexibility. While it is meant to help merchants build stores on Shopify, the company drew a hard line against rival platforms lifting the foundational software to build competing ecosystems.

In recent years, the platform has actively clamped down on intellectual property theft, fighting off both copycat software developers and patent monetization entities

Shopline denied the allegations and argued that Dawn was not copyrightable because it was made from technologies that are "publicly available, widely known and routinely used across the web."

The settlement concludes a major chapter in Shopify's aggressive legal strategy to protect its proprietary technology.

However, the financial terms and specific conditions of the settlement between Shopify and Shopline have not been publicly disclosed.