Figma, Inc. v. Motiff Pte. Ltd. was a lawsuit filed on 2024-09-16 in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. Figma, the maker of the Figma design platform, sued Motiff Pte. Ltd. of Singapore and two Chinese companies, Yuanfudao HK Ltd. and Kanyun Holding Group Co. Ltd. It alleged that they had copied the Figma Platform to build the competing Motiff design tool.[1] The complaint pleaded two claims: copyright infringement under 17 U.S.C. § 501, and breach of Figma’s Master Subscription Agreement (MSA). The contract claim rested on the MSA’s prohibition on reverse engineering.[1]
The case settled in July 2025, shortly before an August 2025 trial date. The parties filed a stipulated consent judgment, and the court terminated the case on 2025-08-11.[2][3] The court made no ruling on the merits. The facts below are Figma’s allegations unless stated otherwise.
Background
The complaint stated that “users must obtain a license that varies based on the scope of the subscription”. It alleged that Yuanfudao was a former Figma customer that had agreed to the MSA by executing a Service Order on 2020-05-18. Between May 2020 and August 2021, the defendants were provided four separate “Organization” accounts under that order and three later Service Orders.[1] Figma alleged that the MSA “binds Defendant Yuanfudao and Defendant Yuanfudao’s affiliates, Defendant Motiff and Defendant Kanyun”. It also alleged that Yuanfudao gave employees of Kanyun and Motiff access through these Organization accounts, which they used to develop Motiff.[1]
According to the complaint, the MSA’s limited licence was “conditioned on compliance with various terms that protect Figma’s intellectual property”. Users agreed not to “reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble or otherwise attempt to discover the source code, object code or underlying structure, ideas, know-how or algorithms relevant to the Figma Platform”. They also agreed not to “modify, translate, or create derivative works” based on the platform or its documentation.[1] Motiff was launched publicly on 2024-06-05.[1]
The dispute
Figma alleged that the defendants had “impermissibly reversed engineered Figma’s products and misappropriated significant portions of Figma’s proprietary code”.[1] Its evidence was a set of shared idiosyncrasies. It said the Motiff product reproduced bugs and programming remnants found in earlier versions of Figma Design. Figma compared these to the “unique patterns in the genetic code of living organisms”.[1] The examples in the complaint included:
- copied shader code, shown by a character-by-character comparison of minified shaders delivered to users’ browsers, and copied GPU strings;
- copied setup and onboarding panes, interface elements, multi-step workflows and content editing panes, including Dev Mode panes;
- copied Help Center documentation, which Figma said is registered for copyright, “from perhaps hundreds” of examples.[1]
Figma also alleged that the defendants “used dozens of free user accounts to systematically scrape content from Figma Community resources”.[1] The breach of contract count listed the MSA duties allegedly broken. They were the bans on reverse engineering, on creating derivative works, on circumventing security or technological measures, and on removing proprietary notices.[1] Figma sought injunctions, damages and the defendants’ profits.[1]
On 2025-06-06, Figma moved to amend the complaint. The amendment would have added three more affiliated companies as defendants and claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and California’s unfair competition law.[2]
Decision or outcome
Figma filed a notice of settlement on 2025-07-23. On 2025-07-25, Judge James Donato issued an order recording that “the case has settled”, vacating all pretrial and trial dates and directing the parties to file a joint consent judgment.[3]
The stipulated consent judgment was filed on 2025-08-09. It records a separate, confidential settlement agreement. Under it, the defendants and their affiliates agreed “to cease marketing, promoting, distributing, selling, licensing, or otherwise making available” the Motiff product “in all jurisdictions, except for mainland China”.[2] The defendants also agreed to reimburse Figma’s legal expenses as set out in the settlement. The court retained jurisdiction to enforce the judgment and the settlement. Figma’s claims were “dismissed without prejudice”, with each party bearing its own costs.[2] The case was terminated on 2025-08-11.[3]
Significance for software licensing and SAM practice
The case is an example of a SaaS vendor relying on its subscription agreement, not only on copyright, to protect the software behind a cloud service. Figma’s current contracts contain the same kind of restriction. The Terms of Service and the Software Services Agreement both forbid reverse engineering the platform, creating derivative works, and letting others access or use it.[4][5] For licence managers, the case shows three things:
- Use restrictions are licence scope. The MSA licence was described as conditioned on compliance with its restrictions. Use outside them was pleaded as both breach of contract and copyright infringement.[1]
- Group structures matter. Figma alleged that one company’s agreement bound its affiliates whose staff used the accounts.[1] The current SSA lets an Affiliate sign its own Order and become the Customer for it.[5]
- Free tiers are contracts too. The scraping allegation concerned free user accounts, which are also governed by the Terms of Service.[1][4]
Figma’s current licensing is described in Figma licensing and Figma Terms of Service and Software Services Agreement.
Lessons learned
- Reverse-engineering and derivative-work restrictions in a SaaS subscription agreement can support a breach of contract claim alongside copyright. Figma pleaded breach of the MSA’s ban on reverse engineering and derivative works as a separate count next to copyright infringement.[1] The same restrictions appear in Figma’s current Terms of Service and SSA.[4][5]
- A vendor may argue that a subscription agreement signed by one group company binds its affiliates whose staff used the accounts. Figma alleged that Yuanfudao’s MSA bound Motiff and Kanyun, whose employees used Yuanfudao’s Organization accounts.[1] Records of which legal entity’s people use each account help answer such claims.
- Free accounts are bound by the vendor’s terms too. The complaint alleged scraping of Figma Community content through dozens of free accounts.[1] Free-tier use by employees is still use under a contract.
- A consent judgment after settlement decides nothing on the merits and is not precedent. The court ruled on no claim. The consent judgment records the settled obligations and dismisses Figma’s claims without prejudice.[2]