Marriage Pact sends cease and desist to Date Drop

Looking for love? Luckily for Stanford students hunting for the “one,” two student-founded platforms have answered the call.

However, in November, matchmaking start-up Marriage Pact sent a cease-and-desist letter to the recently-founded Date Drop, alleging similarities in website, marketing copy and parts of the matching questionnaire.

Marriage Pact, founded in 2019 by Liam McGregor ’20 and Sophia Sterling-Angus ’19, uses a ranking algorithm to pair students with a “backup spouse” each year. Students answer questions about topics ranging from dating preferences to political opinions, with the website offering them a potential partner based on their responses.

Meanwhile, Date Drop, founded by Henry Weng ’25 M.S. ’26 in the fall, matches participants on a weekly basis. After filling in a questionnaire a single time, users can opt in every Tuesday to receive a match in their inbox.

According to exhibits sent to The Daily by Marriage Pact, Weng reopened dozens of Marriage Pact emails from August to September 2025 before the launch of his product.

In an email to The Daily, Marriage Pact claimed that Date Drop copied several marketing materials, including the “secret admirer” mechanism, the phrasing of the “match results” email and elements of their website.

Marriage Pact also alleged that around 25% of the Date Drop questionnaire was copied.

“We can’t say much, pending litigation,” wrote McGregor in an email to the Daily. “But [Weng] looked at Marriage Pact emails going back all four years before launching.”

Weng believes the two projects should be able to coexist. “Marriage Pact is a beloved campus tradition. Date Drop is designed to help students find meaningful connections on an ongoing basis. We believe there is room for both,” Weng wrote in an email to the Daily.

According to Weng, questions in the Date Drop questionnaire are not uncommon among matchmaking tools. However, “as a good-faith gesture to address the concerns raised, [Date Drop has] made some voluntary product updates,” he wrote. Weng noted that Date Drop has since retained outside counsel.

Intellectual property scholar Mark Lemley ’88, a professor at Stanford Law School, believes the case is one of ordinary competition. “There’s nothing actually illegal about copying a business model,” he said. “People do that all the time.”

As for the claim that parts of the questionnaire were copied, “I don’t think that’s the sort of thing that’s going to be copyrightable,” Lemley said.

In his work as an intellectual property lawyer, Lemley said that he frequently sees similar cases. According to Lemley, the cases typically have one of two outcomes: either the defendant is unable to fight the accusation, in which case they acquiesce, or — as in the case of Date Drop — the battle may go to court. “I think if they fight, they’d have a good chance,” Lemley said. 

Another possibility is that the parties reach a compromise, he said. Date Drop’s recent changes to some of its questions may constitute part of such a solution.

To show a trademark violation, “the plaintiff [Marriage Pact] would have to prove that the design of the website or the brand name are sufficiently similar” to the extent that “people would be confused and think that this actually came from the plaintiff,” Lemley said. However, he believes that to be unlikely in the case of Marriage Pact and Date Drop.

Meanwhile, to show copyright infringement, “the plaintiff would have to show that the defendant took their creative expression” beyond standard elements of website design and marketing. Plaintiffs would also be eligible to seek damages if they could demonstrate that the company suffered a financial loss due to the similar materials, Lemley said.

“There [are] a lot of great things worth doing to create meaningful relationships on campus,” McGregor wrote. “We’d just prefer everyone do their own thing.”

As for Date Drop, Weng and his colleagues have no plans to cease operations. “We’re here to help people connect, and that’s what we’ll keep on doing,” he wrote.

The post Marriage Pact sends cease and desist to Date Drop appeared first on The Stanford Daily.