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Unfortunately, the market does not care about who had what first. This is a validation for you. Frustrating validation. You likely do not have the resources to fight them for anything meaningful. Stay focused on your customers.
Could there possibly be reasonable explanation for this? With big name investors involved it's likely that respectable and legitimate reporters wouldn't be interested in digging up the truth.
Can you not use a DMCA and contact their hosting provider? One per offense. Also, if the docs are registered copyright, willfull infringement per offense is over $100k per instance. $50mil/$140k = 357.14 Thoughts?
A bit naive. I am sure the DMCA can be used to put some fire on their ass to rewrite the documentation though but not much more than that.
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Yep! Just check out our docs: https://smartcar.com/docs/ Would love any feedback you may have!
The documentation only has a screenshot of the brands supported. Would be nice to just be able to lookup my car brand and make support in the docs instead of having to make an Auth flow first...
From my understanding though they're just a wrapper API around the car manufactures existing apis?
Go for funding, your idea is already validates.
I expected this to be a " I had the idea first" post. But it is actually a copyright infringement post AND makes the offending company look like a bunch of hacks. If they don't have the engineering chops to build an API how are going to handle the ops of it.
"The redirect_uri provided in Authorize User step" appears exactly once on the Internet according to Google: at smartcar.com. It looks like Otonomo did in fact copy/paste from the SmartCar website.
https://www.google.com/search?q="The+redirect_uri+provided+i...
Yes, it does kind of suck they stole your idea. But the fact that they have $55 million in funding, probably means they're willing to buy you out for a couple million. One, just to avoid any legal issues. Two, because you've already done a lot of work on the problem.
Maybe it's worth fighting. But maybe it's also worth considering getting a multi-million dollar payday, and moving on to something else.
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Just because something is a blatant ripoff, doesn't mean it's not a good investment. VCs are doing investments based on predicted ROI, not uniqueness. Lyft and Uber are extremely similar, but the particulars of the business are much more relevant to the investment opportunity.
Sure, but neither of them was illegally copying aspects of the others' business. Business models are not protectable.
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Came to say just this. They say "illegally cloning our product", but I see nothing illegal so far and I'd love to be corrected. I doubt it is so, but even if those tokens pass the threshold of originality[0], does a few blobs of superficial text justify a lawsuit? Things would be dramatically different if they'd copied source code, but so far, it's just documentation. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_o…
Directly copying a document is simple copyright infringement. Just because it's documentation doesn't mean everyone has a free license to copy and redistribute it. Whether or not any violations occurred in copying code probably depends on whether any employees with company secrets were poached and involved in development. That's a very big, well known no-no amongst tech companies. It's why Compaq had a complete "clea…
That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course. And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market. On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more…
If I was the OP, my reaction would be shock and horror too. But then I'd realize the old axiom of imitation is the best form of flattery.