Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:15 PM UTC

whoisjuan wrote: post #198

keithwhor wrote: post #114

Smartcar has raised $12M in financing from A16Z and NEA. The difference between $12M and $55M is a single financing stage. What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking. This is great PR for Smartcar all things considered, and I actually think has a fantastic silver lining:…

> What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. They didn't steal the docs (not only the docs). They stole the whole public facing architecture as evidenced by the fact that they are using in some instances the exact same API resources names and method names.

Post by amingilani » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

dangus wrote: post #147

amingilani wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The screenshots in the article don't show a direct copy. They show copied tokens only.

Direct copied text in Request Access Token section

Post by sahaskatta » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:16 PM UTC

ethbro wrote: post #151

keithwhor wrote: post #114

Smartcar has raised $12M in financing from A16Z and NEA. The difference between $12M and $55M is a single financing stage. What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking. This is great PR for Smartcar all things considered, and I actually think has a fantastic silver lining:…

> What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking. If a remote team is writing your API documentation by copying and pasting, then what is the actual implementation team building from?

Post by matz1 » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #129

matz1 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

illegal or not is for the court to decide.

Technically, yes. But practically, in cases so blatantly obvious it is fine to draw your own conclusion. In one court case - where a company I had a majority stake in was the plaintiff - the defendant basically had to admit that they copied the code and content of our website. Their defense: 'we did not copy it from them, we copied it from someone else' (without specifying what the 'someone else' was). Needless to sa…

Post by omgitstom » Mon, Apr 22, 2019, 5:18 PM UTC

gwbas1c wrote: post #186

This just looks like an OAuth flow, which is rather standard. It's not a good example to use of someone stealing an API.