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

smartcar.com

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

#301

Post by iandanforth »

joshfraser wrote: post #286

Several years ago, I hired a boutique Silicon Valley law firm to create some terms of service and privacy documents for my company. As part of their long list of questions about how we would use our customers data, they asked for a list of similar companies and competitors. I'd already reviewed all of our competitor's terms to get a sense of what other people were doing. So, when I reviewed the final documents that t…

Sadly this is exactly what should be done in most contracts. (In a hypothetical alternate world where law worked more like OSS).

Of course it was unethical for them to do it without telling you and trying to charge you $5k for it, but law would be a heck of a lot cheaper if openness and code re-use were the default.

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

#302

Post by mrfusion »

neoquisitive wrote: post #173
LeonM wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You will need additional hardware in the car to achieve this. Smartcar just does a really thorough job of hiding this fact. AFAIK the is not a single car manufacturer (not even Tesla) that has any API available. Most cars don't have internet connectivity anyway. Disclosure: I do NOT work for Smartcar, but have build multiple backends for P2P carsharing and bike rental platforms.

Disclosure: I used to work for Smartcar. This is patently false. Smartcar does not require additional hardware. Quoting from their product page: > Our API works with the embedded telematics module built into most new vehicles. No need for aftermarket hardware like OBD2 dongles.

So it’s like builtin Bluetooth?

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

#303

Post by CSMR »

gyaniv wrote: post #236

I sort of feel that if the worst thing you can find is that someone stole your registration or OAuth documentation, you're a bit over-exaggerating. And to say that someone is cloning your startup when they only (supposedly) stole the documentation is extreme in any case, especially when they're not really a very new startup, so it's not like you can claim everything they did was just copy from you.

"I cloned a sheep" does not imply "I am a clone of a sheep" or "The only thing I have ever done is clone sheep".

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

#304

Post by jerf »

matz1 wrote: post #227
jwr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its also par for the course No, it is not. The world would be a much better place if we all started doing what is right. This isn't difficult: stealing and copying API design and API documentation is wrong. Make a note of the company, people who work there, and VCs who invested. Computers are good at quickly finding information: one day you might want to do business with one of those people or VCs and digging up th…

Right or wrong is relative. If to me this is not wrong then what are you gonna do about it.

I don't particularly agree with you; I've often thought that amounts to trying to win the debate by nuking the entire playing field. Even if you win, have you?

But I can spot you that anyhow, because there's a perfectly reasonable fallback position: This is illegal. It's a copyright infringement at the very least, and possibly other things as well. And being "illegal", the "what are you gonna do about it" actually has clear, well defined answers. Smartcar.com is doing them a favor by serving a cease & desist, as there is nothing preventing them from moving straight to legal action.

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

#305

Post by ddebernardy »

phkahler wrote: post #145
seibelj wrote: post #54

So they built a new product to a competitor's API spec? There is nothing wrong with that, the API itself is a plug - you need to implement the backend to compete. It is super lame and dumb to have ripped off their doc, but the API format itself is not an issue to me. If I were going to implement a competitor to Google Maps, it would make sense to copy the Maps API so people can migrate seamlessly. That is the nature…

I agree with you completely, but Oracle vs Google is still going through the courts on this exact issue - copyright on APIs. I've seen product roll-outs delayed because that case isn't settled yet. For VCs to jump in knowing that's what this was seems risky, but maybe they factored that in.

This isn't (only) about copyright on APIs; it's also about copyright on the API docs.

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

#306

Post by hw »

iamleppert wrote: post #282

Forgive me, but all I really see that’s ripped of are...some API docs? You can tell they copied them but this is likely the work of a single lazy employee rather than indicative of an entire company. Consider that the value of a company is more than API documentation. It’s the customers, the business relationships, and the employees. The actual tech is last in the things that are valuable. If you want to survive in t…

It's not just the API docs that are copied, but the API structure itself. Then again, the examples shown in the article are just OAuth flows, which are a standard and docs are going to look similar regardless.

But I totally agree with not worry about competitors. There's always going to be people copying you, and if they do that means you're doing something right. Think Stripe - I'm sure they're a huge source of 'inspiration' for a lot of sites when it comes to design and documentation.

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

#307

Post by Washuu »

keithwhor wrote: post #254
sahaskatta wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm the CEO of Smartcar. While I can't go into exact details, I can say from what we know so far: this occurred out of their main headquarters.

Can you clarify? "Out of" can mean either "outside of" or "within" weirdly enough.

It means the production of the items in question came out of the location specified.

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

#308

Post by Max_aaa »

iandanforth wrote: post #301
joshfraser wrote: post #286

Several years ago, I hired a boutique Silicon Valley law firm to create some terms of service and privacy documents for my company. As part of their long list of questions about how we would use our customers data, they asked for a list of similar companies and competitors. I'd already reviewed all of our competitor's terms to get a sense of what other people were doing. So, when I reviewed the final documents that t…

Sadly this is exactly what should be done in most contracts. (In a hypothetical alternate world where law worked more like OSS). Of course it was unethical for them to do it without telling you and trying to charge you $5k for it, but law would be a heck of a lot cheaper if openness and code re-use were the default.

It would be nice to git clone a contract.

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

#309

Post by stcredzero »

a13n wrote: post #266
samatman wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to being unwelcome in its own right, this sort of comment is against Hacker News guidelines. Please don’t do this here.

Why is it against HN guidelines? If something's actually racist, it should definitely be called out. Not saying the original comment was racist, but in general I don't think we should be promoting racism.

Exercising the principle of charity != Promoting [X]

If we all started calling out everything that might possibly be [X] without being absolute certain, then this stance to accept false positives would result in far too much noise in the form of one of the harshest accusations in 2019.

This sort of stance, where the Presumption of Innocence is sacrificed, to prioritize catching all the guilty, the innocents be damned, is also the stance that leads to the witchhunt mentality. It's a social epistemological catastrophe, where everyone suspects everyone and accusations for ulterior motives cannot be detected.

In 2019, it seems as if this stance is designed to and deployed to cause a social epistemological catastrophe over social media. I suspect this is actually being done!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc

This is precisely why Blackstone's formulation came to be, and why it's necessary to avoid toxic and tyrannical societies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio

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

#310

Post by dep_b »

c2h5oh wrote: post #252
dep_b wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some people built the world's most popular operating system doing just that - copying Java's API.

They didn't copy paste API docs too, including typos, which is what we have here

The lawsuit was about copyright on headers though. I think the headers did include the same documentation as the original Java implementation.
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