Am I missing something or did they only copy the OAuth flow? Yes it's unethical and seemingly illegal, but it's not like this is getting them anywhere close to a working product. None of the content in the article is related to any API that actually does something... It's just authorization.
Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
321–330 of 637 posts
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sounds like VCs need a plagiarism detector for websites (think TurnItIn) to make sure their portfolio companies aren't blatant ripoffs.
TurnItIn resells all of the data you submit to them. Any paper a student is required to sent to the service (it's not optional at schools where it's in place) is added to the dataset which they ultimately profit from, with nothing paid back to the students who own the original IP. It'd be like YouTube using your videos for ContentId, but not having any avenue for you to profit from said videos. Oh and uploading to Yo…
I wasn't suggesting they copy the business model, just the functionality. If it's all websites, there'd be no need to have a separate database.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
And you have no idea what you are talking about. By that logic every company thats an OAuth 2.0 provider ripped off their "whole public facing architecture". Or rather, Smartcar ripped off someone elses'.
I'm not saying that. I'm saying that if they copied parameter names verbatim, it's very likely that they designed the API with the same public facing approach. Possibly with the goal of attracting Smartcar customers with the premise that they just need to change an endpoint and an api key and it would work out of the box.
And BTW, your first line doesn't add anything to the conversation. Is your argument stronger by saying that "I don't know what I'm talking about"? Check the guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html - The idea here is to have a civil discussion.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#324I have solid evidence that some EV startups that raised billions like Faraday Future are built on our EV-technology and self-driving stack that we built during 2007-2012. Our project died in 2014 due to lack of support and funding on Europe, while our "Chinese partners" started raising mega large rounds literally copying everything from us, from business plan to technology. You can also see an overnight quality jump…
In a previous thread about China ripping of IP and blatantly sabotaging others illegally, many commentators supported them saying it’s better for the world. The fact that people are this naive scares me. I’m so sorry this happened, I am glad more light is being shined in unfair practices like this.
It really breaks my heart every time I read this kind of thread in HN, the terrible personal experience of seeing how others build empires with your corpse is the least terrible for me. China thinks like civilization and as long as the rest of us keep thinking that this is a global world, where we are all good, kind and we do yoga while we walk our dogs, we will keep having problems with the Chinese.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#325Several 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…
20 years ago was involved in the sale of a division to some investors. Involved in the same way a chicken is in the poultry business. The law firm didn't know to sanitize their documents. The upshot was they was billing a lot of hours at $500/hr for a clerk to do simple search and replace on previously existing contracts[1]. We'd read the contract find stuff that was utterly wrong and tell them. And the clerk would paste our edits into the document and bill us another 12 hours.
[1] The meta data was leaking the names of their other defunct dotcom clients.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#326Earlier quoted context omitted.
That smoking gun is smoking plenty. That and the typos are the kind of proof that are a godsend during a lawsuit when you're on the offense and a really really bad day when you're on the defense.
And what would the lawsuit be based on? Stealing documentation for how OAuth 2.0 works?
No, on copyright infringement.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
Copying a design is not illegal. Unless the design is patented (which it doesn't seem to be or the OP would likely have said so in the article), everyone is free to copy any design they want.
That you wish something was true doesn't make it so, unfortunately.
What is not OK is copying the documentation verbatim, that is copyrighted. However, that is, frankly, the least of the problems (and easiest to rectify) when someone is taking your product idea wholesale.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#328[deleted]
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is pretty egregious, but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself. The other company still has the write all the backend code, and given their track record of just ripping stuff off, may not have the engineering chops to pull it off. In addition, as Smartcar continuously improves their product and API, the other company can only react to these changes. If I was the O…
If it wasn’t already, the docs and the code should be copyrighted. It costs nothing and should be relatively easy to litigate in the case of copy pastage lol
It IS copyrighted.
To lose copyright, the author has to explicitly volunteer to sell the rights or give them away. A work has copyright protections the moment it is created.
Re: Otonomo, with nearly $55M in funding, is cloning our product
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 h…
even if its illegal, its nothing unless you win it in court.