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

smartcar.com

451–460 of 637 posts

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

#452

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…

At the University of Nebraska they have an athletic director who used the same legal agreement from his past job to arrange a football game with the Zips.

The game was cancelled due to lighting. But the contract supposedly copy and pasted from his old job at a costal school only addressed "tropical storm, hurricane and flood."

It's amazing what people will or will not do when it comes to important legal matters.

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

#453

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can hardly remember someone using an Apple(or any brand really) product name for the whole product category, it's rare in my experience. Sometimes there's a (grand)parent calling every game console "nintendo", but that's about it.

How about Q-tip? Band-aid? Adrenaline? Kleenex? There's quite a lot of them floating around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

Seems to be much more of a US thing. As a European I'd use the category name for most of those.

Some of the category names don't even match up - adhesive tape is definitely not what comes to mind for Durex for me.

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

#455
post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then can't you too find other investor for yourself ? You have the advantage being the one that come out with the idea to sell it to the investor. Or heck pitch it to the same investor too.

No investor will get involved with a company that is presently undergoing major intellectual property litigation. IP lawsuits are the kiss of death for VCs.

Do you mean kiss of death for both Otonomo and smartcar ?

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

#456

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.

So Otonomo took down their API. Can you confirm that more of their API other than the authorization code was duplicated? Honestly duplicating auth APIs are perfectly fine. If you showed proof of business APIs being duplicated, I'd have more faith in your claim. Right now this looks like a publicity stunt on a baseless argument.

> Honestly duplicating auth APIs are perfectly fine.

You don't get to say this.

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

#458
post #437

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere so I thought I'd post it to see what you all think... IANAL, IMHO, etc. I searched for one of the unique tokens in the docs: https://www.google.com/search?q=0facda3319 That pulls up their SDK github repo: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/doc/readme.... Which is published with a standard MIT license: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/LICENSE.md Whic…

What a plot twist. How embarrassing for Smartcar to have written this whole blog post and tried to sue them.

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

#459
post #437

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere so I thought I'd post it to see what you all think... IANAL, IMHO, etc. I searched for one of the unique tokens in the docs: https://www.google.com/search?q=0facda3319 That pulls up their SDK github repo: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/doc/readme.... Which is published with a standard MIT license: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/LICENSE.md Whic…

The MIT license appears to be on their client-side SDK. They are accusing Otonomo of cloning their API, not their SDK.

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

#460
post #437

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere so I thought I'd post it to see what you all think... IANAL, IMHO, etc. I searched for one of the unique tokens in the docs: https://www.google.com/search?q=0facda3319 That pulls up their SDK github repo: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/doc/readme.... Which is published with a standard MIT license: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/LICENSE.md Whic…

The MIT license appears to be on their client-side SDK. They are accusing Otonomo of cloning their API, not their SDK.

I was going to say the same, but it looks like the documentation mentioned is for the client indeed. If the client is MIT licensed, are you infringing on anything by writing a compatible API?
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