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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

#461

Post by dmh2000 »

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…

I can imagine that lawyers in general would prefer to use a contract template that has withstood the test of time (and was held up in court) rather than try to write one up from scratch.

I'm not talking about your case though.

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

#462

Post by nameisu »

woah wrote: post #458
gepoch wrote: 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.

haha

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

#463

Post by ezekg »

It's interesting — I have a couple competitors who have done the exact same thing to my API product (https://keygen.sh). Total copy of a feature subset, down to the API payloads, and verbatim copying my painstakingly written documentation. It bothered me (immensely) at first, but then I stopped thinking about it and instead turned my focus back onto my business. If they want to copy me, so be it. I'll still have the edge because I'm the leader, in a sense.

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

#465

Post by [deleted] »

gepoch wrote: 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…

[deleted]

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

#466

Post by ruchitmatalia »

schwap wrote: post #407
ruchitmatalia wrote: post #393

Besides the blatant copy. I think Otonomo needs to decide whether they using oauth v1 or v2. Point being, the quality of work is speaking for itself. JSON FROM OTONOMO ------------------- https://consent.otonomo.io/oauth/v1/authorize?response_type=... curl https://consent.otonomo.io/oauth/v1/token \ Documents Shows ------------------- response_type This value must be set to code. OAuth2 outlines multiple authorizatio…

It looks to me like they only use OAuth2 (based on the authorize/token endpoints), they just oddly decided to version their OAuth2 api.

Yeah. I completely missed to see that.

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

#467

Post by PopeDotNinja »

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…

Developer and former small business owner here.

Your attorneys may have been using the same base template that was used to create your competitor's documentation. Lawyers reduce the need to copy/pasta code, just like developers do. If an attorney's game of 20 questions leads to a bunch of templates that were drawn up before they ever knew you, values are filled in for your specific use case, you're not getting ripped off. You're (hopefully) not paying for words in a document. You're (hopefully) paying to have the contents of those documents cover your butt when shit hits the legal fan.

The trick is to know templates exist. If you hire an attorney to do a bunch of work, and you are pretty sure that all of that legal work is just going to be generated using boilerplate templates, then you can negotiate a better rate based on the fact that the attorney is doing very little custom work. The more boilerplate being generated, the more leverage you have to negotiate a better price.

Source: I learned this from a mentor to get favorable pricing on attorneys fees.

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

#469

Post by hathawsh »

ricardobeat wrote: post #460
theclaw wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

That question is the essence of the ongoing Oracle v. Google case:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google....

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

#470

Post by [deleted] »

megaremote wrote: post #456
reredacted wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]
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