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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

#471

Post by xvector »

hummel wrote: post #324
rhegart wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have also seen calls for caution and warning dismissed as racism. I agree - this is an extremely sad situation.

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

#472

Post by icedchai »

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?

Compatible APIs happen all the time with SaaS. Look at all the S3 clones out there. Look at SignalWire, which cloned Twilio. It is very, very common.

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

#473

Post by dylan604 »

chmod775 wrote: post #375
jaxn wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tend to agree with the original comment, particularly for products that are still evolving. We have a competitor who copies our features, but they don't know why we built the feature. The result is they end up copying the wrong stuff or tweaking the feature in a way that completely misses the point. But, I agree with you in that creating a feature isn't an advantage in and of itself. Rather, it is the domain expert…

Try adding some random stuff that you get for basically free with your choice of backend / implementation. This will waste their time if its a harder problem with their backend / implementation. Another fun thing you can do is using something that looks like a 3rd-party service/API, but is really just another domain controlled by your company. Make it something specific to your business, so they'll be tempted to use…

>Final thing you can do is not doing incremental updates, but instead doing big rollouts with many features at once. > >That way they'll always be weeks to months behind you.

This reminds me of the old days when Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. I learned both apps, as each release from one would leap frog the other in features. I actually learned from a roommate that was taking college courses, and I would do his homework assignments. Not do them for him, but on my own just to learn the software. Saved me from needing to take the course!

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

#474

Post by dmh2000 »

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…

In Github terms of service, if you make a repo public, others are free to view and fork it, apparently even if you place a commercial license on it, or no license. The lawyers will have to figure out if that means copy, use or whatever.

https://help.github.com/en/articles/licensing-a-repository

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

#475

Post by clarle »

hathawsh wrote: post #469
ricardobeat wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... .

I thought most people (including myself) on HN were in favor of Google in that case, that APIs shouldn't be copyrightable.

What exactly is Smartcar's product? Is it just the API design?

If so, I personally think this is in the same boat as that case, and I don't really see having the same API as copying either.

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

#477

Post by icedchai »

PunchTornado wrote: post #140
yingw787 wrote: post #34

Holy crap. The only way forward for Bessemer et al. VCs is to immediately withdraw their funding for this “company” and cut all ties in order to prove that they had no forewarning that this is how their money was being used. There are so few actors this visibly bad that if they didn’t do anything they would become “that guy” everybody avoids, in both the deals and funding space, when orgs do their due diligence. So t…

Can someone explain me what illegality did they do? Is it illegal to just copy some docs from somewhere on the web? are APIs copyrightable?

As it turns out, probably nothing. Their API docs are apparently open source.

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

#478

Post by da_chicken »

asveikau wrote: post #388
da_chicken wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the perfect counter example here. Apple wasn't the first company to make an MP3 player, but the generic term is basically 'iPod'. Apple wasn't the first company to make a smartphones or touchscreens, but the generic term for a touchscreen smartphone is basically 'iPhone'. Apple wasn't the first company to make a tablet, but the generic term is basically 'iPad'. Apple didn't invent high resolution displays fo…

I feel like some of these examples could be US-centric phenomena. We in the US tend to confuse brand names with product categories, and in other markets the Apple brand doesn't have the same dominance in most of these.

The example may be US-centric, but that really doesn't invalidate the point of the argument: that late comers may come to dominate the market by copying others. I really don't need a global example or eurocentric example to make the point, but if you don't want Apple, take Google's Android, IBM'S PC, etc.

Edit: How about Google? They copied Yahoo and AltaVista, and their search engine has become so ubiquitous with searching that it's a word in the dictionary now.

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

#479

Post by Washuu »

Washuu wrote: post #307
keithwhor wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Good to see that I am being down voted for my accent/dialect.

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

#480

Post by nocman »

znpy wrote: post #405
da_chicken wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple is the perfect counter example here. Apple wasn't the first company to make an MP3 player, but the generic term is basically 'iPod'. Apple wasn't the first company to make a smartphones or touchscreens, but the generic term for a touchscreen smartphone is basically 'iPhone'. Apple wasn't the first company to make a tablet, but the generic term is basically 'iPad'. Apple didn't invent high resolution displays fo…

> The generic term is basically iThing. Are you from the US? Because here in .eu "iThing" is definitely not the generic term for pretty much anything.

Not the parent, but I am from the US. I don't know anyone who uses i{whatever} as a generic term. When they say iPhone, they mean a smartphone manufactured by Apple. When they say iPad, they mean a tablet computer manufactured by Apple, and so on.
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