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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

#551

Post by michaelmrose »

intertextuality wrote: post #526
dmh2000 wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I believe this is a big problem with git or any of the current repo gui providers. A repository should not be able to be forked if it doesn't have a SPDIX license. Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. It's usually not an issue but I have run into some small repositories that had no license, meaning I could -not- fork and modify for myself or a PR, legally. But th…

Neither git nor github can automatically discern how the law applies in context in 195 nations without consulting a lawyer and honestly neither can you.

Unless you want to pay thousands of dollars per repo presumably everyone is going to continue not giving a damn.

If you don't want people to clone a repo don't upload it to a public github repo. If you are thinking of cloning realize that the ability to clone it gives you zero legal rights.

Anyway you cannot fix legal complexities with technology in this instance.

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

#552

Post by jcims »

intertextuality wrote: post #539
mlindner wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. This is absurd. You don't have to use the "fork" button to copy a repository. It's as simple as cloning it and pushing it. Such a restriction servers no purpose at all.

Obviously such an implementation would disable cloning as well.

GitHub would obviously also have to make the repo private as well, and then get into the business of interpreting and potentially defending the compatibility of their service against various licenses before making it public. That's unsustainable.

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

#553

Post by ttoinou »

bjourne wrote: post #505
scient wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its OAuth documentation - its a very well described standard protocol. Most of the OAuth documentation looks and reads exactly like this. The only "smoking gun" is the "random" value used for the state parameter, which seems to be copied over - and developers copy other products/sites documentation ALL THE TIME. While there is substance in the post that some other company is building the same product, saying that its…

But several examples are just way over the top. Smartcar's description for "expires_in": "The number of seconds the access token is valid for. This is always set to 7200 (2 hours)." Otonomo's description for "expires_in": "The number of seconds the access token is valid for. This is always set to 7200 (2 hours)." Coincidence that both companies choose 7200 seconds and formulated the descriptions exactly the same? I t…

Coincidence they choose the same English language ? I think not

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

#554

Post by johnx123-up »

jpatokal wrote: post #423
metamet wrote: post #347

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what you classify as "competition". Theft, sabotage, ad hominem attacks, even murder, could all be considered "competition" if your ethics and morals are on a different plane. So saying there is nothing wrong with competition as a blanket dismissal is a bit myopic.

Are you accusing Rocket of any of those? They're famous for cloning business plans, but I wasn't aware they went beyond that.

IIRC Agriya was much popular compared to Rocket Internet in this business

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

#555

Post by bdowling »

cgy1 wrote: post #392
janoc wrote: post #327

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I see two issued US patents for smartcar: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9870656B2/ https://patents.google.com/patent/US10169825B2/

Those patents are directed towards "method[s] for processing requests for vehicular data", which at first glance appear unrelated to the descriptions of web APIs authenticated by OAuth that Smartcar is complaining about.

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

#556

Post by pron »

smarx007 wrote: post #514
pron wrote: post #481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The APIs discussed in that case are only "classical" APIs, i.e. code APIs, not "web APIs", which are really protocols. Despite the fact that recently people have started calling protocols APIs, the two have huge differences from a copyright perspective[1], so that extrapolating from the former to the latter is tenuous, regardless of the ultimate outcome of that case. Moreover, the court ruling makes it seem that if t…

The docs are also MIT licensed, aren't they?

I don't know, but the MIT license is given under conditions that can be violated.

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

#557

Post by comex »

xgbi wrote: post #541
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.

Come on, this piece is written by someone who obviously doesn't know what he his talking about.. The entirety of his examples are focused on the Oauth API, which is a standard, and all the concepts and var names he shows as a steal of API are present in each and all Oauth authentication servers. I mean, we have in our own api about 90% of the same verbiage for our own authentication doc, this is bog standard Auth cod…

The same verbiage, as in large chunks of text are word-for-word identical? Because that’s what’s being alleged here; it doesn’t happen by accident (the chances of two people independently writing identical text are astronomically low for any significant amount of text), and it certainly constitutes copyright infringement unless it turns out that Smartcar put the documentation under an open source license somewhere. If, on the other hand, you just mean that your docs have a similar overall structure, because they’re documenting a similar API, that’s something completely different.

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

#558

Post by xgbi »

comex wrote: post #557
xgbi wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, this piece is written by someone who obviously doesn't know what he his talking about.. The entirety of his examples are focused on the Oauth API, which is a standard, and all the concepts and var names he shows as a steal of API are present in each and all Oauth authentication servers. I mean, we have in our own api about 90% of the same verbiage for our own authentication doc, this is bog standard Auth cod…

The same verbiage, as in large chunks of text are word-for-word identical? Because that’s what’s being alleged here; it doesn’t happen by accident (the chances of two people independently writing identical text are astronomically low for any significant amount of text), and it certainly constitutes copyright infringement unless it turns out that Smartcar put the documentation under an open source license somewhere. I…

The API the guy is talking about is a freaking RFC!

The wording of this is found everywhere on the internet. Just search for one of the phrases you find and you'll have plenty of matches: https://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+number+of+seconds+the...

I understand the frustration of the guy, but this is not like they copied the business API, this is just the standard Oauth.

Anyways.. I'm starting to sound like an Otonomo PR guys.. I'm not, it's just that reading this article, I found myself pondering whether my current employer could be sued for this kind of trickery. I wrote the Oauth2 code in our product, and found myself writing the exact same doc (probably with different words).

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

#559

Post by atq2119 »

intertextuality wrote: post #540
fsloth wrote: post #537

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, if you don't wan't to fork, don't make it public in the first place? Code escrow is another thing, but that does not mean everyone needs access...

The two aren't necessarily mutually exclusive, although yes I would agree with you. -In the case- of a repository being public without a license however, forking and related things should still be disabled to prevent licensing headaches.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of how git works.

The main point of putting something on GitHub is to allow people to git clone it. Every git clone is a fork of the project.

If you don't want something forked, don't put it on GitHub.

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

#560

Post by ajhurliman »

intertextuality wrote: post #539
mlindner wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Or at the very least users should be able to turn off forking ability in the repo settings. This is absurd. You don't have to use the "fork" button to copy a repository. It's as simple as cloning it and pushing it. Such a restriction servers no purpose at all.

Obviously such an implementation would disable cloning as well.

The onus is on the end user to make it private.
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