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

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601–610 of 637 posts

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

#601

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…

Terms of Service and other types of agreements aren't copyrightable (last I checked). When bootstrapping side-projects, I do what the firm tried to charge you for.

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

#602

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…

> 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.

I mean, you might eventually be right. But why "immediately"? What's wrong with taking some time to talk to people, hear the other side, find out more details, do a proper investigation, and then decide what to do?

One side of a story is never the whole story.

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

#603
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, this is the bread and butter for a lot of law firms. Especially for simpler things like rental contracts and property conveyancing etc. It's got to be disrupted soon enough!

Disrupted how in this case? Lawyers usually use forms / boilerplate because they have worked in the past. Many of these forms are the sum total of thousands of hours of time and refinement over tens of years. Nobody wants to pay a lawyer to reproduce that -- at least, nobody in retail law (big corporate settlement contracts? Those see many many hours of revision and negotion, but ultimately are still based on a core…

I don't know how exactly, but perhaps we could have an open git repository-esque method for refining contracts. Right now, one law firm refines its own contracts over the lifetime of the firm. Why not democratise the entire process and make it open? Then lawyers can stop ripping people off for this sort of non-work and instead focus on actually providing legal counsel (which is what you truly should be paying a lawyer for).

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

#605
post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

thats...not the same.

Why do you say that? In some regards yes, and some no. I think the intellectual property is in the APIs/"headers". That is what Android uses from Java and what this company is copying from SmartCar. Its not easy to write a good API. (But, I should say, once you have the headers it is not as tough to populate them with code.) As for coping actual documentation, that is just plain stupid but not the _worse_ crime here.…

> Many may disagree about Oracle vs Android but I think it is devaluing the work of people like James Gosling _and_ SmartCar if you say there is not intellectual value in the code/API headers.

It is not the same simply because Java is an open-source project. SmartCar, on the other hand, is not. I would argue that, because of the nature of open-source, Google should have been able to do as they pleased to facilitate allowing java code on their OS. I know that many would disagree. But to say that there is not intellectual value in the code/API of Java would be disingenuous, and ultimately incorrect; I can say with certainty that I would never say that, so thank you for putting words in my mouth.

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

#606
post #567

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It wasn't from a template. The language was way too specific to the specific business. And the law firm didn't deny that they had copied it.

Legal contracts are copyrightable too. I've learned this when looking for a basic tenants contract trying to save on lawyer's fees which seemed too high for such a standard document. So not sure how legally safe it is to just copy such documents.

At least a decade ago since I checked but back then, “standard terms” clauses were not copyrightable, the theory being there’s an optimal way to express a legal idea and you can’t be barred from saying it that way. And a collection of such terms is basically a sampled remix.

Quoting:

“[Because] the vast majority of contracts prepared by law firms are either outright copies that aren’t entitled to copyright protection or are contracts that derive copyright protection from their status as compilations, a law firm would likely have a hard time demonstrating breach of copyright.”

And:

”It is standard practice for corporate lawyers to copy—from deal binders, the SEC’s EDGAR database, and elsewhere—and revise contracts drafted by others.... It’s a safe assumption that the vast majority of contracts are either outright copies that aren’t entitled to copyright protection or contracts that derive copyright protection from their status as compilations. Because any compilation contract would resemble countless other contracts, a law firm would likely have a hard time demonstrating breach of copyright of its compilation contract. And even if were able to do so, its damages would likely be nominal, because compiling such contracts is a relatively quick scissor-and-paste exercise. So you should feel free to copy a run-of-the- mill compilation contract, not because doing so constitutes fair use, but because the likelihood of someone knowing of that copying and having any interest in preventing it are exceedingly remote.”

https://www.adamsdrafting.com/downloads/Copyright-NYLJ-8.23....

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

#607

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Laws are different in different countries, e.g. it is not against the law to consume pirated content in Switzerland, but is illegal to share it further. So, if I have a pet project for my personal use then I can pretty much use anything I can find on the internet.

By hosting on github aren't you sharing it further?

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

#608

That is pretty egregious, and its also par for the course. And that is why startup companies go through all the hoops of being "stealth" and having NDAs and what not. There was a German VC firm that was, as I recall, very upfront about this. Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market. On the one hand it is great to have validation of the idea, on the other its a pain to have someone with more…

Copying as a business model is pretty shitty as is copying legitimate IP. But if Company B can execute a similar concept faster and better than Company A, that's ultimately better for society. This situation looks very egregious though.

Will they be able to maintain and improve the code the way the people who wrote it will? The risk is that Company B may be selling something they don't fully understand.

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

#609
post #362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, this is the bread and butter for a lot of law firms. Especially for simpler things like rental contracts and property conveyancing etc. It's got to be disrupted soon enough!

Disrupted how in this case? Lawyers usually use forms / boilerplate because they have worked in the past. Many of these forms are the sum total of thousands of hours of time and refinement over tens of years. Nobody wants to pay a lawyer to reproduce that -- at least, nobody in retail law (big corporate settlement contracts? Those see many many hours of revision and negotion, but ultimately are still based on a core…

Surely it is being disrupted by all the make-a-will websites and stuff -- LegalZoom as you say.

If a standard, simple will is entirely boilerplate with some search-and-replace, then it can be replaced with an app.

You decide whether to pay the lawyer based on your confidence that the boilerplate stuff is right for your case, and will hold up in court. Individuals are likely to take this risk, large companies are not. So the large companies will still get boilerplate search-and-replace, but with the added confidence that they have lowered their risk.

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

#610

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's antithetical to their business strategy. They charge for premium accounts to give access to private repos. Nothing wrong with that, but OP should probably try out Gitlab if he wants an enterprise-level solution for free.

I'm not OP, I'm GP. Second, I fully understand git, github, gitlab, etc. I'm specifically discussing a situation wherein someone has uploaded non-licensed code to github. I am not advocating for this. I am discussing what should be the default behavior for a repo if unlicensed. Another alternative is not having the repo be usable at all (so not private) if one attempts to bring it public without a license.

Get over yourself. I was referring to OP of this particular sub-thread, meaning you.

And you are continuing to misunderstand how this works. If you can view it, you can copy it. Nothing prevents someone from viewing a public repo. So nothing prevents someone from copying it. Therefore any attempt to make it difficult is just a PITA.

That's why Github has a default license for all non-licensed public repos. Because it's a public repo. If it wasn't supposed to be available to copy, the source code shouldn't have been made a public repository.

So again. If what you're looking for is a private repo solution, Gitlab offers this enterprise-level solution for free. You are barking up the wrong tree.

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