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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

#611

Post by mcv »

dragonwriter wrote: post #484
nocman wrote: post #480

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am also from the US, and I frequently hear (in decreasing order of dominance): “Apple Pay” being used as a generic for “phone-based contactless payment system”, “iPad” as generic for “tablet”, and “iPhone” as generic for “smartphone”.

Mu kids called all tablets iPads at some point, so I had to teach them the difference between iOS and Android.

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

#612

Post by sonnyblarney »

upstandingdude wrote: post #596
sonnyblarney wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market." This is really a different case though. The German VC is saying: "Food delivery is working in the US, they've validated the model + EU VC's will now get behind that, so 'do that like they are'. They are more or less competing, not exactly cloning. Copying API's is a whole other level. Literally copying docs etc. is another level. The thing is - the…

NO! Rocket Internet is known and have been busted for straight up copying even website source code, layout, everything. As in the source of the HTML is identical, just the color scheme changed. They are criminals make no mistake, learn how they got their riches, by scamming teenagers with ringtones.

Yes, Rocket copies very specifically, but that does not invalidate my point.

Germany VC's will still very rationally imply what I wrote above.

If Rocket is behind this, well, they might have laid a bridge too far.

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

#613

Post by swsieber »

mlindner wrote: post #536
intertextuality wrote: post #526

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…

> 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.

There _is_ a difference between forking and cloning. Forking is always allowed by the github license:

> other GitHub users have the right to view and fork your repository _within the GitHub site_

^^ That's from the github website. Note that they only have permission to fork from within the website.

So such a restriction serves as a legal barrier - it leaves no legal way to copy the code.

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

#614

Post by hbglih »

frosted-flakes wrote: post #120
perfunctory wrote: post #81

"is illegally cloning our product" isn't it for the court to establish?

No. If I photocopy the Harry Potter books, change the name on the covers, and sell them as my own, that is obviously illegal. This is the same thing, and nobody needs to wait for the courts to say that it is illegal.

It's obviously not the same thing because the only parts that were verbatim copied are some property descriptions for the OAuth 2.0 protocol. Maybe 100 words or so. This whole thing was blown way out of proportion.

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

#615

Post by HenryBemis »

nailer wrote: post #589
ajhurliman wrote: post #560

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Just thinking aloud, but GitHub could warn, when setting up new projects that don't have an OSS license, that the user may wish to make the repo private.

I have a small iOS app, not too big, a few thousand lines.

My idea was to use Github, but then I didn't want to go through the cost/effort, and I am using my own version system, AWAY from everyone. The only way for someone to get my code is: a) laptop gets hacked b) laptop gets stolen (disk is encrypted), c) backup gets stolen (carbonite is encrypted) d) Apple gets hacked.

Git should not bother people with a bunch of different alerts (imho). A COMPANY (apologies for the caps) that has been working on code for "a few years" and doesn't do the MINIMUM to protect their Intellectual Property (IP)... well that is suicide.

Don't they pay someone with GRC/Audit/Security skills to put some sense into them????

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

#616

Post by stcredzero »

ssnistfajen wrote: post #507
stcredzero wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. The Chinese also do this. (As in, the government seems to encourage it outright.) The culture and language barrier do make for an effective moat. It usually takes significant effort and even some cultural change for a company to get its legs for international operation.

But when "the Chinese" do the same thing, the reactions always seem to include something about "cheating", "stealing", and "copying" being "ingrained to their 'culture'", complete with some irrelevant anecdotes about some bad experience with Chinese tourists/coworkers/schoolmates or some geopolitical event being shared in the thread as if people are submitting their victim impact statements. This phenomenon appears t…

This phenomenon appears to be unique to situations where the accused party is Chinese. No other nationality/ethnicity seem to suffer the same treatment on HN and elsewhere on the Internet.

Actually, it gets applied to all Asians. I know this firsthand as an Asian. It used to be applied to the Japanese with just as much fervor, especially in the 80's. (I lived through this.) I should think it was applied to the Americans in the early days of the US. I suspect it was applied to Germans and Russians when they were consolidating and industrializing those nation states.

Here's where bigotry comes in, in the 2019 style: When white people do it, it's "appropriation." When Asian people do it, it's because they have no creativity and can only imitate. In truth, it's all cultural appropriation, and cultural appropriation is actually an engine of human progress and creativity.

The charge of copying gets levied as a protectionist tactic by those already of generally higher status. The charge of appropriation gets gets levied as an aggressive tactic by those who desire that status for themselves. Either way, it's a waste of time better spent learning, growing, and changing.

Appropriation is good. It's how progress is made!

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

#617

Post by Archit3ch »

mrgordon wrote: post #506
woah wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Meh not really. The API client is MIT licensed but that doesn't mean the API itself is MIT licensed. Smartcar obviously would not release their server code as it is proprietary so the question becomes whether it is unethical or illegal to copy the design of it without seeing the code. Most people would also say it is unethical to copy your competitor's docs down to the examples and randomly generated tokens. Note tha…

> Most people would also say it is unethical to copy your competitor's docs down to the examples and randomly generated tokens.

Would it be okay if they changed the tokens and kept everything else? Who benefits from Otonomo changing the examples?

Assuming a REST API is a non-enforceable contract for the sake of interoperability, it doesn't make sense for any party agreeing to it to "own" the contract itself, even if they were involved in writing it.

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

#618

Post by patentatt »

owenmarshall wrote: post #582
Sabinus wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't need the permission of encumbants to disrupt their industry. You just take their customers.

The legal industry - an explicit manifestation of state power - will require a great deal of guns and soldiers to disrupt.

It’s much less the “state” as in the government than the state bar associations and such. They’re guilds, essentially, and quite protectionist ones at that.

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

#619

Post by jdsully »

intertextuality wrote: post #532
jdsully wrote: post #531

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub require you license public repos to allow others to fork it. Whether they can use it for a specific purpose is still questionable - but clicking the fork button on github is allowed. They agreed when they uploaded the code. Note that this is governed by GitHub’s TOS and supersedes anything in the License file.

> If you set your pages and repositories to be viewed publicly, you grant each User of GitHub a nonexclusive, worldwide license to use, display, and perform Your Content through the GitHub Service and to reproduce Your Content solely on GitHub as permitted through GitHub's functionality (for example, through forking) So I can "perform" and "reproduce" content through forking, solely on Github . But I couldn't clone i…

It makes more sense if you understand the license is about protecting GitHub and not you.

A disabled fork button unless the repo did a positive action would dilute the whole concept. The fork feature is key to the whole thing and is what made them different.

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

#620

Post by rossenberg79 »

cadio wrote: post #258
rossenberg79 wrote: post #87

You blew it. By posting this article and getting to the top of Hackernews you may have alerted their attention and they may rapidly change everything to not seem like copyright infringement. Then you might have weak or no claims.

Nothing to blow. This is not illegal. That's why they wrote it up as a blog post and are trying to garner PR from it.

So a postmortem basically.
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