31–40 of 637 posts
There are zero material consequences for a well-funded startup to pull shenanigans like this. Why should we be surprised this is happening?
Yes except if you are a well funded startup and look like amateurs that copy things verbatim that does not bode well for your reputation going forward. Someone needs to get fired for copying shit verbatim.
Could there possibly be reasonable explanation for this? With big name investors involved it's likely that respectable and legitimate reporters wouldn't be interested in digging up the truth.
In either case, how does that relate to the existence of a reasonable explanation?
I expected this to be a " I had the idea first" post. But it is actually a copyright infringement post AND makes the offending company look like a bunch of hacks. If they don't have the engineering chops to build an API how are going to handle the ops of it.
So they could choose to not do anything, which means the only companies approaching them in the future are the desperate ones, and they lose the capital anyways to the markets due to a shoddy portfolio.
Don’t knife your intangibles.
If they actually believe the idea has merit, they should do right by Otonomo.
Amazing that they have 55M$ in funding and still hire a bunch of amateurs. I bet the design for their docs is based on some free online template too because it looks very cheap.
I wish you all luck!
I expected this to be a " I had the idea first" post. But it is actually a copyright infringement post AND makes the offending company look like a bunch of hacks. If they don't have the engineering chops to build an API how are going to handle the ops of it.
So they have the intellectual property of some random CSS tables that everyone have on their website and a GET parameter of an URL ? Wow
I thought we all decided APIs shouldn't/couldn't be copyrighted because that was evil when Oracle and Microsoft tried to do it? I guess literally copy-pasting the docs is a flagrant violation, but it seems like that's the least of their problems. Presumably BigCorp will now get a cleanroom team to re-document the re-implemented API.
Ya, I find it even more interesting that they copied the Smartcars API. In theory, if you copy an API, you also copy its semantics. The docs for it are supposed to be interchangeable. Its touchy. For example, wouldn't most people rely and use the Java doc even for Android? Now obviously, redistributing a copyrighted doc on their own website without permission is something else. Cause I'm guessing docs are copyrightab…
The way they did it looks much shadier, but I doubt it's actually illegal. The longer text blocks are all original, even if clearly inspired by smartcars. The descriptions of paramters is mostly copied verbatim, but I have my doubts it's copyrightable, after all there are only so many ways to describe what "access_token" does. The overall structure of the documentation is also clearly copied and is probably protected by copyright, but it's easily changed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Came to say just this. They say "illegally cloning our product", but I see nothing illegal so far and I'd love to be corrected. I doubt it is so, but even if those tokens pass the threshold of originality[0], does a few blobs of superficial text justify a lawsuit? Things would be dramatically different if they'd copied source code, but so far, it's just documentation. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_o…
Directly copying a document is simple copyright infringement. Just because it's documentation doesn't mean everyone has a free license to copy and redistribute it. Whether or not any violations occurred in copying code probably depends on whether any employees with company secrets were poached and involved in development. That's a very big, well known no-no amongst tech companies. It's why Compaq had a complete "clea…