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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

#411

Post by mkhalil »

mkhalil wrote: post #345
stcredzero wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, to be fair, I wrote the comment, then immediately thought, okay that could be misinterpreted, then added the parenthetical right afterwards. I didn't do an "(EDIT:)" because I thought no one would have come in so soon. The poor sap might have fallen prey to my foolish decision to use an optimistic concurrency protocol.

I commend you for your honesty. Also, I don't think that he was totally wrong in calling it out, but the phrasing he used was very unnecessary. It would be better phrased as a question, like: "Don't you think it's racist to refer to them as "The Chinese"?" or something less dumb than accusing you of racism. I understand HN is a tech place, but since race can play a factor in practically all subjects, it can be a heal…

> Knee jerk rapid reactions aren't an example of "spoken about maturely."

I literally said his response was dumb so I'm not really sure what your point is by claiming I am considering his reaction mature.

I understand if you misread my comment, but I'm baffled otherwise. Thankfully, this is the internet and we can talk it through if we want.

(edit: typo)

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

#412

Post by asveikau »

evanlivingston wrote: post #221
jwr wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its also par for the course No, it is not. The world would be a much better place if we all started doing what is right. This isn't difficult: stealing and copying API design and API documentation is wrong. Make a note of the company, people who work there, and VCs who invested. Computers are good at quickly finding information: one day you might want to do business with one of those people or VCs and digging up th…

Why is it wrong?

Copyright infringement? Plagiarism?

I hope most here can agree that taking a web page, doing command-C, command-V, changing a few words in a small amount and passing it off as your own work is wrong.

This is not even about cloning an API.

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

#413

Post by kbenson »

int_19h wrote: post #406
asveikau wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least the iPod/Pad/Phone stuff isn't US-centric - these are colloquially used to refer players/tablets/smartphones in many different languages.

Of those, the only one I would say that's actually fairly generic is ipod, but that's also the one that's been relegated largely useless as it's an "also" feature of everything else. I don't event here people refer to their non-iphone as an iphone, or their tablet as an ipad. People have have one of those might refer to theirs, and the class in general this way, but given they are actually in the minority of owners for those devices usually, I definitely don't hear it all that often as the generic term.

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

#414

Post by gowld »

evanlivingston wrote: post #233
selectiveshift wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because people and companies who do this add no value to society. They are parasites.

What if they provide the product at a lower price?

Stealing from Peter and donating some of the gains to Paul is not ethical.

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

#415

Post by tcgv »

> Otonomo’s docs are a systematically written rip-off of ours

> Did none of the over 100 Otonomo employees (according to LinkedIn) think that what they were doing was wrong?

> Today we are taking legal action. We have sent Otonomo a cease and desist, demanding that they immediately stop ripping off our hard work.

Is publicly available documentation protected by intellectual property rights?

Since I'm not familiar with the subject I'm trying to understand the grounds for taking the legal action in this situation.

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

#416

Post by gowld »

iandanforth wrote: post #301
joshfraser wrote: post #286

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…

Sadly this is exactly what should be done in most contracts. (In a hypothetical alternate world where law worked more like OSS). Of course it was unethical for them to do it without telling you and trying to charge you $5k for it, but law would be a heck of a lot cheaper if openness and code re-use were the default.

nolo.com for standard contracts. You are welcome to stary a business or an open-source effort to publish standard contract templates.

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

#417

Post by ChickeNES »

mirimir wrote: post #359
inlined wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself You never know. When someone ripped off Parse we were able to deduce which version of our JS SDK was ripped off by which bugs weren’t fixed. We had a weird moral dilemma: we were upset at the copycat yet concerned that their users had security vulnerabilities unpatched. [Edit: added quote to clarify to what I was responding]

If they didn't catch bugs, maybe they also wouldn't catch booby-traps. Are there examples where developers have done that?

FTDI modified the driver for their USBRS232 chips so that it would brick counterfeits: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/10/ftdis...

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

#418

Post by alpaca128 »

int_19h wrote: post #406
asveikau wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

At least the iPod/Pad/Phone stuff isn't US-centric - these are colloquially used to refer players/tablets/smartphones in many different languages.

I can hardly remember someone using an Apple(or any brand really) product name for the whole product category, it's rare in my experience. Sometimes there's a (grand)parent calling every game console "nintendo", but that's about it.

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

#419

Post by your-nanny »

joeax wrote: post #100
ChuckMcM wrote: post #44

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…

This is pretty egregious, but in reality the only thing that was copied was the docs for the API, not the API itself. The other company still has the write all the backend code, and given their track record of just ripping stuff off, may not have the engineering chops to pull it off. In addition, as Smartcar continuously improves their product and API, the other company can only react to these changes. If I was the O…

But the design choices wrt the public interface is not nothing either!

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

#420

Post by kristopolous »

Same thing has happened to us more than once. I blame the founders for not seeing the scalable parts and running with them.

I'm tired of building things, getting knocked off and then having to say "welp didn't see that coming" because I totally did from miles away.

It takes good engineers and good founders. If one group are bozos who don't listen it doesn't work.

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