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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

#501

Post by trevor-e »

Am I one of the few failing to see what is so egregious here? Looking at the screenshots, the documentation text differs quite a lot. The API structure is very similar and many of the parameters have the same names, but I thought the HN crowd generally agrees that API's should not be copyrightable?

To me this looks like a smart business strategy: Otonomo can migrate SmartCar customers to their platform with very few code changes. With that said, copying the identifier from the SmartCar's documentation could be seen as lazy or clever.

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

#502

Post by nathanvanfleet »

kumarski wrote: post #500

Reddit faked comments in the early days. Youtube & Vkontakte hosted pirated content knowingly. In the early days, iOS apps juiced their valuations with vanity invite metrics that entailed invite-walls that juiced downloads to access full functionality of apps. (invite 50 people to use full app features). Some of these were acquired for 8 figures plus. Paypal created a bot that bought goods on eBay and then, insisted…

I am not really sure if this is very insightful. Other people having done something doesn't make it suddenly ethical. The documentary (and book) about Theranos goes over the "fake it until you make it mentality of Silicon Valley. It's only a useful tool if you can actually eventually pull it off. Of course if you can fake it in a way that's not a felony that can help too.

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

#503

Post by istjohn »

kumarski wrote: post #500

Reddit faked comments in the early days. Youtube & Vkontakte hosted pirated content knowingly. In the early days, iOS apps juiced their valuations with vanity invite metrics that entailed invite-walls that juiced downloads to access full functionality of apps. (invite 50 people to use full app features). Some of these were acquired for 8 figures plus. Paypal created a bot that bought goods on eBay and then, insisted…

[flagged]

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

#504

Post by nathanvanfleet »

ethbro wrote: post #151
keithwhor wrote: post #114

Smartcar has raised $12M in financing from A16Z and NEA. The difference between $12M and $55M is a single financing stage. What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking. This is great PR for Smartcar all things considered, and I actually think has a fantastic silver lining:…

> What likely happened here is a remote team was paid to generate docs with a directive like, “Smartcar has a good API,” and stole them directly. Then the management team didn’t bother checking. If a remote team is writing your API documentation by copying and pasting, then what is the actual implementation team building from?

Seems as if you are wildly speculating?

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

#505

Post by bjourne »

scient wrote: post #53
Veen wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you being deliberately obtuse? It's the contents of the tables that have been ripped off.

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 think not.

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

#506

Post by mrgordon »

woah wrote: post #458
gepoch wrote: post #437

I haven't seen this mentioned anywhere so I thought I'd post it to see what you all think... IANAL, IMHO, etc. I searched for one of the unique tokens in the docs: https://www.google.com/search?q=0facda3319 That pulls up their SDK github repo: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/doc/readme.... Which is published with a standard MIT license: https://github.com/smartcar/node-sdk/blob/master/LICENSE.md Whic…

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 that the docs in the blog post are not the same as the markdown document in the repo that appears to be MIT licensed.

Since they copied the docs verbatim, I suspect they will change the docs very soon. I'd be quite ashamed if I were Otonomo. Whether they have to pay financial penalties or admit guilt in court, we'll see.

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

#507

Post by ssnistfajen »

stcredzero wrote: post #160
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…

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 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.

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

#508

Post by int_19h »

kristianc wrote: post #453
MereInterest wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about Q-tip? Band-aid? Adrenaline? Kleenex? There's quite a lot of them floating around. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...

Seems to be much more of a US thing. As a European I'd use the category name for most of those. Some of the category names don't even match up - adhesive tape is definitely not what comes to mind for Durex for me.

The specific brands are usually country- or region-specific. It's just that you often don't notice the ones that have been genericized in your culture.

Consider: thermos, escalator, linoleum, trampoline, zipper, scotch (as in tape), jeep, xerox, jacuzzi, dictaphone...

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

#509

Post by mikekchar »

hathawsh wrote: post #469
ricardobeat wrote: post #460

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was going to say the same, but it looks like the documentation mentioned is for the client indeed. If the client is MIT licensed, are you infringing on anything by writing a compatible API?

That question is the essence of the ongoing Oracle v. Google case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google... .

The difference is that even though the Java API was licensed under the GPL, Google did not accept the GPL license. They implemented the API without a license. Were they willing to implement their code under the GPL there would have been nothing that Oracle could have done.

I'm with others who say that an API should not be copyright-able, however it appears that in this case it doesn't matter. They may have a license! I haven't looked into it at all, but if it's true that Smartcar have implemented this API and distributed it under an MIT license, I think it will be really hard slogging to say, "We only meant to license some of the IP. We just gave a license and decided we'd wait until after the fact to tell people what it covered".

I am a huge advocate of free software, but it really bothers me when people license something without having any clue what it actually means. I can't tell you the number of projects I've encountered who say things like, "I put it under the GPL, but you can't sell it", or "I put it under an open source license, but you can't use any of the code; just look at it", or "I put this game under a free software license, but you can't use any of the story for the game because software licenses only cover code", or "I put my code in the public domain, but that doesn't mean you can make a few changes and claim that it's yours", etc, etc. If you want a "I'll tell you if it's ok after you've done it" license, don't grant a general license! Reserve all your rights and handle licencing on a case by case basis.

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

#510

Post by mikekchar »

Gpetrium wrote: post #152
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…

>The reality is that if an idea is really good, the people who came up with it know it better than anyone and that gives them a tremendous advantage in terms of knowing what is important and what isn't. I have to disagree with you emphasizing this point. If someone/entity manages to get your idea or code, they may be able to sell the solution at a fraction of the cost since their R&D was lower than yours. When the en…

What I find a bit crazy is why don't large corporations do this more often? I literally told my manager when I worked at Corel that we should do this: Find a promising looking startup, clone their offering and blow them out of the water by virtue of the fact that we have 500 sales and marketing people with 20 years of experience (not to mention by being second to the market we can learn how to avoid all the legacy problems the startup endured). We were in a "new ventures" team and I figured instead of going along with cockamamie schemes dreamed up by our PGMs that had virtually no hope of success, we should enter markets that had at least some advance proven success. Nope. Not going to happen. We needed to build something that nobody had ever thought of before. While I can understand the idea, I still think its a massive mistake for an established company. Why enter markets where you can't play to your strengths (muscle)? I never could figure it out...
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