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:…
That's quite an assumption that they just paid a remote team to do that and their management overlooked it.
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.
Some people built the world's most popular operating system doing just that - copying Java's API.
I think that is reductionistic and misguided. I don't know the exact inside story of course, but this is how I read it, and how I honestly think this happened. They chose to have a garbage-collected, bytecode-VM-executed, OO language as the main platform for their external apps (the internal kernel is a still Linux with its regular C interface). They decided to implement their own VM from scratch (Dalvik). They decided to use Java language, including syntax and basic system APIs, which would make it very accessible for a ton of existing developers. They could as easily gone for another syntax and base API. It wouldn't have been more effort to design and implement (arguably, it could have been less). But of course it wouldn't be such an easy sell to existing Java developers. They opted to interpret Java language and API design as an open, public value, and that's what was dealt with in court.
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…
This situation makes me think of the video game industry and people recreating self hosted World of Warcraft servers by reversing the client code.
Blizzard was able to shut down the private servers.
That question is the essence of the ongoing Oracle v. Google case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google... .
The APIs discussed in that case are only "classical" APIs, i.e. code APIs, not "web APIs", which are really protocols. Despite the fact that recently people have started calling protocols APIs, the two have huge differences from a copyright perspective[1], so that extrapolating from the former to the latter is tenuous, regardless of the ultimate outcome of that case. Moreover, the court ruling makes it seem that if t…
20 years ago was involved in the sale of a division to some investors. Involved in the same way a chicken is in the poultry business. The law firm didn't know to sanitize their documents. The upshot was they was billing a lot of hours at $500/hr for a clerk to do simple search and replace on previously existing contracts[1]. We'd read the contract find stuff that was utterly wrong and tell them. And the clerk would p…
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!
I wouldn't hold my breath on law being disrupted, they are quite happy the way they are thank you very much.
>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 pr…
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…
And this is exactly why software patents are not as evil as most people think.
They are being abused, but if you can close that loophole (prevent non practicing entities from enforcing patents), then software patents are critical to protect innovation.
Apple is the perfect counter example here. Apple wasn't the first company to make an MP3 player, but the generic term is basically 'iPod'. Apple wasn't the first company to make a smartphones or touchscreens, but the generic term for a touchscreen smartphone is basically 'iPhone'. Apple wasn't the first company to make a tablet, but the generic term is basically 'iPad'. Apple didn't invent high resolution displays fo…
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.
I’d say this is by design. A major goal / win in marketing is when your market confuses your brand name with a product category.
The USA, love it or hate it, is the most dominant marketing force on planet earth.
That question is the essence of the ongoing Oracle v. Google case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Google... .
I thought most people (including myself) on HN were in favor of Google in that case, that APIs shouldn't be copyrightable. What exactly is Smartcar's product? Is it just the API design? If so, I personally think this is in the same boat as that case, and I don't really see having the same API as copying either.
I agree that copyrighting and endpoint just because the request and response have the same structure is insane.
The docs would be something different thou, but again, I don't know how the docs were licensed.
I'm not really sure what your point is by claiming I am considering his reaction mature. Actually, your comment could indeed be read that way. Therefore I'm obliged to push back against such a position, even if you didn't mean it precisely that way. I'm generally having a conversation for the sake of the 3rd party. The lurkers are the majority of this site's users. Thankfully, this is the internet and we can talk it…
> My un-provable suspicion is that civil discourse itself is being targeted by nefarious forces. I don't know if it's a collective of forces, but I have to agree with the opinion that civil discourse is being targeted. There's been enormous political polarization in the past decade or less, and there is a growing list of topics or social movements that if I even LIST as debatable or in need of further discussion, wou…
And the worst part is, once you have been attacked and mobbed by this new public shaming tactic, very very rarely is being defensive or opening a dialogue something people want, they just want vengeance, and submissiveness.
That's a brilliant and concise way of putting it. I have a mind to steal it!