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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

#61

Post by Veen »

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…

Product ideas are not subject to copyright. Documentation is. If developers copy other products' documentation "all the time" then they should stop (unless the documentation has a licence that allows it). Doing something "all the time" doesn't make it moral or legal.

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

#63

Post by pizzapill »

ttoinou wrote: post #40
dangus wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Couldn't they have written exactly the same things, taking inspiration ?

There is a UUID they use in a example that is 1:1 copied.

> For example, the number of random version-4 UUIDs which need to be generated in order to have a 50% probability of at least one collision is 2.71 quintillion [...] This number is equivalent to generating 1 billion UUIDs per second for about 85 years, and a file containing this many UUIDs, at 16 bytes per UUID, would be about 45 exabytes, many times larger than the largest databases currently in existence, which are on the order of hundreds of petabytes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universally_unique_identifier#...

The probability that they generated the same text 1:1 and a UUID in it by random chance is very, very, very, very slim.

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

#65

Post by jacquesm »

gnicholas wrote: post #59
jacquesm wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bessemer & Co. would not spend this kind of money without doing DD to the point where their competitive review would have snagged the OP's efforts. So most likely they know.

Sounds like VCs need a plagiarism detector for websites (think TurnItIn) to make sure their portfolio companies aren't blatant ripoffs.

We always check this sort of stuff for our customers, and more than once it has triggered.

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

#69

Post by stanleydrew »

jacquesm wrote: post #50
yingw787 wrote: post #34

Holy crap. The only way forward for Bessemer et al. VCs is to immediately withdraw their funding for this “company” and cut all ties in order to prove that they had no forewarning that this is how their money was being used. There are so few actors this visibly bad that if they didn’t do anything they would become “that guy” everybody avoids, in both the deals and funding space, when orgs do their due diligence. So t…

Bessemer & Co. would not spend this kind of money without doing DD to the point where their competitive review would have snagged the OP's efforts. So most likely they know.

Bessemer & Co. likely know that Otonomo is building a drop-in replacement copy of Smartcar's API. I'm not sure there's anything terribly controversial about that, although reasonable people may disagree.

Bessemer & Co. probably don't know that the docs are literally being copied though.

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

#70

Post by jacquesm »

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…

That smoking gun is smoking plenty. That and the typos are the kind of proof that are a godsend during a lawsuit when you're on the offense and a really really bad day when you're on the defense.
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