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 copyrightable, but not APIs. The whole thing is getting more interesting to be honest.
Good opinions here. I worked at very early stage startup, and our huge competitors with 1 billion worth of funding were stealing our shit from day 1. Thankfully, we didnt spec out a nice API and all that shit because we were in startup mode. That makes it a bit harder to copy things our stuff because it was a huge pile of undocumented software and data.
I think that is just life in tech now. You put out a 'feature' in your app that is new and cool. Two weeks later the same feature shows up in your competitors app.
In our case, always better to be ahead of the curve. You've got a small team with 20 folks who are putting pressure on the 100 person teams at these giant companies.
They could just say "Our API is identical to the Smartcars API, documentation can be found here (link)". Smartcars might even be happy about that as it's free advertising.
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.
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 "clean room" to reverse engineer the IBM PC.
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.
I seem to have missed that, thanks for pointing it out! Then we arrive to the question: is a copyright claim over a few paragraphs of text worth the effort?
Maybe, maybe not. I don't know if this kind of thing reaches trial at any point, but I wonder if discovery would turn up any sort of direct code copying or reverse engineering done by poached employees.
Perhaps the company even used decompiled code, it's not out of the realm of possibility that they simply directly stole the whole thing.
I'm not sure any of that is actually likely, but I think that the fact that some paragraphs are directly lifted is a massive red flag.
I don't know that "we" decided that at all, and I don't think that "we" were ever naive enough to assume that it's okay to copy Oracle or Microsoft's documentation or code just because they're big and "we" don't like them.
This appears to be a lawyer's dream case and I wouldn't be surprised that, if this case makes it to court, discovery finds some actual stolen code. If this company ever poached employees they'd better be very, very careful.
IBM "bluewashes" their terminology and vocabulary for this same reason. They can easily catch someone else using IBM-specific language, and they'll often call very common things by unique and very different names compared to other companies. This can also help cover for any perceived issues with employees bringing over ideas from their previous company.
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.
Unfortunately for the little guy it's the winner take all market. If the well-funded company wins at the end, no one would even remember the other one existed. Is it ethical? Depends on your ethical stands. Happens all the time.
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.
That seems totally backwards to me. Did you mean "unlikely"? The higher profile the investors, the bigger the news story if something dodgy's happening.
In either case, how does that relate to the existence of a reasonable explanation?
The documentation only has a screenshot of the brands supported. Would be nice to just be able to lookup my car brand and make support in the docs instead of having to make an Auth flow first...
Agreed. The homepage is confusing and doesn't give me some of the information I need.
The requirements/supported brands & models should be somewhere prominent on the front page, and I'm honestly still confused.
Similar any country restrictions. This being limited to the US should not be hidden three levels deep in some FAQ.
The Otonomo isn't any better though, it doesn't even seem to have any links to the docs.
Only a very, very small selection of cars support this.
As it stands now, the documentation is very much misleading as Smartcar makes it sound as if you can use this on any vehicle. Look again at sahaskatta's response, he/she made it sound as if you just have to read the docs to 'unlock your car with an app'. But in reality, you'll also need to have a brand new and very specific car if you want to do this.
Sahaskatta also asked for 'any feedback I have'. I gave that and now I'm being downvoted for my criticism...
A lot of new cars do have internet built in whether that is exposed for your use or not.
My 2014 Chevy gave me 2 years of their mobile app which could unlock/lock the car via cellular for free. I know the car still has a data connection available because if I play songs via bluetooth it pulls in album art that doesn't exist on my phone via Gracenote. I can also hit the OnStar button and talk to someone via the car and I don't pay for that.
That Chevy lock/unlock API may not be a public API but there is nothing stopping someone from reversing it. Or just signing up to use it: https://developer.gm.com/vehicle-apis
Every business has an obligation to make money. However, the VC game has been filled with a win at all cost mentality that has led to the downfall of many companies - as well as evidence that the companies themselves are not prepare to become public (they aren't worthy of the public trust).
One could argue that the market is okay with these types of things. But, we talk about doing the right thing. And if it's not just lip service, this could be a great opportunity to prove it.
I don't have a problem with copying another API for compatibility; Think of the Oracle/Google lawsuit, and the fact that reverse engineering for compatibility is already a protected right.
I do have major issues with verbatim copying of documents and websites, there's an obvious copyright violation there.
This may be a silver lining - a competitor has shown that the work you have done, exactly the work you have done is worth 55 million in VC funding.
There are enough people on here who can point you in the right direction, or arrange introductions.
Spend at least one of those millions on PR and lawyers to ensure it's clear who has the moral high ground, and who should be hired if a company has to choose between you - I mean if they are prepared to breach copyright so blatantly here, who knows what other problems they have in their repos - enterprises can be very conservatice on unknown legal risks like that
I would agree on this with one caveat - you should be able to run this battle on a back burner or don't go there. If it would consume you ... Don't. Your time and positive energy are too important. But if you can (it's what's in the CEO learning curve imho) spent a small faction of your time dealing with competitors. If this one is a proper competitor and you have leverage (public goodwill, cash to burn for litigation and communication) - go there. Your investors are probably with you if the threat is both to you and their investment. The outrage factor will probably play into your hands as well. A bankrolled litigation fund (smallish) is doable.
Or, go get $55 Million in VC funding from someone else.
You have a major head start. Your company is theoretically worth at least as much as theirs.
Complaining about competitors copying you might slow them down a bit. But it will probably slow you down a lot more. On the other hand, using their valuation to raise $55M+ would be a huge boost for you.
"Your company is theoretically worth at least as much as theirs."
Maybe.
Having worked in the auto industry (albeit well over a decade ago), it is one of those industries where connections, and knowing how to navigate the relationships, goes a long way. I don't know much about either of these companies, or their founders, but in B2B scenarios like this, the value is often related to much more than just the underlying technology.
If I were Smartcar, I would look closely at relationships, physical and virtual proximity to major automotive players, and how their suppliers prefer to do business. And, perhaps they already have...
The fact that in-car tech is so bad in general is a good indicator that the auto industry is a relationship industry. Its a golf course based business, and building the tech is the "easy" part. See also: the payments and especially credit card space - if you don't start up with the backing of a major player your entire business hinges on bus-dev and exec relationships to convince the incumbents to let you play in the space.
If the work SmartCar had done was worth $55 million, I suspect Company X (or their VC) would have used their money to purchase this company for $55 million instead of deciding to waste the time cloning it.
Instead, think of the work as a means to an end, the end being revenue.
Company X was able to raise $55 million because they were able to demonstrate that the potential market could support the revenue necessary to justify such funds, and that they could use the work already done by SmartCar to get to market more quickly.
Now, in my opinion this is very shady and should be grounds for a lawsuit, but in terms of raw business savvy, the $55 million is for a smart business that knows how to execute for less. If money raised was in direct correlation to a quality product or the ability to produce such a product, rather than in direct correlation with e.g., the team (cabal?) involved and their ability to make returns for investors, then we’d be living in a very different world.
I can imagine the "Kickstarter scam" running in the VC scene, the Kickstarter scam being: you show ads for a product on Kickstarter with the line "300 thousand dollars in backers already! Get yours too!", but that money isn't from genuine backers, coming from your friends instead. Then a chump seeing the ad will think "Oh, this new gadget is popular, it must be good, let me buy 1 for the introductory price!" and gives you his money. Then you just keep the chumps updated with "Sorry for the delays, we have manufacturing difficulties" month after month.
So in the VC scene, you could get your friend to invest in your idea for $$$, get other investors interested, and... profit? I can imagine it'd be nice to spend the genuine VC money on company Lamborghinis and penthouses for a few months, declare bankruptcy, rinse and repeat (just steal the API from the next "Smartcar"...).
> I can imagine it'd be nice to spend the genuine VC money on company Lamborghinis and penthouses for a few months, declare bankruptcy, rinse and repeat
or simply refocus the startup on used lambos and penthouses :)
Depends who is hosting their documentation. Under the DCMA, hosting providers are obligated to take content down when they recieve a valid takedown notice (They can put it back up when they get a counter notice).
The DMCA can be used to put a fire under them to file a DMCA counternotice, at which point the whole issue with their hosting provider is done and you are down to the basic question of are you going to file, litigate, and win an actual copyright lawsuit on a timeline and at a cost that leaves you with a viable startup.
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.
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 literally cloning it and using documentation similarity for a standardized protocol is not really cutting it.
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.
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.
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.
...and of course Java was somewhat open to begin with, which isn't the case for the technology the company that got copied in story. There's always the next level in douchebaggery, if Google was really wrong copying those headers to begin with.
Copying the headers make sense even if you rewrite the implementation from scratch, it gives a very basic layer of verification that your implementation matches the original (if the declarations in the prototype clash with your rewrite, there's probably something wrong in there). It doesn't sound like a particularly bad or unethical technical decision to me, at least as long as it's done otherwise completely legally (which has been a very expensive question to settle).
Copy/pasting docs and rewording everything to try and hide that fact is a lot lazier and shadier IMO.
Why do you say that? In some regards yes, and some no.
I think the intellectual property is in the APIs/"headers". That is what Android uses from Java and what this company is copying from SmartCar. Its not easy to write a good API. (But, I should say, once you have the headers it is not as tough to populate them with code.) As for coping actual documentation, that is just plain stupid but not the _worse_ crime here.
Now, what is different is that many of us don't approve the way Oracle is enforcing the rights on this information. Java is not like the SmartCar APIs in that it has been free to use for so long. All the same I think Oracle should have the legal right to do this.
Many may disagree about Oracle vs Android but I think it is devaluing the work of people like James Gosling _and_ SmartCar if you say there is not intellectual value in the code/API headers.
> Many may disagree about Oracle vs Android but I think it is devaluing the work of people like James Gosling _and_ SmartCar if you say there is not intellectual value in the code/API headers.
It is not the same simply because Java is an open-source project. SmartCar, on the other hand, is not. I would argue that, because of the nature of open-source, Google should have been able to do as they pleased to facilitate allowing java code on their OS. I know that many would disagree. But to say that there is not intellectual value in the code/API of Java would be disingenuous, and ultimately incorrect; I can say with certainty that I would never say that, so thank you for putting words in my mouth.
Sorry, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth, particularly based on a mere four words. I was talking to people who I have heard argue "it's only the headers".
I appreciate your response. I am not clear on if that particular information is open source. A quick Google search does not seem to give a good (single) answer.
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.
I was curious if some of these docs were auto-generate or templated copy, so I double checked some of the text.
"The redirect_uri provided in Authorize User step" appears exactly once on the Internet according to Google: at smartcar.com. It looks like Otonomo did in fact copy/paste from the SmartCar website.
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 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.
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.
How do you do it? Just using Google on various phrases? Are you checking for your customers our on your customers? If the latter, why do you care (most vendors wouldn't).
We have a team of people that exhaustively search for players in the same space. The 'Google on various phrases' is more or less the gist of it, the more unique the better.
It's not an automated process so fairly time consuming.
> Are you checking for your customers our on your customers?
We do not check on our customers, we check for our customers. And usually pre-investment.
> If the latter, why do you care (most vendors wouldn't).
You are probably wrong about that, copying something verbatim will get you a C&D pdq in most cases.
Thanks for clarifying! I'm still confused as to why a vendor would check on a customer or care if they're infringing.
I sell a SaaS reading product and don't care what my customers are using it to read, or whether their own websites our products contain any infringing content.
> I sell a SaaS reading product and don't care what my customers are using it to read, or whether their own websites our products contain any infringing content.
What they are using your product for might very well turn into 'aiding and abetting', make sure your TOS is up to snuff and that you have it checked over by a lawyer to verify that if your customers do something illegal with your service you don't end up being on the hook.
As for the second, that might be a good hint that your customer is not above-board and will bear closer watching.
I'm not sure I follow (and I'm a lawyer). If someone uses my chrome extension to research how to rob a bank, and then they go do it, what is the legal theory that puts me at risk? Is Google at risk because they're using chrome? Or the computer manufacturer?
Napster is one end of the spectrum, but I'm not sure how anything short of that is a legal risk. Are there cases or legal theories I'm unaware of?
There is a lot under 'SaaS' that you could use to further illegal schemes that do not fall under 'chrome extensions'.
Off the top of my head: anything payment related and two sided market places (money laundering, false binning), anything that allows large volumes of data to be moved around (copyright violation, child pornography, exfiltration of data from corporate networks), proxy services and spider services (DOS attacks, harassment, TOS circumvention and copyright violation) etc.
So nothing that would require legal theories, just the usual abuse of service.
They could be on the hook, except the ToS of Firefox Send includes this language:
You hereby represent and warrant that your content will not infringe the rights of any third party and will comply with any content guidelines presented by Mozilla...
We may suspend or terminate your access to the Services at any time for any reason, including, but not limited to, if we reasonably believe:... you create risk or possible legal exposure for us...
You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Mozilla [et al] from and against any and all third party claims and expenses, including attorneys' fees, arising out of or related to your use of the Services (including, but not limited to, from any content uploaded by you).
The indemnification bit is pretty much testimony to the fact that Mozilla also realizes the abuse potential of 'Send', but it may not work out well for them if they end up as the defendant in some lawsuit and the party breaking the TOS is penniless.
Just because something is a blatant ripoff, doesn't mean it's not a good investment. VCs are doing investments based on predicted ROI, not uniqueness. Lyft and Uber are extremely similar, but the particulars of the business are much more relevant to the investment opportunity.
Are you suggesting that the article isn't describing an open and shut case, our that business models may in fact be protectable? As a former lawyer, I would say that neither of these is even a remotely close call (assuming the description is accurate).
Technically, yes. But practically, in cases so blatantly obvious it is fine to draw your own conclusion.
In one court case - where a company I had a majority stake in was the plaintiff - the defendant basically had to admit that they copied the code and content of our website. Their defense: 'we did not copy it from them, we copied it from someone else' (without specifying what the 'someone else' was). Needless to say that did not end well, we were surprised they actually went to court but since this was in a country where the loser pays the court costs of the winner that did not overly bother me.
Lawyers do not call the shots, clients do. So if a client wants to take a losing battle to court a typical lawyer will caution them but will not hand in their commission.
He lost the civil suit. And the only reason you bring it up is because it is exceptional. The general rule is that the courts tend to get it right but there are obvious (and glaring) exceptions.
The quality of your lawyer will help in the gray areas, and may get you a reduced sentence in case of a criminal affair but in general you will lose if you go to court with a case where you were in the wrong. It's not a perfect system but for most cases it works out.
You don't 'win' a criminal suit. The standards of proof in a criminal suit are different than the standards of proof in a civil one, because the punishment in a criminal suit is much heavier than in a civil suit (where the maximum is some monetary penalty, whereas in a criminal suit it is imprisonment or in some countries even death).
I really think your view of the legal system is somewhat theoretical, there is no such case that it can always be won given the right lawyer or argument.
He didn't get death penalty or imprisonment is a win to me.
The reality is legal system consist of human in various capacity, judge, lawyer, jury, even public opinion. Its all boil down to convincing these human. Given the right method or argument, you can convince any human.
Sure some case are harder then the other but doesn't mean it impossible. Really really hard != impossible.
>there is no such case that it can always be won given the right lawyer or argument
TurnItIn resells all of the data you submit to them. Any paper a student is required to sent to the service (it's not optional at schools where it's in place) is added to the dataset which they ultimately profit from, with nothing paid back to the students who own the original IP.
It'd be like YouTube using your videos for ContentId, but not having any avenue for you to profit from said videos. Oh and uploading to Youtube would be mandatory.
There was a lawsuit about this, decided on TurnItIn's side, but I still disagree.
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.
Bessemer's last round was a series 'B', by then the bits and pieces would have all been in place, whether it was public or not isn't even all that important.
It does raise an interesting question though: how will the OP prove that their work is the original, that might hinge on a lot of unknowns, more difficult still if the work was originally lifted by an employee of the company and then passed on to Otonomo with them being the unwitting recipients.
However, the Smartcar CEO replied in another thread that they use Readme.io for their docs, which can autogenerate using Swagger, which automatically parses hints in code.
So it is definitely possible that the codebase got stolen and the perps missed changing a few hints, resulting in the Otonomo samples generating identical sample code, as shown.
>> 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.
Anyone considering that should be aware that Oracle vs Google is still not finished.
Even a drop-in replacement does not normally go so far as to have verbatim copied documentation. Which makes me wonder how far the copying went, if they actually obtained the code as well.
They would not have looked at the API docs of either the startup they are investing in or their competitor (99.95%). I've worked as VC and technical detail at such a level is basically non existent. Economics, team, market take up the vast majority of the effort.
I’ve been through a technical due diligence for an acquisition and the process was severely lacking. In total it took ~8 hours (compared to ~80 for financial diligence). It felt like a once-over smoke test to eek out any major red flags.
I almost wish you had done my technical diligence, Jacques. I spent a week preparing for it and was very proud of what I’d built.
We get that a lot actually. We do quite a few 'B' and later rounds (43 deals last year!) and apparently we're the hardest exam to pass for, but the people we work with are generally really happy that they finally get to show off all their hard work to people who really appreciate what they've done.
It's five of us for a week with a super intensive interview on the Wednesday and it is always the highlight of the week for me. What is also neat is that most of these turn into very long term relationships post deal, not necessarily financial ones, just that the interview day makes the whole thing a two-way street where the tech team will occasionally reach out when they are stumped on some problem or need outsider perspective.
Ya, we got very close to closing with a VC in SV. Their technical due diligence consisted of one of their contacts from Google calling and asking me questions about our tech stack. It appeared that the Google dev derailed the deal because we were building our product in PHP. That's how they decided we must not know what we are talking about.
Good to see that that did not reduce your long term chances. I really don't like these out-of-hand dismissals without doing the homework first, PHP is not exactly the worlds most elegant language (to put it mildly) but it is definitely not a disqualifying one either.
This is correct. The odds that a VC investment fails because the company copied work and gets caught/sued is very low. Thus, there is little incentive to dig through all the weeds to ensure that absolutely no work was copied.
Ultimately, the VCs probably just ask the founders "Hey, your product looks very similar to product A, how is yours different and did you develop it on your own?" If the founder denies copying and gives a reasonable answer for how they developed it on their own, the VC then makes a judgement. They also may hire some consultants or have some outside experts look at the tech stack to make sure no red flags pop up.
However, you can't dig through every line of code and every document in diligence and compare it to several other companies code/docs. It would take too long and everyone involved (VCs, lawyers, start-up) would be annoyed.
VCs are not banks and are not staffed like banks, and they don't do DD like banks. I've been in the weeds in six VC rounds and through an IPO, you'll be incredibly disappointed what passes for DD for VCs.
> you'll be incredibly disappointed what passes for DD for VCs.
There are lots of VCs, some are better at this than others, some really suck. On the whole though they tend to do their homework at least on the commercial front and a competitor with a feature-for-feature identical offering would have most likely been spotted even at the 'not so good ones', irrespective of whether or not the API docs were made public.
The interesting questions to me are:
- what was the exact timeline?
- was an (ex) employee of the company involved in the copying?
- is Otonomo itself aware of the fact that they have this sitting on their website?
- How far down does it go? Is it just the API documentation, or also the underlying code?
VCs love to tout how they reject 99.9% of their pitches. What's the competitive advantage for them to fund an investment with minimal technical review? Wouldn't avoiding the next Theranos be worth it?
No. VC is about numbers, getting into as many deals as possible because a very small number return enough to pay for the fund. 99% of deals are expected to fail. In-depth due diligence costs too and would take away money that could be better spent on just another deal.
There is no such thing as "withdrawing funding" in this context. The Series A is long closed and Bessemer is deeply entwined with the company's governance.
The most severe move they could take would be to enforce whatever contractual mechanisms they have to block additional financing pending an independent investigation and replacement of responsible parties. Or they could directly force the matter if investors hold a majority Board vote.
If the investors have a board and shareholder majority (which they may not), and really thought this was a terrible investment decision that they want to get out of, then they could vote to wind down the company immediately, redistributing the assets pro-rata (with possible liquidation preferences). This would be roughly the same as "withdrawing funding".
They could recoup a huge part of their investment before things get worse. But again, afaik this requires a shareholder majority, barring any strings/triggers on the investment terms that could be activated.
The latest decision in that saga is that yes, they can be. Whether that holds up in the Supreme Court is an open question. Most of us hope it doesn't, I suspect.
Copying documentation is definitely a copyright violation. Similar situation exists with recipes - a list of ingredients can't be copyrighted, but the wording of the steps can be. You have to at least put it in your own words.
The docs are definitely copyrighted. Same as if you wrote a blog post and they copied it, it would be copyright infringement.
Otonomo sounds like a deeply unethical and shady company. If I was doing any kind of business with them I would not continue to do so. While it would be hard to sue them, hopefully when you Google them in the future the fact they ripped of Smartcar will be one of the first results.
> 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.
I mean, you might eventually be right. But why "immediately"? What's wrong with taking some time to talk to people, hear the other side, find out more details, do a proper investigation, and then decide what to do?
I am sorry to hear that but it is does not really surprise me. I bet they will just rewrite their docs a little bit and then go on with their business.
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.
But you can understand the outrage: now two sets of developers can do this.
I'm still getting over the fact I upgraded the radio on my car back in 2010 with a USB stick and using the driver's side door to control the process. I think a well-documented API that shows exactly how my car is vulnerable is a step up.
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 money in the bank able to spend it on marketing and spinning the narrative in their favor.
Since the ability to get a foreign company (in this case Israeli) to do anything is limited, your best bet is to out execute them. Also, love them or hate them, having patents helps in situations like these.
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. Companies have been known to talk about expensive and complicated features or options in order to get people trying to copy their success to waste time and money on something for which there is no actual demand. It is no doubt worth investing in understanding how one's enemies are getting their information and shutting that off if possible.
Their salaries, too, put [competitors] in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. If he sells his goods at nearly the same price, he cannot have the same profit, and at least, if not bankruptcy and ruin, will infallibly be his lot. If he attempts to sell them much dearer, he is likely to have so few customers that his circumstances will not be much mended.
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter 1.
I heard the model was to actually sell the European copy to the original US startup as it got bigger. It was never in their interest to end up operating an actual company. This backfired on them for one of their "investments" (I think an Airbnb clone?) when the US counterpart decided to go head and head against the Rocket's copy in Europe instead of simply acquiring.
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 OP, my reaction would be shock and horror too. But then I'd realize the old axiom of imitation is the best form of flattery.
Agreed. It sounds like a case of "this looks good, let's follow their format" and revising words/paragraphs just enough so you won't be blamed for plagiarism. The API parameters are very generic so it shouldn't be considered cloning.
It seems like you haven't seen the exact same copied parameter examples? I don't really see how this can be defended as not cloning - it's one thing to use others as "inspiration" and take in some general good ideas, but copy someone else's work in such a blatant manner is disgusting. If I were amongst their investors, I'd be pissed.
Oh I have seen it, and I'm not suggesting they haven't copied that. I'm saying that most client SDK documentation looks alike at least for authentication etc. and when you look at the examples given for Otonomo, most of it is boilerplate information.
> 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]
The article discusses Microsoft's anti-piracy measures. And it brings back horrible memories. So I had this server, running Windows Server 2000. And there was a nearby lightning strike, which bricked the motherboard.
But hey, service contract. Except that the company had gone through reorganization. So they sent me a motherboard that was comparable and compatible with the box. But it had a different seller code, so my copy of Windows Server 2000 wouldn't install.
Microsoft couldn't/wouldn't fix that. So I had to return the replacement motherboard, wait for another replacement, and install it. But hey, it all worked out in the end.
In the mid-nineties a company named Avanti stole code from Cadence Design Systems (where I worked at the time, though I had no involvement in the case). This was first discovered by an engineer noticing that error messages in the two systems were similar in ways that made no intuitive sense. Case was unusual in that several Avanti executives actually wound up going to jail for the theft.
If it wasn’t already, the docs and the code should be copyrighted. It costs nothing and should be relatively easy to litigate in the case of copy pastage lol
To lose copyright, the author has to explicitly volunteer to sell the rights or give them away. A work has copyright protections the moment it is created.
Looks to me like they are copying the entire concept, not just the docs. Seems like very little intellectual creativity went into the creation of their API.
The actual saying is "imitation is the sincerest form of flattery". Sorry, but it's a pet peeve of mine when people replace "sincerest" with "best", because it changes the point of the adage.
Because sincerity implies the flattery is entirely genuine, rather than best suggesting it is heaping praise upon you? Hadn't thought of that; it's a good distinction to make.
The docs for the API, especially for a company whose primary users are software developers, is a core part of the product offering. Just look at the investments that AWS, Twilio, and Stripe make in their docs. This stuff matters.
Given the current ruling in Oracle v. Google, though, I'd imagine Smartcar would have grounds for a legal case. If Oracle is awarded damages from Google for "copying" the Java API specification in Android, even with a different underlying implementation, then I'd imagine Smartcar can highlight the similarities to their own dispute with Otonomo. The tricky thing is it looks like Otonomo is an Israeli company so I'm not familiar with how US court rulings apply across international boundaries -- perhaps at the very least Smartcar can attain an injunction against Otonomo within the US.
"Given the current ruling in Oracle v. Google, though, I'd imagine Smartcar would have grounds for a legal case."
Which might be the best news Otonomo gets all day. In addition to outfunding them, now their competitor is going to focus their time and cycles not on the competition for this market space, but in expensive legal actions with a dubious chance of success.
If I were smartcar I would ignore Otonomo (or at least their shameless ripoffs of your public facing code bits) and double down on the business of beating them with your product.
An API usually embeds significant design decisions that are hard work to come up with. That said, there is some precedent for companies reimplementing competitors' API verbatim in order to get customers to port their applications more easily...
>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 entity is 10x+ your size, they can also afford to gather the resources that increase their odds of success (e.g. marketing specialists, engineers,etc) at a rate which you can't compete. By then, you may have spent 2-3 years creating a business that is destroyed by an external entity acting in bad faith.
Further to that point about undercutting for years, it's not going to be just $55m.
If Otonomo have raised ~$55m, it means they have very powerful, very rich backers (Bessemer, NTT, SK, Aptiv). They might realistically have another $100m over the coming years instead, if they continue making progress.
I tend to agree with the original comment, particularly for products that are still evolving.
We have a competitor who copies our features, but they don't know why we built the feature. The result is they end up copying the wrong stuff or tweaking the feature in a way that completely misses the point.
But, I agree with you in that creating a feature isn't an advantage in and of itself. Rather, it is the domain expertise that led to the creation of the feature that is the true advantage.
Agree with generally not worrying about the competition — we were a little worried since a valley startup of ex-Big4 people cloned us 3 years ago, but they haven‘t managed to come far, despite a whopping 8MM seed round (we were bootstrapped).
This example however seems to play in a different league, the extent of ripoff here is absolutely staggering.
If I were OP, I‘d immediately call Daimler‘s PR department. After the whole dieselgate shitshow, none of the German automakers are out for the slightest bit of negative PR...
Try adding some random stuff that you get for basically free with your choice of backend / implementation.
This will waste their time if its a harder problem with their backend / implementation.
Another fun thing you can do is using something that looks like a 3rd-party service/API, but is really just another domain controlled by your company. Make it something specific to your business, so they'll be tempted to use it.
IF they use it, the least you can do is terminate their access at an inconvenient time. This will frustrate their customers as they scramble to do their own implementation.
Final thing you can do is not doing incremental updates, but instead doing big rollouts with many features at once.
That way they'll always be weeks to months behind you.
Basically, when someone is following you, mine the path to the point that it's cheaper and more effective for them to find their own.
Edit: Bonus round is talking about some near-useless feature on your dev blog that would be hilariously expensive and complicated to build, without actually building it. Hope they waste time on it.
>Final thing you can do is not doing incremental updates, but instead doing big rollouts with many features at once.
>
>That way they'll always be weeks to months behind you.
This reminds me of the old days when Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. I learned both apps, as each release from one would leap frog the other in features. I actually learned from a roommate that was taking college courses, and I would do his homework assignments. Not do them for him, but on my own just to learn the software. Saved me from needing to take the course!
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.
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.
It all depends on the countries. FWIW, in my experience outside of US and other First World countries, "iPad" for "tablet" is by far the most common, and "iPhone" for "smartphone" is also pretty common. This is more typical of the older (roughly 50+) generation though.
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.
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.
>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
I think branding to generic really depends on linguistics of target market, brand writers and brand saturation in target market.
A brand name that is hard to pronounce is less likely to be used and how often do you think about the Slovakian pronunciation of your brand?
The US being a large linguistically similar market would be more susceptible to this.
I wonder if in the UK the BBC's anti-branding guidelines make a difference; they will almost never refer to a phone as an iPhone unless it's specifically relevant.
The example may be US-centric, but that really doesn't invalidate the point of the argument: that late comers may come to dominate the market by copying others. I really don't need a global example or eurocentric example to make the point, but if you don't want Apple, take Google's Android, IBM'S PC, etc.
Edit: How about Google? They copied Yahoo and AltaVista, and their search engine has become so ubiquitous with searching that it's a word in the dictionary now.
Not the parent, but I am from the US. I don't know anyone who uses i{whatever} as a generic term. When they say iPhone, they mean a smartphone manufactured by Apple. When they say iPad, they mean a tablet computer manufactured by Apple, and so on.
I am also from the US, and I frequently hear (in decreasing order of dominance):
“Apple Pay” being used as a generic for “phone-based contactless payment system”, “iPad” as generic for “tablet”, and “iPhone” as generic for “smartphone”.
This has to be a regional thing, similar to how in some areas of the American south, "Coke" is a generic term for all sodas. But at least in my area (Portland, OR), what you're saying is definitely not true.
I've never heard someone use Apple trademarks as generic terms. The generic term people use for a touchscreen smartphone is...a smartphone. Likewise, a generic term for a tablet is "tablet". I've never heard someone use "iPhone" to refer to all smartphones or "iPad" to refer to all tablets.
Though as a kid, I know my parents would say to "put away the Nintendo" when it was the PlayStation stuff that was all spread out on the floor.
It doesn't really matter if it is a regional thing. The point is not that the name takes over. That's just a side effect that sometimes happens. The point is that the product that came second and copied the first now dominates the market.
How about the IBM PC? Plenty of home computers existed prior to the PC, but today 8086 code dominates at all levels of computing.
How about Google's search, or Google Maps? AltaVista and MapQuest came first.
You mention Nintendo and PlayStation, but Atari was before both of those!
How about Facebook instead of MySpace?
The point is that saying that the person who comes along and copies you will do it worse because they don't understand it is often wrong.
Where I grew up (borderline Midwest, generally associated with the South), it is common to ask “What kind of Coke would you like?” And an acceptable answer to said question could be “Mountain Dew”, “Dr Pepper”, or any competing soda brand. After I moved away from my hometown (though still in the general midwestern region) I found it fascinating how hyper local the nomenclature for soda can be (or rather “pop” or “coke” depending on where you live).
I'm a long-time Apple user fully baked into the Apple ecosystem and have friends and acquaintances in the same position, and I'm not sure I agree with most of those. Maybe "Retina display," only because Apple arguably was the first company to give that a specific branding term. I don't even think iPod was ever a generic for "MP3 player"; it was far and away the most popular MP3 player, and I'm sure the dozens of people who bought Zunes were tired of people saying "I've never seen an iPod that looks like that before," but that's not the same thing as being a generic term.
Beyond that, though, your other examples just seem weird, because I don't ever hear anyone use iPad or iPhone as a generic term. "I have an Android iPhone." "Hey, that's a cool Microsoft iPad." Nope. And the Mac was the first computer anyone outside of nerdspace ever heard of using a GUI and mouse, and I'm sure that's led to some pop culture confusion, but that doesn't strike me as comparable to the other examples anyway. "GUI" and "mouse" are generic terms.
No investor will get involved with a company that is presently undergoing major intellectual property litigation. IP lawsuits are the kiss of death for VCs.
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...
My theory on this is that small dev teams are an order of magnitude more productive than large ones, and most large companies cannot help themselves when it comes time to assign team sizes.
You can definitely win a war with superior marketing, but it's not a sure thing if your product is inferior.
Some SLC companies did pull this off well. I'm working with some Russians now that have teams that replicate US services for Russia, China, India and Brazil, simply with the idea of flipping them post-launch and pre-growth. They are getting rich, so it appears to be working.
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.
Only if the software patent is really an innovation, not just restating something already known in a different way.
Patents need fixing from both ends - the enforcement end for non-practicing entities, as well as the assignment end, where patents are examined under harsher conditions.
OTOH, if a company can only sustain its business model because it has the advantage of state protection, it necessarily means naturally defensible business products get less investment and artificially defensible business products get a bump. Which is better, is hard to say.
It should be clear however that patent and patent giving has massive costs on the state and a great boon to lawyers.
And at the same time, its still not enough, as you still need to do counter-espionage at companies anyway.
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.
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 healthy discussion if spoken about maturely.
it can be a healthy discussion if spoken about maturely
Knee jerk rapid reactions aren't an example of "spoken about maturely." The normalization and acceptance of such reactions is what leads to toxic community atmospheres and the "social epistemological catastrophe" of a witch-hunt mentality.
In other words, "shoot first, ask questions later" is against the stated policy around these parts of the Principle of Charity. Just look around the Internet, and tell me what you see in this regard.
I'm obliged to link this again, for the good of all:
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 through if we want.
My un-provable suspicion is that civil discourse itself is being targeted by nefarious forces. It's either that, or the emergent incentive structures of social media as currently constructed are having the same effect. Or both. It's bad either way.
> 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, would put myself in great danger of being targeted, defamed or worse.
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.
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!
Now its the Chinese that encourage ignoring copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret laws. It helps them get their country ramped up with regards to industrialization.
Japan did so before that, in the 60s and 70s.
The USA also did so when we broke off from England. And later, Hollywood was made to get away from Edison's and others patents.
But complaining that "The Chinese" is derogatory is petty posturing and fake outrage.
What do people mean by this exactly? I've heard some people make the case that the exact boundaries between ethnic groups can be socially constructed, which makes sense to me (like how one draws a hard line between two groups which have some admixture).
But the idea that ethnicities have nothing to do with biology and is a purely social phenomenon sounds like a lay-person's misunderstanding of the above claim. For example, it should be obvious that using a sperm/egg donor can lead to a child of a different ethnicity even if the socialization is kept the same (which you can't necessarily do perfectly in reality, but still).
> What do people mean by this exactly? I've heard some people make the case that the exact boundaries between ethnic groups can be socially constructed, which makes sense to me (like how one draws a hard line between two groups which have some admixture).
Or people trying to be too inclusive and forward thinking without thinking about the implications of what is being said. Race and ethnicity are so closely tied, that from a biological standpoint, it's almost pointless to try to separate them.
I made a comment about this previously in reply:
>This isn't really a good argument. Western people use lactose in a variety of ways such as a drink additive (tea), for cooking (cheese, cream-based sauces), and even consuming by the glass (good ol' fashion milk). However, there's a high prevalence of lactose intolerance in Asian countries. There are just some sensitivities, diseases, and reactions that are more prevalent in some ethnicities than others including lactose intolerance, sickle-cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease.[0]
I'm still figuring this out myself, but I think that people are talking about race in at least two different ways:
1) Race from a biological/chemical perspective.
Stuff like 'DNA determines race' goes here.
2) Race from the perspective of all the things that happens to a person because they belong to a particular race (as defined in 1).
Apparently, being black and driving in America means it's more likely that you'll be pulled over by the cops, more likely that they'll assume you're a drug dealer, etc, etc. I wouldn't know because I'm not black, and every time I was pulled over by the cops I was clearly at fault.
Differences like these are discussed under the umbrella of 'race'.
The key is that in the second case there's nothing from biology / chemistry / science that says that black people should get pulled over more. That's just how things are in America now - it's a "social construct".
Again, I'm not an expert, but I think that's what people mean by 'race is a social construct'
Historically, “race” was a term invented to group/categorize people by language. From there it evolved into a reference of nationality. Most recently it has become a word to define an attempt to group people by physical characteristics.
So for example you associate race with ethnicity...the question is why? Ethnicity after all is a word to group people through nationality and culture, having nothing to do with physical characteristics...for example Irish is an ethnicity (in addition to just a nationality), but there are both black and white irish.
> Historically, “race” was a term invented to group/categorize people by language. From there it evolved into a reference of nationality. Most recently it has become a word to define an attempt to group people by physical characteristics.
Do you have more information about this? It has been my understanding that throughout history, some languages became the "lingua Franca" so to speak while not introducing race conflict. So I'm curious to hear more about the origins of race as a social construct, specifically its roots in language.
You’re conflating race with ethnicity. They are not the same. For example, in America the ethnicities of Irish and Italian were not always considered to be part of the race of white.
Race is too important in medicine to merely be a social construct.
Different races have significantly different disease rates (incidence rates), such that you cannot erase them even if you control for environment (born in the same city, at the same time, went to the same school, etc).
If you were to open a large hospital in town X, you would very much want to know X's demographic structure to make informed decisions on how many highly specialized professionals and equipment you would need to effectively treat the population.
Making design mistakes at this stage would literally cost lives.
Exercising the principle of charity != Promoting [X]
If we all started calling out everything that might possibly be [X] without being absolute certain, then this stance to accept false positives would result in far too much noise in the form of one of the harshest accusations in 2019.
This sort of stance, where the Presumption of Innocence is sacrificed, to prioritize catching all the guilty, the innocents be damned, is also the stance that leads to the witchhunt mentality. It's a social epistemological catastrophe, where everyone suspects everyone and accusations for ulterior motives cannot be detected.
In 2019, it seems as if this stance is designed to and deployed to cause a social epistemological catastrophe over social media. I suspect this is actually being done!
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.
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.
Actually, it gets applied to all Asians. I know this firsthand as an Asian. It used to be applied to the Japanese with just as much fervor, especially in the 80's. (I lived through this.) I should think it was applied to the Americans in the early days of the US. I suspect it was applied to Germans and Russians when they were consolidating and industrializing those nation states.
Here's where bigotry comes in, in the 2019 style: When white people do it, it's "appropriation." When Asian people do it, it's because they have no creativity and can only imitate. In truth, it's all cultural appropriation, and cultural appropriation is actually an engine of human progress and creativity.
The charge of copying gets levied as a protectionist tactic by those already of generally higher status. The charge of appropriation gets gets levied as an aggressive tactic by those who desire that status for themselves. Either way, it's a waste of time better spent learning, growing, and changing.
As a USian, when I lived in Japan (working in semiconductor) from the mid-80s to the mid 90s, people always seemed to make this copying claim.
My response was-
1) Copying an ISA is not copying architecture
2) JP was innovating in manufacturing, not ISAs, which is why they got 95% yield, not 65.
3) Yes - they weren't great systems software guys, and
4) Have you seen Nintendo's games? Clearly they can create and innovate and program.
The trope irritated me, but it seems to be a psychological defense move whenever an emerging contender challenges an incumbent (got to get the base features first == copying)
Also, while I appreciate this is a name and shame, it might help to put your company's name in the title and not give Otonomo the free exposure for anyone who's not going to dig into the article.
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 this information might change your mind.
If you won't throw your ethics into the pit for power, someone else will. And them everybody will be forced to throw the shared ethics or be outcompeted. And collectively, everyone will be poorer as a result.
I'll take the high road, thank you. I'm perfectly fine taking satisfaction in being morally and ethically superior for not stealing someone else's hard work.
I think you draw the wrong conclusion, even from your link. Your link as I read it is basically saying we are all collectively responsible for good and evil, and that there are supposedly unpopular evils which we ourselves create and implicitly endorse, often counterintuitively.
That doesn't mean we ought to just give up and worship whatever worst thing capitalism produces. If you look at Ginsberg's long history of political activism as an example it's certainly not what he and those around him lived.
At a separate scale from that discussion we need to "play our side" of the game, and that will necessarily involve your personal interpretation of ethics. I believe it is a kind of laziness to dismiss that.
I leave it to that someone else to have to resolve the cognitive dissonance. One concrete benefit might be not doing in my 50ies due to stress-related health issues.
And I would happily live in a poorer society with better ethics any day (given some minimum threshold of live quality).
Everyone getting into business knows that competitors want to copy them. Not only that, there are only so many ways to do things, so it's usually a question of how much you're copying.
So inferior goods (using the economic term) can add low-cost options for consumers and are thus a social benefit.
While copying itself isn't bad, in practice those companies often releasing products that are unfit for sale or engage in deceptive advertising.
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.
I don't particularly agree with you; I've often thought that amounts to trying to win the debate by nuking the entire playing field. Even if you win, have you?
But I can spot you that anyhow, because there's a perfectly reasonable fallback position: This is illegal. It's a copyright infringement at the very least, and possibly other things as well. And being "illegal", the "what are you gonna do about it" actually has clear, well defined answers. Smartcar.com is doing them a favor by serving a cease & desist, as there is nothing preventing them from moving straight to legal action.
Copying a design is not illegal. Unless the design is patented (which it doesn't seem to be or the OP would likely have said so in the article), everyone is free to copy any design they want.
That you wish something was true doesn't make it so, unfortunately.
What is not OK is copying the documentation verbatim, that is copyrighted. However, that is, frankly, the least of the problems (and easiest to rectify) when someone is taking your product idea wholesale.
Those patents are directed towards "method[s] for processing requests for vehicular data", which at first glance appear unrelated to the descriptions of web APIs authenticated by OAuth that Smartcar is complaining about.
>Companies have been known to talk about expensive and complicated features or options in order to get people trying to copy their success to waste time and money on something for which there is no actual demand.
Anyone know of a specific documented example of this? I'm not really doubting, just interested.
Thanks, but I think you're supporting a different claim by OP. I'm asking about the spread of disinformation to derail the development efforts of clones, not the creation of clones.
This is commonly called the second mover advantage. If they do not have some special sauce that prevents an easy copy of their idea then it was going to happen sooner or later.
"Clone a successful US company before it got to the European market."
This is really a different case though.
The German VC is saying: "Food delivery is working in the US, they've validated the model + EU VC's will now get behind that, so 'do that like they are'.
They are more or less competing, not exactly cloning.
Copying API's is a whole other level.
Literally copying docs etc. is another level.
The thing is - the small company may have some power here. The bigger company does not want an ugly, permanent lawsuit hanging over them. With the screen-scraping and blatant copying, it's going to make it seem, at least popularly bad, and possibly add emotive impetus to a judge. The copier cannot say with a straight face that they were not copying to a judge.
NO! Rocket Internet is known and have been busted for straight up copying even website source code, layout, everything. As in the source of the HTML is identical, just the color scheme changed. They are criminals make no mistake, learn how they got their riches, by scamming teenagers with ringtones.
> Also, love them or hate them, having patents helps in situations like these.
Does it though? There is no global patent authority. If the ripoff is not for the US market, only a patent for their market will help. Which might be impossible to get in the first place.
Addressing this case, for an Israeli company, infringing a US patent implies death. First, there's no "Israel market", US is the market. Second, there goes any chance of future funding. Last, a company s.a otonomo has one way out - acquisition. Say goodbye to that too.
Copying as a business model is pretty shitty as is copying legitimate IP. But if Company B can execute a similar concept faster and better than Company A, that's ultimately better for society.
Will they be able to maintain and improve the code the way the people who wrote it will? The risk is that Company B may be selling something they don't fully understand.
That German VC company contacted us to talk about partnering, learnt as much as they could from us and then (not to my surprise) launched their clone of our company with $42m backing.
So they built a new product to a competitor's API spec? There is nothing wrong with that, the API itself is a plug - you need to implement the backend to compete.
It is super lame and dumb to have ripped off their doc, but the API format itself is not an issue to me. If I were going to implement a competitor to Google Maps, it would make sense to copy the Maps API so people can migrate seamlessly. That is the nature of SaaS.
The core value proposition is not in API design, it's in the implementation.
I agree with you completely, but Oracle vs Google is still going through the courts on this exact issue - copyright on APIs. I've seen product roll-outs delayed because that case isn't settled yet. For VCs to jump in knowing that's what this was seems risky, but maybe they factored that in.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadAlso their stats dashboard isn't secured: https://dashboard.otonomo.io/dashboard
you can see public data here
https://www.rocket-internet.com/
They did a 1:1 facebook clone for example.
https://web.archive.org/web/20190422150111/https://smartcar....
(And a reminder to donate to archive.org if you can!)
https://archive.fo/4l7Wl
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.
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 copyrightable, but not APIs. The whole thing is getting more interesting to be honest.
I think that is just life in tech now. You put out a 'feature' in your app that is new and cool. Two weeks later the same feature shows up in your competitors app.
In our case, always better to be ahead of the curve. You've got a small team with 20 folks who are putting pressure on the 100 person teams at these giant companies.
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.
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_originality
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 "clean room" to reverse engineer the IBM PC.
> 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.
Perhaps the company even used decompiled code, it's not out of the realm of possibility that they simply directly stole the whole thing.
I'm not sure any of that is actually likely, but I think that the fact that some paragraphs are directly lifted is a massive red flag.
This appears to be a lawyer's dream case and I wouldn't be surprised that, if this case makes it to court, discovery finds some actual stolen code. If this company ever poached employees they'd better be very, very careful.
IBM "bluewashes" their terminology and vocabulary for this same reason. They can easily catch someone else using IBM-specific language, and they'll often call very common things by unique and very different names compared to other companies. This can also help cover for any perceived issues with employees bringing over ideas from their previous company.
It looks like API copying violates copyrights on the US, so go for it. In a democracy crazy laws can't be crazy just for the bad.
I don't know what legal recourse smartcar has, but I would think it is time to seek that advice.
In either case, how does that relate to the existence of a reasonable explanation?
Would love any feedback you may have!
From my understanding though they're just a wrapper API around the car manufactures existing apis?
Yep, think EasyPost for car functions
The requirements/supported brands & models should be somewhere prominent on the front page, and I'm honestly still confused. Similar any country restrictions. This being limited to the US should not be hidden three levels deep in some FAQ.
The Otonomo isn't any better though, it doesn't even seem to have any links to the docs.
AFAIK the is not a single car manufacturer (not even Tesla) that has any API available. Most cars don't have internet connectivity anyway.
Disclosure: I do NOT work for Smartcar, but have build multiple backends for P2P carsharing and bike rental platforms.
This is patently false. Smartcar does not require additional hardware. Quoting from their product page:
> Our API works with the embedded telematics module built into most new vehicles. No need for aftermarket hardware like OBD2 dongles.
As it stands now, the documentation is very much misleading as Smartcar makes it sound as if you can use this on any vehicle. Look again at sahaskatta's response, he/she made it sound as if you just have to read the docs to 'unlock your car with an app'. But in reality, you'll also need to have a brand new and very specific car if you want to do this.
Sahaskatta also asked for 'any feedback I have'. I gave that and now I'm being downvoted for my criticism...
My 2014 Chevy gave me 2 years of their mobile app which could unlock/lock the car via cellular for free. I know the car still has a data connection available because if I play songs via bluetooth it pulls in album art that doesn't exist on my phone via Gracenote. I can also hit the OnStar button and talk to someone via the car and I don't pay for that.
That Chevy lock/unlock API may not be a public API but there is nothing stopping someone from reversing it. Or just signing up to use it: https://developer.gm.com/vehicle-apis
Most modern cars offer the same features.
Updated to include my tweet: https://twitter.com/MattHurewitz/status/1120356791932604421?...
One could argue that the market is okay with these types of things. But, we talk about doing the right thing. And if it's not just lip service, this could be a great opportunity to prove it.
Anyway, it was archived:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190416030526/https://docs.oton...
https://archive.fo/QiMY9
The full list of archived otonomo doc pages:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://docs.otonomo.io/docs/*
https://archive.fo/docs.otonomo.io
(found on another internal forums/board) Save a copy maybe?
I do have major issues with verbatim copying of documents and websites, there's an obvious copyright violation there.
There are enough people on here who can point you in the right direction, or arrange introductions.
Spend at least one of those millions on PR and lawyers to ensure it's clear who has the moral high ground, and who should be hired if a company has to choose between you - I mean if they are prepared to breach copyright so blatantly here, who knows what other problems they have in their repos - enterprises can be very conservatice on unknown legal risks like that
Summary: They are vulnerable - Get 'em
Or, go get $55 Million in VC funding from someone else.
You have a major head start. Your company is theoretically worth at least as much as theirs.
Complaining about competitors copying you might slow them down a bit. But it will probably slow you down a lot more. On the other hand, using their valuation to raise $55M+ would be a huge boost for you.
Maybe.
Having worked in the auto industry (albeit well over a decade ago), it is one of those industries where connections, and knowing how to navigate the relationships, goes a long way. I don't know much about either of these companies, or their founders, but in B2B scenarios like this, the value is often related to much more than just the underlying technology.
If I were Smartcar, I would look closely at relationships, physical and virtual proximity to major automotive players, and how their suppliers prefer to do business. And, perhaps they already have...
Instead, think of the work as a means to an end, the end being revenue.
Company X was able to raise $55 million because they were able to demonstrate that the potential market could support the revenue necessary to justify such funds, and that they could use the work already done by SmartCar to get to market more quickly.
Now, in my opinion this is very shady and should be grounds for a lawsuit, but in terms of raw business savvy, the $55 million is for a smart business that knows how to execute for less. If money raised was in direct correlation to a quality product or the ability to produce such a product, rather than in direct correlation with e.g., the team (cabal?) involved and their ability to make returns for investors, then we’d be living in a very different world.
I can imagine the "Kickstarter scam" running in the VC scene, the Kickstarter scam being: you show ads for a product on Kickstarter with the line "300 thousand dollars in backers already! Get yours too!", but that money isn't from genuine backers, coming from your friends instead. Then a chump seeing the ad will think "Oh, this new gadget is popular, it must be good, let me buy 1 for the introductory price!" and gives you his money. Then you just keep the chumps updated with "Sorry for the delays, we have manufacturing difficulties" month after month.
So in the VC scene, you could get your friend to invest in your idea for $$$, get other investors interested, and... profit? I can imagine it'd be nice to spend the genuine VC money on company Lamborghinis and penthouses for a few months, declare bankruptcy, rinse and repeat (just steal the API from the next "Smartcar"...).
or simply refocus the startup on used lambos and penthouses :)
One per offense.
Also, if the docs are registered copyright, willfull infringement per offense is over $100k per instance.
$50mil/$140k = 357.14
Thoughts?
It just isn't something a judge would ever agree to.
If they don't have the engineering chops to build an API how are going to handle the ops of it.
While there is substance in the post that some other company is building the same product, saying that its literally cloning it and using documentation similarity for a standardized protocol is not really cutting it.
Copy/pasting docs and rewording everything to try and hide that fact is a lot lazier and shadier IMO.
I think the intellectual property is in the APIs/"headers". That is what Android uses from Java and what this company is copying from SmartCar. Its not easy to write a good API. (But, I should say, once you have the headers it is not as tough to populate them with code.) As for coping actual documentation, that is just plain stupid but not the _worse_ crime here.
Now, what is different is that many of us don't approve the way Oracle is enforcing the rights on this information. Java is not like the SmartCar APIs in that it has been free to use for so long. All the same I think Oracle should have the legal right to do this.
Many may disagree about Oracle vs Android but I think it is devaluing the work of people like James Gosling _and_ SmartCar if you say there is not intellectual value in the code/API headers.
It is not the same simply because Java is an open-source project. SmartCar, on the other hand, is not. I would argue that, because of the nature of open-source, Google should have been able to do as they pleased to facilitate allowing java code on their OS. I know that many would disagree. But to say that there is not intellectual value in the code/API of Java would be disingenuous, and ultimately incorrect; I can say with certainty that I would never say that, so thank you for putting words in my mouth.
I appreciate your response. I am not clear on if that particular information is open source. A quick Google search does not seem to give a good (single) answer.
"The redirect_uri provided in Authorize User step" appears exactly once on the Internet according to Google: at smartcar.com. It looks like Otonomo did in fact copy/paste from the SmartCar website.
https://www.google.com/search?q="The+redirect_uri+provided+i...
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.
We have a team of people that exhaustively search for players in the same space. The 'Google on various phrases' is more or less the gist of it, the more unique the better.
It's not an automated process so fairly time consuming.
> Are you checking for your customers our on your customers?
We do not check on our customers, we check for our customers. And usually pre-investment.
> If the latter, why do you care (most vendors wouldn't).
You are probably wrong about that, copying something verbatim will get you a C&D pdq in most cases.
I sell a SaaS reading product and don't care what my customers are using it to read, or whether their own websites our products contain any infringing content.
What they are using your product for might very well turn into 'aiding and abetting', make sure your TOS is up to snuff and that you have it checked over by a lawyer to verify that if your customers do something illegal with your service you don't end up being on the hook.
As for the second, that might be a good hint that your customer is not above-board and will bear closer watching.
Napster is one end of the spectrum, but I'm not sure how anything short of that is a legal risk. Are there cases or legal theories I'm unaware of?
Off the top of my head: anything payment related and two sided market places (money laundering, false binning), anything that allows large volumes of data to be moved around (copyright violation, child pornography, exfiltration of data from corporate networks), proxy services and spider services (DOS attacks, harassment, TOS circumvention and copyright violation) etc.
So nothing that would require legal theories, just the usual abuse of service.
So could Mozilla be on the hook if people used Firefox Send to do any of these things?
You hereby represent and warrant that your content will not infringe the rights of any third party and will comply with any content guidelines presented by Mozilla...
We may suspend or terminate your access to the Services at any time for any reason, including, but not limited to, if we reasonably believe:... you create risk or possible legal exposure for us...
You agree to defend, indemnify and hold harmless Mozilla [et al] from and against any and all third party claims and expenses, including attorneys' fees, arising out of or related to your use of the Services (including, but not limited to, from any content uploaded by you).
(https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/about/legal/terms/services/#se...)
In one court case - where a company I had a majority stake in was the plaintiff - the defendant basically had to admit that they copied the code and content of our website. Their defense: 'we did not copy it from them, we copied it from someone else' (without specifying what the 'someone else' was). Needless to say that did not end well, we were surprised they actually went to court but since this was in a country where the loser pays the court costs of the winner that did not overly bother me.
https://webwereld.nl/overheid/10591-webcamsites-bevechten-el...
(Dutch)
The quality of your lawyer will help in the gray areas, and may get you a reduced sentence in case of a criminal affair but in general you will lose if you go to court with a case where you were in the wrong. It's not a perfect system but for most cases it works out.
>And the only reason you bring it up is because it is exceptional
So you need exceptional lawyer.
>The quality of your lawyer will help in the gray areas
An exceptional lawyer will make seemingly black and white situation to looks like grey.
> in general you will lose if you go to court with a case where you were in the wrong
Sure, the point of court is argue that meaning of "wrong"
You don't 'win' a criminal suit. The standards of proof in a criminal suit are different than the standards of proof in a civil one, because the punishment in a criminal suit is much heavier than in a civil suit (where the maximum is some monetary penalty, whereas in a criminal suit it is imprisonment or in some countries even death).
I really think your view of the legal system is somewhat theoretical, there is no such case that it can always be won given the right lawyer or argument.
The reality is legal system consist of human in various capacity, judge, lawyer, jury, even public opinion. Its all boil down to convincing these human. Given the right method or argument, you can convince any human. Sure some case are harder then the other but doesn't mean it impossible. Really really hard != impossible.
>there is no such case that it can always be won given the right lawyer or argument
What is your reasoning ?
It'd be like YouTube using your videos for ContentId, but not having any avenue for you to profit from said videos. Oh and uploading to Youtube would be mandatory.
There was a lawsuit about this, decided on TurnItIn's side, but I still disagree.
Bessemer & Co. probably don't know that the docs are literally being copied though.
It does raise an interesting question though: how will the OP prove that their work is the original, that might hinge on a lot of unknowns, more difficult still if the work was originally lifted by an employee of the company and then passed on to Otonomo with them being the unwitting recipients.
So it is definitely possible that the codebase got stolen and the perps missed changing a few hints, resulting in the Otonomo samples generating identical sample code, as shown.
Anyone considering that should be aware that Oracle vs Google is still not finished.
I almost wish you had done my technical diligence, Jacques. I spent a week preparing for it and was very proud of what I’d built.
It's five of us for a week with a super intensive interview on the Wednesday and it is always the highlight of the week for me. What is also neat is that most of these turn into very long term relationships post deal, not necessarily financial ones, just that the interview day makes the whole thing a two-way street where the tech team will occasionally reach out when they are stumped on some problem or need outsider perspective.
Ultimately, the VCs probably just ask the founders "Hey, your product looks very similar to product A, how is yours different and did you develop it on your own?" If the founder denies copying and gives a reasonable answer for how they developed it on their own, the VC then makes a judgement. They also may hire some consultants or have some outside experts look at the tech stack to make sure no red flags pop up.
However, you can't dig through every line of code and every document in diligence and compare it to several other companies code/docs. It would take too long and everyone involved (VCs, lawyers, start-up) would be annoyed.
It's a Series A, serious DD doesn't usually happen this early and a jr. analyst with a finance background wouldn't catch something like this.
https://otonomo.io/pr/otonomo-announces-25-million-strategic...
And even then, series 'A' requires DD as much (and sometimes more so) as later rounds.
There are lots of VCs, some are better at this than others, some really suck. On the whole though they tend to do their homework at least on the commercial front and a competitor with a feature-for-feature identical offering would have most likely been spotted even at the 'not so good ones', irrespective of whether or not the API docs were made public.
The interesting questions to me are:
- what was the exact timeline?
- was an (ex) employee of the company involved in the copying?
- is Otonomo itself aware of the fact that they have this sitting on their website?
- How far down does it go? Is it just the API documentation, or also the underlying code?
The most severe move they could take would be to enforce whatever contractual mechanisms they have to block additional financing pending an independent investigation and replacement of responsible parties. Or they could directly force the matter if investors hold a majority Board vote.
They could recoup a huge part of their investment before things get worse. But again, afaik this requires a shareholder majority, barring any strings/triggers on the investment terms that could be activated.
Is it illegal to just copy some docs from somewhere on the web?
are APIs copyrightable?
The latest decision in that saga is that yes, they can be. Whether that holds up in the Supreme Court is an open question. Most of us hope it doesn't, I suspect.
Copying documentation is definitely a copyright violation. Similar situation exists with recipes - a list of ingredients can't be copyrighted, but the wording of the steps can be. You have to at least put it in your own words.
Otonomo sounds like a deeply unethical and shady company. If I was doing any kind of business with them I would not continue to do so. While it would be hard to sue them, hopefully when you Google them in the future the fact they ripped of Smartcar will be one of the first results.
I mean, you might eventually be right. But why "immediately"? What's wrong with taking some time to talk to people, hear the other side, find out more details, do a proper investigation, and then decide what to do?
One side of a story is never the whole story.
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!
If they actually believe the idea has merit, they should do right by Otonomo.
Playing fast and loose with the law—whether it's competitors legal interests or regulatory conpliance—is often part of the economy of disruption.
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_America,_Inc._v._Goog....
Maybe this is karma for being willing to work people to death?
I'm still getting over the fact I upgraded the radio on my car back in 2010 with a USB stick and using the driver's side door to control the process. I think a well-documented API that shows exactly how my car is vulnerable is a step up.
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 money in the bank able to spend it on marketing and spinning the narrative in their favor.
Since the ability to get a foreign company (in this case Israeli) to do anything is limited, your best bet is to out execute them. Also, love them or hate them, having patents helps in situations like these.
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. Companies have been known to talk about expensive and complicated features or options in order to get people trying to copy their success to waste time and money on something for which there is no actual demand. It is no doubt worth investing in understanding how one's enemies are getting their information and shutting that off if possible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_Internet
For all the ethically ambiguous things they do, I still remember fondly their creative ways of using AdTech.
Theft, sabotage, ad hominem attacks, even murder, could all be considered "competition" if your ethics and morals are on a different plane.
So saying there is nothing wrong with competition as a blanket dismissal is a bit myopic.
Their salaries, too, put [competitors] in the same state with a merchant who attempts to trade without a bounty in competition with those who trade with a considerable one. If he sells his goods at nearly the same price, he cannot have the same profit, and at least, if not bankruptcy and ruin, will infallibly be his lot. If he attempts to sell them much dearer, he is likely to have so few customers that his circumstances will not be much mended.
-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Book V, Chapter 1.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations/Book_V/...
https://techcrunch.com/2018/09/27/wimdu-rocket-internets-air...
If I was the OP, my reaction would be shock and horror too. But then I'd realize the old axiom of imitation is the best form of flattery.
https://flattr.com
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]
The article discusses Microsoft's anti-piracy measures. And it brings back horrible memories. So I had this server, running Windows Server 2000. And there was a nearby lightning strike, which bricked the motherboard.
But hey, service contract. Except that the company had gone through reorganization. So they sent me a motherboard that was comparable and compatible with the box. But it had a different seller code, so my copy of Windows Server 2000 wouldn't install.
Microsoft couldn't/wouldn't fix that. So I had to return the replacement motherboard, wait for another replacement, and install it. But hey, it all worked out in the end.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems,_Inc._v...
To lose copyright, the author has to explicitly volunteer to sell the rights or give them away. A work has copyright protections the moment it is created.
https://otonomo.io/about-us (see bottom of page)
Which might be the best news Otonomo gets all day. In addition to outfunding them, now their competitor is going to focus their time and cycles not on the competition for this market space, but in expensive legal actions with a dubious chance of success.
If I were smartcar I would ignore Otonomo (or at least their shameless ripoffs of your public facing code bits) and double down on the business of beating them with your product.
Doesn’t hurt to have a court order in place. Chances are they’ll settle for a material fraction of the cash you know they have.
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 entity is 10x+ your size, they can also afford to gather the resources that increase their odds of success (e.g. marketing specialists, engineers,etc) at a rate which you can't compete. By then, you may have spent 2-3 years creating a business that is destroyed by an external entity acting in bad faith.
These things happen quite often.
For example, Uber and Lyft. (Point being: survival is not just about the long run, but also the short run.)
If Otonomo have raised ~$55m, it means they have very powerful, very rich backers (Bessemer, NTT, SK, Aptiv). They might realistically have another $100m over the coming years instead, if they continue making progress.
We have a competitor who copies our features, but they don't know why we built the feature. The result is they end up copying the wrong stuff or tweaking the feature in a way that completely misses the point.
But, I agree with you in that creating a feature isn't an advantage in and of itself. Rather, it is the domain expertise that led to the creation of the feature that is the true advantage.
This example however seems to play in a different league, the extent of ripoff here is absolutely staggering.
If I were OP, I‘d immediately call Daimler‘s PR department. After the whole dieselgate shitshow, none of the German automakers are out for the slightest bit of negative PR...
https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/01/10/168588...
This will waste their time if its a harder problem with their backend / implementation.
Another fun thing you can do is using something that looks like a 3rd-party service/API, but is really just another domain controlled by your company. Make it something specific to your business, so they'll be tempted to use it.
IF they use it, the least you can do is terminate their access at an inconvenient time. This will frustrate their customers as they scramble to do their own implementation.
Final thing you can do is not doing incremental updates, but instead doing big rollouts with many features at once.
That way they'll always be weeks to months behind you.
Basically, when someone is following you, mine the path to the point that it's cheaper and more effective for them to find their own.
Edit: Bonus round is talking about some near-useless feature on your dev blog that would be hilariously expensive and complicated to build, without actually building it. Hope they waste time on it.
This reminds me of the old days when Adobe Illustrator and Macromedia Freehand. I learned both apps, as each release from one would leap frog the other in features. I actually learned from a roommate that was taking college courses, and I would do his homework assignments. Not do them for him, but on my own just to learn the software. Saved me from needing to take the course!
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 for personal devices, but the generic term is basically 'Retina display'.
We can go back in time, too. Apple didn't invent the mouse or a GUI, but lots of people pointed to the Macintosh as inventing them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_generic_and_genericize...
Some of the category names don't even match up - adhesive tape is definitely not what comes to mind for Durex for me.
Consider: thermos, escalator, linoleum, trampoline, zipper, scotch (as in tape), jeep, xerox, jacuzzi, dictaphone...
I think branding to generic really depends on linguistics of target market, brand writers and brand saturation in target market.
A brand name that is hard to pronounce is less likely to be used and how often do you think about the Slovakian pronunciation of your brand?
The US being a large linguistically similar market would be more susceptible to this.
Here in the UK people just have "Smartphones" and "tablets" (tho I do hear people calling generic tablets "iPad" sometimes).
Edit: How about Google? They copied Yahoo and AltaVista, and their search engine has become so ubiquitous with searching that it's a word in the dictionary now.
The USA, love it or hate it, is the most dominant marketing force on planet earth.
Are you from the US? Because here in .eu "iThing" is definitely not the generic term for pretty much anything.
“Apple Pay” being used as a generic for “phone-based contactless payment system”, “iPad” as generic for “tablet”, and “iPhone” as generic for “smartphone”.
I've never heard someone use Apple trademarks as generic terms. The generic term people use for a touchscreen smartphone is...a smartphone. Likewise, a generic term for a tablet is "tablet". I've never heard someone use "iPhone" to refer to all smartphones or "iPad" to refer to all tablets.
Though as a kid, I know my parents would say to "put away the Nintendo" when it was the PlayStation stuff that was all spread out on the floor.
How about the IBM PC? Plenty of home computers existed prior to the PC, but today 8086 code dominates at all levels of computing.
How about Google's search, or Google Maps? AltaVista and MapQuest came first.
You mention Nintendo and PlayStation, but Atari was before both of those!
How about Facebook instead of MySpace?
The point is that saying that the person who comes along and copies you will do it worse because they don't understand it is often wrong.
I think "pop" is a hold over from the older English fizzy pop
Beyond that, though, your other examples just seem weird, because I don't ever hear anyone use iPad or iPhone as a generic term. "I have an Android iPhone." "Hey, that's a cool Microsoft iPad." Nope. And the Mac was the first computer anyone outside of nerdspace ever heard of using a GUI and mouse, and I'm sure that's led to some pop culture confusion, but that doesn't strike me as comparable to the other examples anyway. "GUI" and "mouse" are generic terms.
It was generic enough to form part of the word "podcast", which has stuck around.
i've never heard anyone use iphone as a generic term. phone, mobile, cell, cellphone. these are the only terms i've heard.
and while i'm add it, mp3 player is what i've heard EVEN it is in reference to an ipod.
ipad? nah, generally i've heard tablet.
and finally, i've heard no one say retina, i have heard HD, HiDPI or 4k (even if it's not).
Or heck pitch it to the same investor too.
Investor: "Oh I wonder what other IP we can steal from them under the guise of due diligence"
You can definitely win a war with superior marketing, but it's not a sure thing if your product is inferior.
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.
Patents need fixing from both ends - the enforcement end for non-practicing entities, as well as the assignment end, where patents are examined under harsher conditions.
It should be clear however that patent and patent giving has massive costs on the state and a great boon to lawyers.
And at the same time, its still not enough, as you still need to do counter-espionage at companies anyway.
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.
You mean "Chinese companies". "The chinese" is just racist.
> The Chinese also do this. (As in, the government seems to encourage it outright.)
Way to be outraged through your own selective reading.
I understand HN is a tech place, but since race can play a factor in practically all subjects, it can be a healthy discussion if spoken about maturely.
Knee jerk rapid reactions aren't an example of "spoken about maturely." The normalization and acceptance of such reactions is what leads to toxic community atmospheres and the "social epistemological catastrophe" of a witch-hunt mentality.
In other words, "shoot first, ask questions later" is against the stated policy around these parts of the Principle of Charity. Just look around the Internet, and tell me what you see in this regard.
I'm obliged to link this again, for the good of all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
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)
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 through if we want.
My un-provable suspicion is that civil discourse itself is being targeted by nefarious forces. It's either that, or the emergent incentive structures of social media as currently constructed are having the same effect. Or both. It's bad either way.
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, would put myself in great danger of being targeted, defamed or worse.
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!
Now its the Chinese that encourage ignoring copyright/patent/trademark/trade secret laws. It helps them get their country ramped up with regards to industrialization.
Japan did so before that, in the 60s and 70s.
The USA also did so when we broke off from England. And later, Hollywood was made to get away from Edison's and others patents.
But complaining that "The Chinese" is derogatory is petty posturing and fake outrage.
Race itself is a social construct.
Nice try though!
What do people mean by this exactly? I've heard some people make the case that the exact boundaries between ethnic groups can be socially constructed, which makes sense to me (like how one draws a hard line between two groups which have some admixture).
But the idea that ethnicities have nothing to do with biology and is a purely social phenomenon sounds like a lay-person's misunderstanding of the above claim. For example, it should be obvious that using a sperm/egg donor can lead to a child of a different ethnicity even if the socialization is kept the same (which you can't necessarily do perfectly in reality, but still).
That, and the idea that "races" can be clearly distinguished and defined, as you said.
Pretty spot on.
I made a comment about this previously in reply:
>This isn't really a good argument. Western people use lactose in a variety of ways such as a drink additive (tea), for cooking (cheese, cream-based sauces), and even consuming by the glass (good ol' fashion milk). However, there's a high prevalence of lactose intolerance in Asian countries. There are just some sensitivities, diseases, and reactions that are more prevalent in some ethnicities than others including lactose intolerance, sickle-cell anemia, and Tay-Sachs disease.[0]
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19420642
1) Race from a biological/chemical perspective. Stuff like 'DNA determines race' goes here.
2) Race from the perspective of all the things that happens to a person because they belong to a particular race (as defined in 1). Apparently, being black and driving in America means it's more likely that you'll be pulled over by the cops, more likely that they'll assume you're a drug dealer, etc, etc. I wouldn't know because I'm not black, and every time I was pulled over by the cops I was clearly at fault. Differences like these are discussed under the umbrella of 'race'.
The key is that in the second case there's nothing from biology / chemistry / science that says that black people should get pulled over more. That's just how things are in America now - it's a "social construct".
Again, I'm not an expert, but I think that's what people mean by 'race is a social construct'
Historically, “race” was a term invented to group/categorize people by language. From there it evolved into a reference of nationality. Most recently it has become a word to define an attempt to group people by physical characteristics.
So for example you associate race with ethnicity...the question is why? Ethnicity after all is a word to group people through nationality and culture, having nothing to do with physical characteristics...for example Irish is an ethnicity (in addition to just a nationality), but there are both black and white irish.
> Historically, “race” was a term invented to group/categorize people by language. From there it evolved into a reference of nationality. Most recently it has become a word to define an attempt to group people by physical characteristics.
Do you have more information about this? It has been my understanding that throughout history, some languages became the "lingua Franca" so to speak while not introducing race conflict. So I'm curious to hear more about the origins of race as a social construct, specifically its roots in language.
Related:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/21/against-murderism/
Different races have significantly different disease rates (incidence rates), such that you cannot erase them even if you control for environment (born in the same city, at the same time, went to the same school, etc).
If you were to open a large hospital in town X, you would very much want to know X's demographic structure to make informed decisions on how many highly specialized professionals and equipment you would need to effectively treat the population.
Making design mistakes at this stage would literally cost lives.
Please don’t do this here.
Not saying the original comment was racist, but in general I don't think we should be promoting racism.
If we all started calling out everything that might possibly be [X] without being absolute certain, then this stance to accept false positives would result in far too much noise in the form of one of the harshest accusations in 2019.
This sort of stance, where the Presumption of Innocence is sacrificed, to prioritize catching all the guilty, the innocents be damned, is also the stance that leads to the witchhunt mentality. It's a social epistemological catastrophe, where everyone suspects everyone and accusations for ulterior motives cannot be detected.
In 2019, it seems as if this stance is designed to and deployed to cause a social epistemological catastrophe over social media. I suspect this is actually being done!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3j_RHkqJc
This is precisely why Blackstone's formulation came to be, and why it's necessary to avoid toxic and tyrannical societies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackstone%27s_ratio
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.
Actually, it gets applied to all Asians. I know this firsthand as an Asian. It used to be applied to the Japanese with just as much fervor, especially in the 80's. (I lived through this.) I should think it was applied to the Americans in the early days of the US. I suspect it was applied to Germans and Russians when they were consolidating and industrializing those nation states.
Here's where bigotry comes in, in the 2019 style: When white people do it, it's "appropriation." When Asian people do it, it's because they have no creativity and can only imitate. In truth, it's all cultural appropriation, and cultural appropriation is actually an engine of human progress and creativity.
The charge of copying gets levied as a protectionist tactic by those already of generally higher status. The charge of appropriation gets gets levied as an aggressive tactic by those who desire that status for themselves. Either way, it's a waste of time better spent learning, growing, and changing.
Appropriation is good. It's how progress is made!
My response was- 1) Copying an ISA is not copying architecture 2) JP was innovating in manufacturing, not ISAs, which is why they got 95% yield, not 65. 3) Yes - they weren't great systems software guys, and 4) Have you seen Nintendo's games? Clearly they can create and innovate and program.
The trope irritated me, but it seems to be a psychological defense move whenever an emerging contender challenges an incumbent (got to get the base features first == copying)
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 this information might change your mind.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
That doesn't mean we ought to just give up and worship whatever worst thing capitalism produces. If you look at Ginsberg's long history of political activism as an example it's certainly not what he and those around him lived.
At a separate scale from that discussion we need to "play our side" of the game, and that will necessarily involve your personal interpretation of ethics. I believe it is a kind of laziness to dismiss that.
And I would happily live in a poorer society with better ethics any day (given some minimum threshold of live quality).
So inferior goods (using the economic term) can add low-cost options for consumers and are thus a social benefit.
While copying itself isn't bad, in practice those companies often releasing products that are unfit for sale or engage in deceptive advertising.
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.
But I can spot you that anyhow, because there's a perfectly reasonable fallback position: This is illegal. It's a copyright infringement at the very least, and possibly other things as well. And being "illegal", the "what are you gonna do about it" actually has clear, well defined answers. Smartcar.com is doing them a favor by serving a cease & desist, as there is nothing preventing them from moving straight to legal action.
That you wish something was true doesn't make it so, unfortunately.
What is not OK is copying the documentation verbatim, that is copyrighted. However, that is, frankly, the least of the problems (and easiest to rectify) when someone is taking your product idea wholesale.
Copying text or pictures would be copyright infringement.
Copying APIs is fine, as far as I'm concerned.
The world is as better place if hardware and software is compatible with each other, and common interfaces enable that.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-clone-factory
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-broth...
Anyone know of a specific documented example of this? I'm not really doubting, just interested.
This is really a different case though.
The German VC is saying: "Food delivery is working in the US, they've validated the model + EU VC's will now get behind that, so 'do that like they are'.
They are more or less competing, not exactly cloning.
Copying API's is a whole other level.
Literally copying docs etc. is another level.
The thing is - the small company may have some power here. The bigger company does not want an ugly, permanent lawsuit hanging over them. With the screen-scraping and blatant copying, it's going to make it seem, at least popularly bad, and possibly add emotive impetus to a judge. The copier cannot say with a straight face that they were not copying to a judge.
Germany VC's will still very rationally imply what I wrote above.
If Rocket is behind this, well, they might have laid a bridge too far.
Does it though? There is no global patent authority. If the ripoff is not for the US market, only a patent for their market will help. Which might be impossible to get in the first place.
This situation looks very egregious though.
Only in the short term. In the longer term, it may no longer be worth the risk for any Company A to begin in the first place.
https://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer
Love them, hate them, never underestimate them.
Whether you are creating, disrupting, stealing, copying or cheating... just be the best at it. There is reward for that.
Rocket internet, clone then sell to the U.S. company when they expand.
That's not the same as copying their manuals,code or other copyright though.
It's more akin to lyft to uber.
It is super lame and dumb to have ripped off their doc, but the API format itself is not an issue to me. If I were going to implement a competitor to Google Maps, it would make sense to copy the Maps API so people can migrate seamlessly. That is the nature of SaaS.
The core value proposition is not in API design, it's in the implementation.
The copyright of the structure of the API, however, is still something to be debated about.