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.
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 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!
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...
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.
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
Here in the UK people just have "Smartphones" and "tablets" (tho I do hear people calling generic tablets "iPad" sometimes).
The USA, love it or hate it, is the most dominant marketing force on planet earth.
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.
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.
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”.
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).
You can definitely win a war with superior marketing, but it's not a sure thing if your product is inferior.
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"
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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)
> 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:
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).
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.
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'
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]
That, and the idea that "races" can be clearly distinguished and defined, as you said.
Pretty spot on.
Related:
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.
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.
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.
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]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems,_Inc._v...
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.
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.
https://otonomo.io/about-us (see bottom of page)
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://www.wired.co.uk/article/inside-the-clone-factory
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2014/07/31/samwer-broth...
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.
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.
Anyone know of a specific documented example of this? I'm not really doubting, just interested.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
And I would happily live in a poorer society with better ethics any day (given some minimum threshold of live quality).
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 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.