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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.