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Comment by ttoinou | Hacker News Reader

So they have the intellectual property of some random CSS tables that everyone have on their website and a GET parameter of an URL ? Wow

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Are you being deliberately obtuse? It's the contents of the tables that have been ripped off.

Its OAuth documentation - its a very well described standard protocol. Most of the OAuth documentation looks and reads exactly like this. The only "smoking gun" is the "random" value used for the state parameter, which seems to be copied over - and developers copy other products/sites documentation ALL THE TIME.

While there is substance in the post that some other company is building the same product, saying that its 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.

I've been in this field for 10+ years and I have never encountered ripping off others' docs and calling them your own and it being ethically OK

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.

And what would the lawsuit be based on? Stealing documentation for how OAuth 2.0 works?

No, on copyright infringement.

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.

Coincidence they choose the same English language ? I think not

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