Uber faces at least five U.S. probes | Hacker News Reader

Uber faces at least five U.S. probes

bloomberg.com

35 pointsbrakmic7 comments

The media's outlook on Uber is always very fascinating to me. At least this article got things mostly factually correct, but the amount of times that blatant speculation and rumor have been published about Uber is astounding.

Before UberX, Uber followed all the laws to a tee. This article correctly points out, that only after lyft and sidecar were flaunting the law and getting away with it, did Uber decide it must do so as well in order to stay ahead of the competition.

Laws and regulations about new and innovative technologies and products are a grey area. While I don't agree with a lot of the shitty tactics Uber employed, I can say with confidence that 80% of the bad shit written about Uber is totally false.

In hindsight, Kalanick could have and should have handled things better. Looking at the regulatory landscape for cryptocurrencies and blockchain tech, I find myself wishing there was a Kalanick out there pushing for innovation rather than letting the banks reign everything in and stifle it.

Cmon, tho, they literally built a system to ID cops. It's no wonder people are giving them shit, even if you forgive it all you have to know its terrible optics. It's not really astounding.

And I don't think the blockchain world is any any way over regulated or stifled, 5ish years in and its still basically the wild west. Btce was one of the biggest exchanges until recently, and I doubt whatshisface would have even been arrested had they not vacationed in greece or w/e. And any random jerkoff can still make something just like it. Or implement some funny p2p exchange etc..

Is scraping competitors’ public API’s out of the ordinary for technology companies? I was under the impression that Wal-Mart/Jet scraped Amazon and vice versa, similar to how retail chains employ “secret shoppers” to discover competitors’ prices.

I do remember a case where Craigslist sued a company for scraping its API and won. I wonder if it is invalidated by Weev’s subsequent acquittal.

They could be apples/oranges since the former is civil while the latter is criminal. Also, Craigslist was able to demonstrate damages, which were clearly linked; every visitor to the other company’s page was one that didn’t visit Craigslist. And there are clear copyright issues with scraping Craigslist and using that user-generated information to populate another website.

Though I'm unsure about competitors, there's a startup named ThinkNum which focuses entirely on scraping public APIs to provide investors with more data on tech companies.

Not only do competitor's do it, but also university and transportation authority researchers have as well.

Usually scraping is covered under tort law as a trespass to chattels. Since services have limited capacity, any scraping that imposes an undue amount of traffic is essentially depriving that entity of using their capacity to serve legitimate customers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trespass_to_chattels

Insofar as copyright is concerned, you can't really copyright data, but you can copyright a collection of data. See Feist v. Rural.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

To determine if someone is copying your data wholesale via scraping or some other method, it's not uncommon for a data provider to include false data that isn't real. If they see a competitor publishing that data, they can make the case that the competitor is copying their collection of data, especially if enough pieces of false data show up. In mapping, these are known as trap streets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

Ha! I love the idea of trap streets. From the wikipedia article, it appears that they're not protected by copyright in the U.S., though they are in the UK and Singapore.

They might be big enough to get away with an apology.

Obviously their business model was against the law as taxis are virtually everywhere regulated and then they are tax related issues regarding employee /contractors etc. A typical Harvard MBA would not have stated Uber.

I have a feeling that they made it...new CEO, plenty of cash, and a willingness to issue e thousand apologies and /or settlements.

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