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.
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.
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.
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?
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.