All the type of rubbish
We do not want on websites, both can go away AFAIC
A British startup backed by Google stole code from a US startup after meeting them, a lawsuit alleges. Bounce Exchange filed the lawsuit in the federal court for the southern district of New York in December and is seeking $100m in damages for copyright infringement. The company describes its product as behavioural marketing …
From the Dominos Pizza campaign case study :
"For new visitors, we wanted to capture their email addresses. We kept the campaign focus simple because each captured email address would create a number of new opportunities for future direct sales that could then be pursued through later email campaigns."
Yep, they can all fuck right off.
The vultures are eating each other... Maybe Ad-sling is finally imploding???
Watching legacy HBO series from Tom Hanks called 'From the Earth to the Moon'... Its a mix of The Right Stuff (1983) & Apollo 13 (1995)....
Wow, the human race used to have such lofty honorable goals...
Now we just fling Ads! ...
How sad is that!
Looking at this small sample of code, I really can't see that they have got much to go on unless they can prove that the source was taken in the first place. Just changing a few variable names isn't proof.
If the desired objective is similar then there is always a possibility that the code will be similar. This could well be a case of a US group getting a little too greedy, looking for slights that didn't actually happen.
Then again...
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Hard to tell who's at it to be honest but I can't help think that this is similar to musicians claiming stolen IP over a song someone heard years earlier that's similar, at least to some peoples ears.
If they do win though I'd expect it to be a field day for litigation as other firms hop on the juicy band wagon.
"Hard to tell who's at it to be honest but I can't help think that this is similar to musicians claiming stolen IP over a song someone heard years earlier that's similar, at least to some peoples ears."
Men At Work got thoroughly screwed over with their Down Under track because of that. Some prior song (which to me sounded nothing like it) had some similarities which apparently meant theft. Judge was probably tone deaf.
"If they do win though I'd expect it to be a field day for litigation as other firms hop on the juicy band wagon."
As usual the only people who'll win will be the lawyers.
It's funny how different people can see different things in the same code - to me, it looks very much as though the code has been copied. Of course some similarities are to be expected, and of course if you compare any two sufficiently large bodies of code you'll find similar snippets (which is probably what we're seeing in the image above) - it would be hard to tell without seeing much larger segments of the code.
But, speaking as someone who has pinched more than his fair share of code from StackOverflow, that snippet looks very suspicious.
My first thought was also that it looks a bit incriminating.
My second thought was why on earth you'd give a prospective reseller a copy of the source code? Perhaps once a contract was in place and the reseller has proven themselves but on the first visit?
Yes it is. It's been decades since I've done any programming, and even when I did, at best you could say I dabbled. As I look at the single snippet of code provided, I see similarity in naming conventions, not programming. As as someone who did professional tech writing once upon a time, that makes sense to me. You name the function to represent what it does, but customize it slightly. The actual block of code is completely different. But it's only a single block so not necessarily representative and there's no link to the actual complaint.
As one of those crazy 'Merkins I have one question that isn't covered here: Did the plaintiff have the defendant sign a non-disclosure agreement AND a non-compete agreement? If not, it sucks to be plaintiff and the case should be summarily dismissed.
Doesn't matter what they signed, if their code was stolen that's a copyright violation.
Stealing their "idea", I agree, if they didn't make them sign something they're stupid. Since the article said they were a startup, probably it was the guys responsible for the startup who were uneducated in how to run a business and thought "we're smart, why do we need to hire a lawyer to tell us what we already know?"
" that snippet looks very suspicious."
It does. But I'd be more interested in seeing the actual code than a few variable names. Nicking someone else variable and function names and changing them slightly isn't a copyright infringement. Copying the source line by line is.
What I mean is that the first word of the title was "Google", not because it was the most relevant thing about the story, but because people click more on any title containing the word Google.
And John went one step further, and apparently deduced that it was Google's fault. Maybe he's thinking about the Oracle lawsuit.
"They should both be fined $100m for crimes against humanity."
Bah, they'd probably count that as cost of doing business.
Lock all senior management from both companies in a room for a month with Bill Hick's rant on a continuous loop.
When you let them out, ask them, "Are you ready to get back to work?"
If they say yes, shoot them, it's the only humane thing to do.
Doesn't it depend on the inducement offered and method used? If you're just about to procrastinate and not buy a $THINGY today after all, but the website guesses this before you leave because of the way your mouse pointer moves, and so quickly offers x% off $THINGY's price if you buy within 10min, what would be so awful?
I don't doubt that the website response could be awful, and probably will be awful, but I don't see that such inducements, or the mechanism by which they are offered, /has/ to be awful.
Based on the small samples of code here it would be very difficult to prove they had been stolen. They are simple direct functions that really any basic programmer would come up with for the small function concerned.
So unless they had their code lodged in escrow or some other secured format that proves the date of authoring beyond reasonable doubt then they're probably fishing.
How did Bounce steal the Yieldify code anyway?
"predicting when a user will leave (or “bounce off”) a site, triggering inducements to stay"
The instant you push an intrusive ad in my face (especially if it's audio/video), or start messing about with analytics that bring the page to a halt, I'm gone. I'll happily tell them that for free so they don't have to piss money up the wall with services or software.
One guy designed a software, in DOS age, for several purposes, from HR management to you name it. He knew his students were a bit evil, and hid under his code a keyboard three-letter salute, like a ctrl-alt-del, programmed directly in Assembler.
One of his students stole the code, renamed everything, but the style was there. Most importantly, the three finger salute.
So, the teacher was there, in the sales stand, claiming it was his code, in front of his former student clients. So, he dared the student, and he bought the bluff. The teacher then, pressed the 3 finger salute, and lo and behold, his name appeared in the specially concealed credits window.
It was glorious.
I had a habit of including numeric constants which where MD5 hashes of certain strings, these constants where never used.
But it was interesting to listen to a certain individual and an supposed expert Lotus Notes dev accounting for these constants in a Lotus script to track 2 ton newsprint rolls.
They had taken my prototype application (constants and all) changed the colours, added a couple of images and claimed it as their own (adding no functionality whatsoever)
The Notes expert claimed that they wrote it over 3 days ans I could have as I wasn't a registered developer.
I almost felt bad asking them about the constants then supplying the strings to pass through the hashing package.
No I didn't feel bad about their written warnings from HR
The best thing is that if you take the code snippet from the linked compaint and strip out both sets of namespacing, you link straight back to a SO question from 2011 where they say they got the snippet from an opensource library written in 2009. So I'm guessing both companies copied it from the same place.
Most of those lines look like:
- Native hooks you use in almost every JavaScript app which listens to the DOM
- People programming to a common coding standard
I thought this approach was the way people are encourage to write code? Would they have been happier if the definitions were meaningless to humans like we used to get? temp1, temp2, temp11...
I just did a quick google search for setbouncecookie and came across a GitHub project for exactly what BOTH of these projects do, is the author "carlsednaoui/ouibounce" going to sue both?
I have a feeling this case will go on for too long as law simply doesn't understand code...Winter is coming...