I think the more interesting part is the comments that crept out of the wood work days after the article was posted to HN.
hautit 5 days ago (1 comment - account created 324 days ago)
Get over it, CBInsights, your UX sucks.
theUXclub 4 days ago (brand new account)
CB Insights, cheap and creepy as always. A 'low-drama' group of people that decided to tweet and share the story all over the place claiming something like 'Look! They copied us!'- Your UX is bad as hell, I wouldn't be very proud. Plus, your site is Bootstrap (a framework created for people who have no skills or time to invest on CSS or design), did you also invent it and they copied you as well?
frumpywooly 4 days ago (brand new account)
"...12 folks from their team have signed up for our free trial since September including the CEO, head of product, designer, product manager and a senior ruby developer." CBInsights, creepiest company in America
CB Insights actions, arguably, constitute a large scale smear campaign that is not adequate to the original transgression of the startup.
Your comment, arguably, constitutes a low scale smear campaign as you have no proof that startup founders have posted those comments. Any other CB Insights competitor/enemy could use that opportunity.
>CB Insights actions, arguably, constitute a large scale smear campaign that is not adequate to the original transgression of the startup.
"Blame the victim" much?
They just reported it on the web AFAIK. What else would be "adequate to the original transgression of the startup"?
>Your comment, arguably, constitutes a low scale smear campaign as you have no proof that startup founders have posted those comments.
Sure, no hard proof. I only have a guess, based on decades of living in a human society, that accounts that were created days before, and that say the same things, and in favor of the transgressor, are somehow related to them...
Is there any competing theory? Random internet people that decided to sign up to HN just to vent against a company?
Yeah, a competing theory that I've included in my original comment. Anyone with a grudge against CB Insights could have registered those accounts.
>Random internet people that decided to sign up to HN just to vent against a company?
Obviously, trolls exist. Copyright/plagiarism/"inspiration" discussions are a feeding grounds for those kind of people.
That's two competing theories. And yeah, it's ironic to state with confidence that someone is "actively running a smear campaign" with no plausible data confirming the statement.
Jesus, besides the merit of CB Insights' claim, this whole thing reeks of incompetence. You're a YC-funded startup and you can't do your own visual design? I'll admit that when I need ideas/designs, I'll often head over to the D3 gallery page, copy the relevant parts of the code, but at least modify it so that it looks different, and actually meets my needs. What's comical is not only did they purportedly rip off a design, but they ripped off a pretty prosaic one. And I don't know what's the worser sign of their operational capacity, that they signed into a competitor's product to take code/get inspiration, or that they couldn't even be bothered to come up with fake email addresses, or that it required 12 employees to go in and successfully make off with the designs.
Edit: Also, as a data-handling-person, the startup's defense that their inspiration is "only the way data is displayed" is annoying...data display is very important...but also, data display is the first thing people see, and I imagine is the thing that makes it into slidedecks in lieu of actual proof of quality of data analysis and data research...if you have the resources to be great and different at the "backend" part of data work, you most definitely have the ability to not just borrow someone's design...as good data display often follows a bespoke understanding of the data itself.
Also, I must credit HighCharts and its well-documented API as getting me through various crunch-time oh-shit-I-need-a-web-graph-right-now situations http://www.highcharts.com/demo
> if you have the resources to be great and different at the "backend" part of data work, you most definitely have the ability to not just borrow someone's design...as good data display often follows a bespoke understanding of the data itself.
Given the incredible popularity of "big data" startups, this assumption I believe is incorrect. There are many data-oriented startups who have put out questionable data visualizations in the name of "content marketing." (e.g. Mattermark, another YC company, has been fond of doing this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8090617 )
The thing that irritates me is that naive users would assume CB Insights were the ones who copied, as they don't have the YC brand.
Not YC's fault per se... just how people generally use brands as a shorthand for merit. At this point YC is almost more like a meta-corporation with its individual startups as departments.
There's one attribute of capitalism that I think is largely responsible for its success, and is likely the single largest factor that contributed to the USA's victory over the USSR:
Capitalism allows permission-free innovation.
In my opinion, markets get too much credit and are actually secondary to this. A market is just a way of performing goal-directed gradient descent and aggregating decision making. Markets are not by any means "efficient," and are highly vulnerable to getting stuck at local maxima like any other gradient descent algorithm.
I think the ability to engage in permission free innovation is actually a much more significant advantage than markets. You could nix the market and implement some kind of socialism and I think you'd still have a fast, innovative economy if you allowed people to negate the bureaucracy. I'm not saying markets don't have advantages, just that they're not a panacea.
I saw this when I worked as a government contractor. There was an incident within the org where I worked that had the effect of temporarily suspending the bureaucracy, and for that brief period of time it innovated like a small agile private company! Everything felt like it went vertical. Then the bureaucracy came back and all innovation halted. Now you had to ask permission, so nothing could happen.
Thing is: as the size of a corporation approaches "big," its internal procedures and politics start to resemble government. Microsoft, IBM, and yes even the venerable Google start to look a lot like government agencies internally. As they grow they take on a lot of government's problems, like sclerotic bureaucracy.
The meta-corp model avoids this by allowing individual "departments" to function with an extreme level of independence. It uses mechanisms like equity finance to capture upside while creating enough autonomy to allow permission-free innovation.
I grew up playing a huge amount of basketball, and therefore have a completely different frame of reference here. In sports, you watch a lot of film and study your competition. You then take the best parts of your competition, and prepare to compete with them. Sometimes you take their best plays. Sometimes you you design new plays to actively exploit the other team.
The point that I'm trying to make is: this is a competition. The fact that CB would even validate this YC company by writing this post - to me - is a defensive move rather than an offensive one.
Practially speaking, design is legally indefensible as intellectual property - if you actually paid lawyers to make a case for you, you'd only be depleting your own war chest to make your copycats go through the relatively small hassle of a redesign. The only effective way to counter it is loudly naming and shaming the companies responsible.
Kudos to CB Insights for doing exactly that. Not only will it make the copying more trouble than it was worth to Techlist, but the threat of public embarrassment will help deter copycats in the future.
Not every lawyer knows/understands IP and user interface design. But if you find a lawyer who specializes in the two, and you lay the groundwork before your design is copied, you should have a strong legal position when the copycats arrive.
For an early-stage startup, it may not make sense to sink a ton of $$ into design patents. But companies with more revenue/capital should think about it.
I disagree from a practical, as well as financial standpoint.
It's very difficult to patent a software interface design as you have to prove a lack of existence of prior art and the patent must describe the specifics of what you are patenting.
These days there's very little new under the sun. I don't see anything remarkably unique about that particular interface. I'm certainly not saying that it wasn't lifted by their competitor, but that analytics dash also bares a striking resemblance to Google Analytics and a host of others, not to mention Microsoft Excel. Okay, it's blue and has large Helvetica numbers- is that what you're going to patent? Okay, I'll change mine to a green color scheme with Arial fonts. Your patent is no longer enforceable, and your IP attorneys who tend to be paid quite well will charge you tens of thousands of dollars to prove that.
I can imagine it feels like a major violation and annoying to be ripped off, and I don't condone that strategy, but I doubt that CB's competitive advantage is a color scheme and some data labels. A design patent would have basically no value in this scenario.
That's a great link to example of user design patents that proves your point. But reading that I feel like almost all the examples they show are not protecting innovation. It seems like the kind of thing that ought to be protected as trademarks, not patents. If Google makes a page that is distinctive enough to be its trademark and you make a paget that looks clese enough to that page that the average user coudl confuse them, it seems like you are doing the equivelent of infringing on a trademark.
CSS (like all written works) is copyrightable, so if there is clear evidence that the CSS was copy/pasted, CB Insights would have a case on that basis. Damages would be negligible, so it would not be a case worth pursuing.
Not all written works are copyrightable. Even in the US which is fairly lax about granting copyright, a work must fulfill certain criteria to be copyrightable, cf here for a good overview https://www.lib.purdue.edu/uco/CopyrightBasics/basics.html
Since titles and short phrases aren't copyrightable, could I start a tech news blog, have all of the exact same stories and titles that Engadget uses, and write my own content for each story and not being infringing on their copyright?
You could try, and Engadget would probably not, if they hire a good law firm, use copyright to try to stop you. They could however potentially use other parts of the law including, depending on the jurisdiction, rules on unfair competition, passing off etc.
Anand, CEO of CB Insights here. Surprised to see this here again (prior discussion - http://cbi.vc/1DhMQT3), but if any questions, feel free to ask. I'm at a conference but will try to reply during breaks.
If you're really bored :) and want to read more on this, Connie Loizos of StrictlyVC dove in a bit more (http://cbi.vc/1vk4lLY)
When did YC companies change from being the little guys/underdogs to being the big strong evil Lord Business?
I don't know if it's schadenfreude, or simply that HN is full of people who resent YC because they didn't get in (myself somewhat included)
But, this propensity to try to destroy someone who wronged you, without a pragmatic outcome you are trying to achieve, other than to be punitive, goes completely against my own moral compass, and It really bothers me that no one else here seems to agree.
and the excuse that "we have a right to know" or that "if they did this, what else are they dishonest about...we need to know who they are to protect ourselves." etc... are all built on a house of cards with a foundation called, "we like to watch the mighty fall."
I try to never bring up religion, but there is a beautiful Jewish Law called Shemiras Halashon (guarding your tongue) that bans "Gossip, bad mouthing people, and talking about others in a way that can be construed negatively, even if its true... unless there is what's called, "Toeles" which is a set of criteria the story must meet to be justified to share... http://www.torahmediaatlanta.com/assets/Uploads/MiriamFeldma...
This idea that our words don't hurt is a falacy, and while I am certainly guilty myself... when it's an egregious effort to be punitive, with no pragmatic goal...it just seems wrong to me.
Yes,but not immediately, the initial reaction of the perpetrator was to defend the decision on twitter, thats what happens when you attack someone, they go on the defensive...
..but that same objective could have been achieved privately. A nice email from the victim stating that they see they copied their design and would greatly appreciate them changing it ASAP...would have likely yielded a quicker and cleaner result.
Regardless, my initial comment was less addressed to the victim here, but rather to the HN community for pouncing all over it.
I don't disagree that people get weird about YC companies here, but let's be honest: YC can take it. This startup can take it. A week of bad publicity is a minimal amount of adversity compared to what they'll endure in the future, and there were a few lessons they needed to learn. What we're seeing isn't some kind of lynch mob, it's a few people shooting the breeze on the internet.
More importantly, I think the notion that a victim - a real victim, making a truthful accusation - is obligated to remain silent is very badly thought out.
Do you really think this story will prevent someone who plans on stealing a design from stealing it?
It's one thing if you seeked punitive damages from a court...but just tooing your horn on a blog, twitter and HN...will not only not yield results, but will likely be forgotten tomorrow by everyone else.
Besides, even if the victim's intention was altruistic and intended to prevent others from stealing designs in the future, who made society or the HN community responsible for raising that flag?
You can disagree, but I would put my money on the notion that your argument is built on a schadenfreude foundation, not a "I care about the world" platform.
Having started two companies, as a non tech founder, I can understand why they did this at the start, as there are many other more important things to do than CSS and TOS. But this isn't an excuse as soon as they had the resources to make the change.
> YC promotes launching fast and copying / plagiarism facilitates that.
You don't copy someone's unique look, when they don't want you to copy them. There are so many inexpensive ($12 - $49) CSS templates that look good enough or even cool, that what happened is both inexcusable and just stupid. Most of them are already built to use either bootstrap or foundation as well, so it makes the launching fast part trivial.
> Graham killed the thread, saying that it violated the
> site’s guideline to “not use posts to ask us questions,”
> but he also wrote, “I think they shouldn’t have done
> it, and that they compounded the problem by not taking
> the initial complaints seriously enough.”
That is a convenient and often used response. And also a great way to cap controversies from getting out of hand: just censor them!! Good thing YC owns this forum.
Playing devil's advocate here. How much change in the design would people think it is not a rip-off? If they changed the color scheme? If they changed the font? The type of visualization shown seems pretty standard (looks like a treemap plot?). I don't want to denigrate the importance of stylistic choices as they are very important in data visualizations, but it seems like a pretty standard visualization.
Perhaps it is the dimensions they chose to represent out of the data that was a rip-off? Ripping off methods of visualizing subtle aspects of the data that conveys information would be a more egregious offense to me.
Hey I made the CB Insights design. I completely agree the viz is standard (the treemap was my first d3 viz actually!). A lot of people are stopping at the charts and saying "well it's just a bar chart and a treemap, get over it!"
To me the fact that the entire layout outside of the chart, even the copy is exactly the same is the main offense. Even the table below the chart (when you click to see the data) is exactly the same. It would have taken them 20 minutes to just shuffle things around, but no they just replicated it.
We put a lot of time in figuring out the best way to present information so that users don't actually have to spend a lot of time to get answers. They skipped that part and stole our work.
> Our terms of service which all these users agreed to prohibits this explicitly – You may not access the Services if You are Our direct competitor, except with Our prior written consent.
I'm not a lawyer, but I tend to think that it would not be a clear-cut argument. On the one hand, it is a TOS, which is a contract. On the other, people don't read TOSes online, and I have no idea what the current case law has to say about that. Even if they did read it, it could be argued that a "signup for free" button that is generally available, without an approval cycle behind it is an implicit written permission for anyone to access the services.
Again, IANAL, but I certainly would not make any decisions on the validity of this without consulting one.
Here in Belgium, there are terms that people put in their legal document that shouldn't be present and would be considered invalid (as if they were not present) irrespective of the fact you agreed to them.
Examples that come to mind: prohibit people renting an apartment to have a cat, reduce the time you have to return a product bought online (and get a refund) to less than the legal time, ...
>Though the most successful founders are usually good people, they tend to have a piratical gleam in their eye. They're not Goody Two-Shoes type good. Morally, they care about getting the big questions right, but not about observing proprieties. That's why I'd use the word naughty rather than evil. They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter. This quality may be redundant though; it may be implied by imagination.
While I've never been particularly interested in YC itself, that quote is something I'd never read, and honestly it's really sad. That he straight up admits that he's looking for people who are [synonym for evil that doesn't make him look as bad] is really telling and sad.
Maybe I'm just too idealistic in general -- entirely possible -- but when I read "breaking rules, but not rules that matter," I wonder who gets to decide which rules matter. Because someone obviously thought they mattered enough to be rules in the first place.
I book I've found that helped me get a historical sense for morality and its place in politics, religion, and personal success is Karen Armstrong's Fields of Blood.
So basically you support Adolf Eichmann's claim that "following orders" was a legitimate excuse for participating in the Holocaust? Either that, or you do not understand PG's argument.
It could go either direction. There was an startup Innopage in Hongkong news these two days claiming that the design of its iOS App "Worthy" was copied in merely 2 months by China's Alibaba after the latter sent a 10-member delegation team to visit Innopage in Hong Kong. Alibaba responded that "there is no factual and legal basis." What can a startup do?
It's cool to see the startup growth analytics industry heating up. I thought Mattermark was first, but it looks like CB Insights was founded before them.
Regarding the plagiarism, I think this will blow over pretty quickly. Not a fan of what they did, but as long as they weren't stealing data, it isn't unforgivable. UIs are almost always influenced by one another, they just made the mistake of following their inspiration too closely.
I've used tree-maps for data visualization before too...I've never heard of cb-insights though. Furthermore, I've written an additional piece of code that let's you decide what colors to use...so it could be blue and white...
While I agree that there's some suspicious similarities in content (potentially plagiarism, although you're in the same vertical...) and style, the use of tree-map visualizations isn't plagiarism, nor is using bar-charts with a line on top.
When I read the article my first thought was... So go to war. Don't be proud that you bootstrapped and they got funded. Go to war.
Go to the VC community and raise a ton. You have proof of a strong product and yet you are not capitalizing on first mover advantage. You are asking these guys to copy you and trump you.
Go to war. Raise. Build. Grow. Expand. Offer more things free to limit competitor entry points. Offer even better metrics. Go to war.
The article's passive-aggressive tone is overbearing. Why can't they simply present the evidence, say they are very disappointed with the YC company for stealing their design and be done with it?
No it doesn't. There's a big difference between taking inspiration from somewhere, and copying it.
CB Insights and Disk Space Analyzer use blocks to visualize size, but that's about as far as the similarity goes. This company not only copied CB Insights's color scheme and layout, but also the text "The color represents the amount of funding and the size represents the number of deals."
What gets me about this whole flap is that I just don't see anything particularly interesting or innovative in the UX design for that page CB Insights is so fiercely proud of. So it's a heatmap combined with slider -- how original is that?
As if everyone hasn't been stealing from everyone else's UX, like, all the time, since the public internet became a thing.
The CEO of the YC company apologized in the other HN thread and said they are changing it...why is this still a story.
To be fair, I would be upset and annoyed like CBI, but on a pragmatic level...what more do they want.
No good comes out of publicizing others shortcomings (no matter how much they deserve the public shaming). This should have been handled privately...not through Twitter and HN.
If they insisted on doing something publicly why not spin it in your favor and make a slogan, "Data so awesome, our competitors steal it like a possum."
- Are blue treemap your only value CBinsights? Well if you felt like you had to write about it, so maybe...
- Also public shaming using "Y Combinator company" instead of naming the company is shameful. Don't lump together all the YC companies for your own greed of getting attention.
- Your TOS blows. Close their account and send them a mail if you didn't want them to use your product.
I pretty much agree with this. They created a D3.js treemap and probably even used a standard Colorbrewer blue color scheme, as seen in this d3 example:
Was it terribly uncreative for the other YCombinator company to do the same thing? Yes.
Was it plagiarism, copying, or unethical? No way. You did not invent the treemap nor a strong blue on light blue color scheme. Your UX is not unique enough to claim design infringement here.
Lastly, your TOS is probably the most alarming part of this story. You should not be so afraid of competition that you attempt to prohibit 'competitors' from using your product.
This is like saying a blog copied another blog because they're showing sequences of articles in a vertical column that scrolls.
That style of heat map is not unique nor exclusive to a site. Nor it is to use shades of blue.
Oh wow they have a blue bar graph with a red line, "they're stealing our IP!!!!"
"Oh the fields are the same" Similar software needs to deal with the same data, obviously.
This article is enlightening. It's free publicity for the Y Combinator company, and I'd take them more serious than a company that greatly overstates their IP.
But they said the design was copied. Also, non-trivial parts of the design are in the exact same positions in both examples -- it seems to me like the question isn't even if the design was copied, but more of whether we should care.
And on top of that, the exact same capitalization and abbreviations are used. At least they took the effort to rename "last year" to "last 4 quarters" in one occasion..
And as it turns out, both parties probably copied design elements created by Xerox PARC... which were probably originally created by some researcher(s) there who read scholarly articles by other researcher(s) who probably wrote about the possibility of things similar to the created design elements existing in the first place...
So who invented what, when?
I sure as heck don't know!
But what I think is amazing is how computer history tends to repeat itself... <g>
