Sadly, the design is most likely going to be copied, mass produced and available on Temu/Amazon/Alibaba within the next several weeks. Kick Starter is basically free R&D for Chinese manufacturers.
The entire US of A is free R&D for Chinese manufacturers. In fact the entirety of China is free R&D for itself as companies in China copy each other. China is the apex of the open source philosophy taken to the maximum extent.
> Further investigation taught me that the Chinese have a parallel system of traditions and ethics around sharing IP, which lead me to coin the term “gongkai”. This is deliberately not the Chinese word for “Open Source”, because that word (kaiyuan) refers to openness in a Western-style IP framework, which this not. Gongkai is more a reference to the fact that copyrighted documents, sometimes labeled “confidential” and “proprietary”, are made known to the public and shared overtly, but not necessarily according to the letter of the law. However, this copying isn’t a one-way flow of value, as it would be in the case of copied movies or music. Rather, these documents are the knowledge base needed to build a phone using the copyright owner’s chips, and as such, this sharing of documents helps to promote the sales of their chips. There is ultimately, if you will, a quid-pro-quo between the copyright holders and the copiers.