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Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

vintedgoods.com

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Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#21

Post by stcredzero »

ThaddeusQuay2 wrote: post #12
ChuckMcM wrote: post #2

tl;dr - Person who mentored these guys didn't realize they were going to compete, takes legal action, Kickstarter complies. Since Kickstarter is walking into the same land mines that eBay did, albeit with a slightly different flavor, it will be interesting to see how this plays out. The Vinted Goods folks can show pretty clear economic harm from the action, the mentor clearly thinks there is some sort of trademark, t…

"So what happens if you decide to make a Kickstarter Movie about a couple of anthropomorphized robots who end up on a dessert planet only to discover one of the inhabitants is destined to overthrow a totalitarian dictator?" That depends. Does the plot involve one of the robots taking a bite out of the dessert planet?

> Does the plot involve one of the robots taking a bite out of the dessert planet?

This puts the Candy Kingdom in the land of OOO in an entirely different perspective for me.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#22

Post by 001sky »

bicknergseng wrote: post #16
rosser wrote: post #10

IANAL, but if the "mentor" is acting in as bad of faith as it appears, there may be grounds for a counter-claim of "tortious interference."

Great legal term. Makes me think of a tortoise chewing on ethernet cables or something.

Actually, a torte is a rich, usually multilayered, cake that is filled with buttercreams, mousses, jams.[1]

So, don't you interfere....=D

_____________

[1] Wikipedia: http://www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torte Not to be confused with tart or tort. [FYI tortious interference, less ceremoniously, alludes to 'tort', a decidely less delicious variation of the word.]

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#23

Post by cube13 »

Dystopian wrote: post #15
matthuggins wrote: post #3

It feels like there's got to be more to this story than is actually included in this post with regards to the mentor suddenly opposing the startup.

More likely - "Mentor" was training (grooming) these interns so that they would eventually work at his company. Interns decided to move out on their own (nothing wrong there), Interns signed some kind of overly general internship / employment contract that included some form of non-compete which he's leveraging to strengthen his lawsuit. If I'm mistaken and the mentor's lawsuit really is as weak as the founders excla…

>Interns signed some kind of overly general internship / employment contract that included some form of non-compete which he's leveraging to strengthen his lawsuit.

That doesn't seem to be the case here, from TFA. It seems that it's more of a general IP infringement claim.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#24

Post by ThaddeusQuay2 »

stcredzero wrote: post #20
ThaddeusQuay2 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"gotta love spelling correctors" Figure out a way to route all of your writing through your search engine, and have it flag phrases which do not occur in its database, or which occur much less frequently than similar ones. So, in this case, it would ask: "Did you mean 'desert planet'?" Alternately, you could just have your secretary check everything before it goes out. You know, like they did in the old days. But the…

> Figure out a way to route all of your writing through your search engine, and have it flag phrases which do not occur in its database, or which occur much less frequently than similar ones. So, in this case, it would ask: "Did you mean 'desert planet'?" Or, one could build a table of trigrams and bi-grams for English words and use that in the spell checker. It would be helpful to have some sort of approximate index…

My suggestion was for Blekko, where he works. It just occurred to me that there are interesting possibilities in connecting a search engine with a word processor. Anyway, even though your table/index thingy would work, it's availability and/or accuracy might suffer from whatever manual intervention which would be necessary for maintenance, but mostly, it would not have the advantage of constant updates from crawling new and updated sources. There is more to English than the OED. A while back, I saw an estimate of there being something like more than one million words in English, which included many terms that have come into normal usage, but which might take years to be included in any mainstream dictionary.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#25

Post by rprasad »

Dystopian wrote: post #15
matthuggins wrote: post #3

It feels like there's got to be more to this story than is actually included in this post with regards to the mentor suddenly opposing the startup.

More likely - "Mentor" was training (grooming) these interns so that they would eventually work at his company. Interns decided to move out on their own (nothing wrong there), Interns signed some kind of overly general internship / employment contract that included some form of non-compete which he's leveraging to strengthen his lawsuit. If I'm mistaken and the mentor's lawsuit really is as weak as the founders excla…

The interns note that they were accused of stealing designs in the mentor's complaint. They never address this, and talk instead about website infringement issues.

If the suit relates to the misappropriation of their mentor's designs, they are in hot water. If the suit is merely about them copying the website, then it may blow over fairly quickly.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#26

Post by stcredzero »

ThaddeusQuay2 wrote: post #24
stcredzero wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Figure out a way to route all of your writing through your search engine, and have it flag phrases which do not occur in its database, or which occur much less frequently than similar ones. So, in this case, it would ask: "Did you mean 'desert planet'?" Or, one could build a table of trigrams and bi-grams for English words and use that in the spell checker. It would be helpful to have some sort of approximate index…

My suggestion was for Blekko, where he works. It just occurred to me that there are interesting possibilities in connecting a search engine with a word processor. Anyway, even though your table/index thingy would work, it's availability and/or accuracy might suffer from whatever manual intervention which would be necessary for maintenance, but mostly, it would not have the advantage of constant updates from crawling…

> There is more to English than the OED. A while back, I saw an estimate of there being something like more than one million words in English...

I can see the advantage of a cloud-hosted solution here. It's getting pretty compute/memory intensive. Still, "spell/grammar" check is something that we'll probably never get completely right. We'll just peck away and approach asymptotically. Desert/dessert and their ilk are a worthy target. (Words that "look" right.)

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#27

Post by rprasad »

goatforce5 wrote: post #9
citricsquid wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree: > He laid claims to a number of our designs such as our website utilizing a top navigation bar, our photo of the designer operating a sewing machine, etc. > In short, the claims are as outlandish as we perceived If the claims are so ridiculous why haven't they posted the claim? Why are we supposed to trust what they have to say? Also this line reads very curiously: > the mentor gave them words of blessing fo…

"Thanks for all your help help, Mentor. We'll be off!" "Sure thing kids, go crazy. Do whatever you want! Good luck! You'll need it!" [Kids post to kickstarter and get tons of funding. Mentor decides that maybe he wants some of that action.] How much funding had been pledged before Kickstarter pulled the plug?

Based on the conflicting statements the interns wrote, this is how I would put it:

"Thanks for all your help help, Mentor. We'll be off! [And we're taking your designs with us!]"

"Sure thing kids, go crazy. Do whatever you want! [I don't know that you're taking any of my designs to create competing products.] Good luck! You'll need it [because you don't have any designs and it will take you a while to come up with good ones]!"

Kids post to kickstarter using their mentor's proprietary designs, and get tons of funding to make products based on their mentor's designs.

Mentor sees them stealing the designs he spent months/years working on and sues.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#28

Post by camiller »

cube13 wrote: post #23
Dystopian wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

More likely - "Mentor" was training (grooming) these interns so that they would eventually work at his company. Interns decided to move out on their own (nothing wrong there), Interns signed some kind of overly general internship / employment contract that included some form of non-compete which he's leveraging to strengthen his lawsuit. If I'm mistaken and the mentor's lawsuit really is as weak as the founders excla…

>Interns signed some kind of overly general internship / employment contract that included some form of non-compete which he's leveraging to strengthen his lawsuit. That doesn't seem to be the case here, from TFA. It seems that it's more of a general IP infringement claim.

And regarding their website at that, not their products. A cursory look at the products on both companies websites doesn't show any obvious copying of products designs. And if killspenser thinks they own the idea of a top navigation bar...

I will agree though, we have heard only one side of the story.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#29

Post by colindoc84 »

citricsquid wrote: post #5
matthuggins wrote: post #3

It feels like there's got to be more to this story than is actually included in this post with regards to the mentor suddenly opposing the startup.

I agree: > He laid claims to a number of our designs such as our website utilizing a top navigation bar, our photo of the designer operating a sewing machine, etc. > In short, the claims are as outlandish as we perceived If the claims are so ridiculous why haven't they posted the claim? Why are we supposed to trust what they have to say? Also this line reads very curiously: > the mentor gave them words of blessing fo…

It's an attempt at a web 2.0 'serious reply' while being very concerned about coming across as reasonable. If there's more to this story the people behind Vinted Goods are in for a rude shock that good PR isn't about a reasonable sounding blog post with a community outreach angle. That's a tactic for taking on faceless multinationals who move slowly.

Re: Kickstarter suspends project 10 hours from successful funding

#30

Post by colindoc84 »

Tipzntrix wrote: post #19

Tsk, it stings that the timing is so poor. It's almost malicious to pull the rug in the eleventh hour like that. I agree that the story is pretty one-sided here. The posts reeks of PC, sanitized writing which is to be expected, considering they will be going to court soon. Motives are well hidden and the overall tone of how each interaction between the Vinted and their mentors sounds way too congenial.

It's certainly better to pull it before the money is distributed. It sucks but the money going to the bank account of Vinted Goods is only going to make the situation messier.
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