I recently had a conversation with a friend about an innovative coffee cup design he had discovered on the popular crowd-funding website, Kickstarter. Kickstarter was troublingly described to me as a glorified electronic bulletin board with seemingly little to no protections for this coffee cup inventor and his peers. Do idea-sharing, marketplace, and crowdfunding websites, like Kickstarter, have protections in place to stop me, or anyone else, from taking that coffee cup inventor’s idea and presenting it as my own on Kickstarter or, more strategically, in another forum?
The Internet boom over the past several years has drastically changed the way and the speed with which creative professionals, aspiring creative professionals, and amateurs alike broadcast their work and content with each other and the worldwide community at large. Crowdsourcing sites like Kickstarter are at the forefront of this growing movement of e-collaboration and entrepreneurialism.
Reviewing the Kickstarter Terms of Use, there isn’t much in the way of protections for users who submit their creations to the site. The only mention the terms make to copyright issues is to that of protecting already existing works (“infringes any patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, right of publicity, or other right of any other person or entity, or violates any law or contract”), and what could perhaps be read as a loose warning to not using stolen ideas (“you know is false, misleading, or inaccurate”).
Though the Digital Millennium Copyright Act coupled with the U.S.’ adherence to the Berne Convention establish that copyright exists as soon as content is created; however, the landmark case Dastar Corp. v. Twentieth Century Fox 539 U.S. 23 (2007) has held that there are no protections for the unaccredited copying of uncopyrighted work.
So as the means and methods by which we generate and share ideas expand and evolve, will the law continue to struggle to keep up? Or will the Internet and its avant-garde, justice-driven community be forced to self-regulate? Both the lack in litigation over such issues and the Kickstarter Terms of Use seem to point in the direction of the latter.