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Copyright concerns hit Kickstarter campaign for wood turntable

Raise your hand if you remember the Kickstarter campaign for Silvan Audio Workshop’s wood turntable. It’s a sleek, ornamental design featuring a slab of wood, a glass platter, supporting spikes and high-end parts from UK audio manufacturer Rega. It struck a chord with some of our readers yesterday, and especially with Joel Scilley, a longtime turntable and audio gear manufacturer operating under the name Audiowood. He’s been selling “Barky,” a turntable just like Silvan Audio Workshop’s, since 2009. Scilley claims that the Kickstarter design infringes on his copyright, and he’s asked the campaign’s owner, Kent Walter, to halt all crowdfunding. He’s also filed a DMCA notice with Kickstarter, so far to no avail.

Scilley’s issue with the Silvan Audio Workshop campaign isn’t its use of Rega parts or slabs of wood — it’s all about the design similarities.

“The Silvan Audio turntable is identical to my design in every way but two: a change of wood types (which I too have done), and a different brand of spike feet (which, importantly, from a visual design perspective, are still spikes),” Scilley says. “The parts kit is the same, including the glass platter which allows tree rings to be seen, and the overall concept is identical.”

The Barky turntable has been featured in more than 20 major international print publications and dozens of online outlets since 2009, which Scilley says lends him protection under US copyright law. He offers the following quote from the US Copyright Office as support of this claim: “A work is automatically protected by copyright when it is created, that is, ‘fixed’ in a copy or phonorecord for the first time. Neither registration in the Copyright Office nor publication is required for copyright protection.”

Kent Walter’s Silvan Audio Workshop design

Walter doesn’t see his Silvan Audio Workshop turntable as an infringement or copycat art, and he says he has nothing but respect for Scilley and his work. Walter thinks that Scilley’s outrage stems from the fact that, now, he has competition.

“Really, the very last things I want are a bunch of drama or any harm to Audiowood,” Walter says. “Legal stuff aside, if there was any intention to copy anything, then on an ethical and creative level, I wouldn’t want to do it. We had a similar idea, Rega is far and away the best parts for making it a reality (due to the way they build their products), and I would love to be able to coexist.”

Scilley first asked Walter to voluntarily halt the campaign, and he noted that if it were successful, confusion over the design would hurt his own brand and business. Walter says in these messages — and on the Vinyl Collective forum — that he conceived of the design without any outside influence in 2011, and later made a wood turntable as a wedding present for a friend. Response to that present pushed Walter to consider expanding production via Kickstarter. In September, someone on a message board sent Walter a link to Audiowood.

After checking out Scilley’s site, Walter decided to go ahead with the Kickstarter campaign, with the belief that they were both simply trading in custom parts for factory ones. Considering potential copyright protection and the popularity of the Barky turntable model, this isn’t how Scilley sees it.

“Barky is my signature design,” he says. “It is on my business cards, the cover page of my website, and it is the most published of my designs to date. In copying this model, Silvan chose the most successful of my designs.”

Joel Scilley’s Audiowood “Barky” design

Scilley eventually sent off a DMCA notice to Kickstarter, but that probably won’t lead to any action, legal or otherwise.

“Thanks for writing in,” Kickstarter wrote to Scilley. “Unfortunately, this is a matter that falls outside our Copyright and Trademark policies, and is not one that we are equipped to assess or act upon. If you’d like to pursue this further, you will have to do so directly with the project creator.”

In a separate message to Engadget, a Kickstarter representative offered the following note: “It’s our policy to not comment on legal issues or complaints along those lines. In general we follow a detailed procedure for copyright complaints we receive, as outlined by the DMCA.”

Scilley remains in contact with Walter, and the Silvan Audio Workshop Kickstarter now includes an update and an FAQ entry addressing the issue.

“In any case, my priority is to be really open and transparent with everyone, and if anyone would rather go to Audiowood than participate in what I’m doing, I completely respect that and wish Joel absolutely the best,” Walter says.

Filed under: Household, Alt

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Ting launches open beta for its GSM network

Ting launches open beta for its GSM network

Kickstarter’s ‘Zach Braff’ problem gets worse with the Pebble Time

Whenever you talk about Kickstarter, it’s natural that the conversation will turn to Pebble. There may be more successful crowdfunding campaigns, but the smartwatch’s stratospheric success is inexorably tied to that of its partner. Earlier today, however, Pebble once again took to the site to launch its third product, the Pebble Time. It seems odd that a company would use a service designed to get startups off the ground when it’s clearly in no need of help — having raised $1 million in just 49 minutes. For me, it’s the moment where I’ve finally lost patience with Kickstarter.

When Allerta (the company we now know and love as Pebble) launched its original Kickstarter campaign, it was teetering on the edge of what you’d normally call a startup. After all, it had already produced a successful hardware product (the inPulse) and had around $400,000 in venture capital funding in its back pocket.

Since then, it has become the most popular smartwatch in the world; hell some see it as the gold standard by which all wearables are judged. The company already has an online store, and I have no doubt that its employees are capable of making sure its servers would be up to demand. So, why did it run pre-orders via Kickstarter instead of on its own service? Because it’s great PR.

“A CEO openly admitted they had the cash to bankroll its first production run, but was using Kickstarter to generate more attention.”

Pebble knew that it had a blockbuster product and it’ll enjoy a thousand column inches with people talking about its success. Even though it had no need to come to Kickstarter, and I’m sure that the commission the site takes will sting just a little, the free publicity will more than compensate for that.

Kickstarter has become a machine for established businesses to generate as much unpaid advertising as possible. It’s anecdotal evidence, sure, but last week I had a phone call with a startup (I won’t name names) where the CEO openly admitted that they had the cash necessary to bankroll its first production run, but was using the site to generate more attention.

Ever since Zach Braff, with his reported net worth of $22 million, raised $3.1 million on Kickstarter, there’s been a tension about the “right way” to use the service. When Kickstarter responded, it said that high-profile projects like Wish I Was Here and Veronica Mars encouraged people to get involved. Maybe, it added, they’d stick around and back other projects, too. There’s never been any proof that such efforts have resulted in more frequent pitches, and Tim Heidecker already made the point more eloquently (and, you know, more swearily) than I can.

I’m not saying that successful people can’t use Kickstarter but, to me, their cap-in-hand use of the platform has always felt fraudulent. It’d be like watching Bill Gates, Mark Cuban and Warren Buffett panhandling on the streets of Seattle. This is why it’s easy to rail against Silicon Valley venture capitalists who use the site purely as a means of reducing the risk of their investments. James Proud raised $2 million for a “smart sleep sensor” on the site, but he neglected to mention that venture capitalists had already kicked in a bucketload of cash already.

Kickstarter actually railed against this sort of behavior back in 2012, when its co-founders declared “Kickstarter Is Not A Store” — each word capitalized for emphasis. It was magnificent, because the site took a stand against those people who were simply using it as a pre-ordering platform. The rules were also changed to mandate that products had to have a working prototype and banned flashy renders and outrageous marketing claims.

Kickstarter actually railed against this sort of behavior back in 2012, when its co-founders declared “Kickstarter Is Not A Store.”

A couple of years later, however, the site’s founders had changed their tune: rolling back those rules and allowing creators to launch products without the projects being vetted by staff first. Here’s what I think happened: Indiegogo emerged as the crowdfunding platform du jour, with its entirely hands-off stance on product development. It may be technology’s equivalent of the Wild West, but it was a Wild West that was taking money away from Kickstarter, so the rules were relaxed to keep creators on its side.

It’s a romantic notion, but I always saw Kickstarter as a way to empower inventors (and creatives) who couldn’t get backing any other way. In 1991, a retired engineer named Trevor Baylis saw a documentary showing how radio was used to educate Africans about preventing the spread of AIDS — but very few people had radios at the time. Baylis retired to his garage and developed a hand-cranked radio that was both cheap and required no batteries, but it took years before an investor would take a gamble on the invention. Wouldn’t it be great if Kickstarter were famous for empowering future Baylises rather than simply supporting the status quo?

Filed under: Wearables, Internet

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