It’s plausible they’ve tweaked the design slightly, but still kinda annoying they didn’t reach out and all permission. I’ll likely have given it if they had given attribution and given a small donation to charity.
Mostly I’m sad about the people who are spending $29 on it.
Any suggestions if it’s worth doing anything about this? At least any way to tell those who’ve pledged they can download it for free?
It’s also plausible that they independently came up with the same idea. There are plenty of similar such toys already on the market. So it’s not like this idea exists in a vacuum.
well if you are confident they are infringing on your intellectual property, raise the topic with kickstarter
i’ve had one of my designs being sold by a “brand” on amazon as if it was their product, after submitting a claim and providing evidence to amazon they took it down
i feel for the people that pledged, if they do take that down, i hope they get their money back, and those guys don’t just walk away with 50k if they indeed infringed, as mentioned by Murata, there are already commercial projects very similar
First, I would check when that campaign started, and I believe it began after you uploaded your model.
Then, I would contact both them and Kickstarter. It might be difficult to claim, “I’m the author, you copied me”, in a situation like this, but it’s worth giving it a try.
Oh and I see it is an exclusive model, I would try also to send a message to MakerWorld to ask legal support from them. It’s something included in the exclusive program.
The design and mechanical concept (configuration of every link) is novel enough to be able to be unique, so I was skeptical when I read this comment. However, when reading the Kickstarter page, this is an important excerpt:
Everybody can say that they made the first prototype in the attic of their parents when they were 3 years of age, but claiming you made a prototype as your final project for your industrial design studies is another thing to lie about because that would be easy to (dis)prove.
So I’m afraid that he came up with the idea as well. And then the way the links are designed is just form follows function, I believe I had a 3D printed cube like this (with cube blocks) years and years ago, with the flat oval links.
And I’m not sure MakerWorld will give legal support. Yes they claim they offer protection for your IP if you enroll but IMO the exclusive program is just to gain and protect the monopoly of BambuLab, heavily sugar coated for users
So it sure looks like the idea was stolen one direction (or the other) but it seems like you came up with the idea for the mechanics independent from each other
I’m going to take a closer look at Kickstarter. Unfortunately, I don’t have much knowledge about marketing and what else would be necessary … blablabla… But I am currently rebuilding my brand, maybe we can support each other to be successful together?
I am a toy sales rep in the US and one of my vendors is the distributor of all things Rubik. I know less than nothing about patents and have always wondered …
It’s confusing. I found two projects on Kickstarter. After a short search, I found a model that has adopted my ideas for a project completely as I think it should be. Another one is similar, but not as far as my ideas for it. If I now imagine that I had already published my two projects here a few months ago.
But at least it shows me what potential there is in my own projects/ideas.
I am not a copyright or patent lawyer, so take the following with a benchy-load of salts
Ideas are not patentable, nor do they enjoy copyright protection.
It sounds like you are claiming that the way the joints are made or designed was invented by you, and that you have either a utility patent or a design patent on that.
Unlike a copyright which is automatically granted the moment an original work comes into existence, a patent requires an application and approval. Have you applied and obtained a patent, or at least a patent-pending status?
Na, I’m just a bit sad as I thought someone just ripped off my design, passing it off as their own with no attribution or permission seeked.
Another commenter has pointed out they claim to have come up with the concept in 2006. Of course this is possible but seems a bit of a coincidence this appears on Kickstarter a few months after my design was published. But coincidences do happen.
Either way, life’s too short to be overly worried about it.
Maybe the real lesson here is that the better designers on here than me should be considering getting their designs on Kickstarter - seems there is really money to be made on there!
I’m just saying that I can find my ideas there, nothing else. Yes, it would probably be good if I patented my ideas rather than having them realised. but that’s not my thing.
But my story shows what I have often said and what has already been said here: many people in the world have very similar or even identical ideas. Unless they could see into my head. It couldn’t be industrial espionage unless they were bugging my flat.
If your model had hardly had any downloads, it might not have appeared on Kickstarter. Someone simply redeveloped it. In any case, this suggests that it took a few months. You’ll probably never find out. But you have to expect that these days.
Let’s take note of this as another disadvantage of free models.
He meant me I believe. The Kickstarter ad literally says they designed it in 2006 as part of their Industrial Design final project and that they won a Bosch toy design award with it in the same year. It’s hard to verify for me since all websites referencing this seem to be Turkish, but it is a claim that is verifiable.
They could even claim that OP is the one that stole the idea if the Bosh award has been published somewhere. I’d say, two people had the same conceptual/mechanical idea and converged to a very similar (logical) functional end design with the double-hinging flat oval links.
As a designer I get your initial frustration, but on the bright side, you also had a 46.000USD design idea! (although it is just MAD that something like this makes that kind of revenue)
That may be true. But I hope they are not claiming they own a patent or copyright on the concept and no one else can use their concept wthout paying them roylaties . Concepts are ideas, they are neither patentable nor copyrigtable.
BTW, I used the word “claim” in my post to you. But that word was used because in a patent application, one makes claims, that’s the exact wording. I hope you didn’t interpret the use of the word claim as me questioning your concern.
That was addressed to OP. If the post was shown as replying to you then it’s by accident.
Again, ideas are free for everyone to use. If they claim that OP stole their idea, OP can simply ignore them, or counter claim that OP first had this idea when playing a toy as a toddler and at that time none of them were born yet
It takes a lot more than an idea or even a 3D printable design to bring a commercial toy to market.
Injection mold tooling, assembly, packaging, quality control, certifications, distribution & marketing don’t just happen for free when you have a good product idea.
Having a good idea is not a guarantee of a successful product. It is the minimum requirement for a successful product.
