A Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before fundraising has finished | Hacker News Reader

A Kickstarter idea could be on sale in China before fundraising has finished

qz.com

21 pointspanabee14 comments

Discussed 4 months ago (142 points/57 comments):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12724096

Actually part of me is thrilled with this development, there are so many of the cool Kickstarter projects that fail due to lack of scale and economy - if Chinese factories can be bothered producing functional versions of these projects this is great from consumer perspective!

While that is cool from the customer side it also reduces incentive to innovate. The best innovations are usually simple. An example being that cell phone selfie stick. Easy to copy once you come up with the idea. Since we live in a capitalized world we have certain protections for inventors, patents. This gives the inventor time to attempt to capitalize on their invention. If they cannot then it goes into the public domain. If the patent is ignored this allows for a much larger company to squash competition (a necessity in our economic model).

This essentially means you have to keep your products secret and not advertise them. Pushing you back to the old school method of funding with angels and VC's. No longer having crowd sourcing (which can be a major benefit to inventors, not having to give up equity).

I've always wondered how frequently this happened.

While I do enjoy the videos and lengthy posts about the backstory, inspiration and early design ideas on a lot of Kickstarter/Indiegogo projects, I've always wondered if someone else could pick up the inspiration and run with it.

I appears that the barriers to actually executing an idea (which is usually the excuse for ideas not ever coming to fruition) get lower and lower every day, with offshoring options, and manufacturers willing to create one off prototypes at very low prices.

On one side, 'OpenSource' even on hardware is needed, on the other, if you have no benefit for the one that innovates, you end up with less incentives for innovation.

Well open source software seems to be continually inovating, so we shouldn't expect open source hardware to not.

thing is, this is ripping out someone else's ideas. One thing is to donate the software/hardware, the other is to steal it and call it open source

What is the most striking: the celerity of Chinese copycats or the extremely high demand for selfish sticks?

The problem seems to be Kickstarter, in this case, for misleading underfunded people without access to essential resources into believing they could compete with people who have more resources.

Or for people to believe they could post ideas and the world would just wait for them. It doesn't sound like the guy got patent protection for his device.

You could argue that patent protection would promote more innovation, but they introduce other costs that stifle it, like paying lawyers and time to write and file patents.

This doesn't seem a problem with China but a property of capitalism. Just having an idea doesn't guarantee you get the value of it. Ultimately you have to deliver value to someone for them to pay you for it.

> "It doesn't sound like the guy got patent protection for his device."

But in China it doesn't matter if you have patent protection or not.

I don't think a patent would have helped here. Patents take years to be granted (if they are granted), around $7-$10k to file unless you're experienced in writing them, and then you would be attempting to sue internationally against a country which doesn't recognize your patent.

Kickstarter might be able to do better with user risk education, I'm not familiar with their onboarding enough to know what they do. In this specific case, I think it's mostly on the entrepreneur to recognize the tradeoffs when using a low cost service in a country where the rule of law is weaker or enforced in ways you don't understand. Sometimes, despite that research, you still get ripped off.

What happened, if true, is unfortunate. Hopefully publicized cases like these will lead prototypers to make better decisions.

Or, maybe, people "Kickstart" an existing product then just get their brand on

It seems to be something that happens frequently (amongst other kickstarter/related sites scams)

Could we also say that "some Chinese* developers clone software ideas from Product Hunt"?

*although they can be of any nationality

Or Europeans :)

https://thehustle.co/rocket-internet-oliver-samwer

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