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Re:State court orders Kickstarted game creator to pay $54k f... by lotharbot on Friday September 11, 2015 @07:06PM (#10206601)
kickstarter is neither "investment" not "pre-sales".

It's patronage [0], as explained on a KS blog post the day before the site went live [1]. This means backers are funding a good-faith effort by the team to deliver the described result. They don't have any recourse if the team's good-faith effort fails (meaning, genuine attempts are protected from litigation), but they do have recourse if that effort is not made.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/blog/defining-patronage

Re:State court orders Kickstarted game creator to pay $54k f... by meddlepal on Friday September 11, 2015 @08:00PM (#10206759)
I think the fact nobody understands this means their objective has failed and they are by default relegated to being investment or pre-sales regardless of whether they claim to be or not.
Re:State court orders Kickstarted game creator to pay $54k f... by Guvante on Friday September 11, 2015 @11:42PM (#10207137)
No effort was made in this case (from the stories) so it seems to line up well with their original goal.
Re:State court orders Kickstarted game creator to pay $54k f... by rue on Saturday September 12, 2015 @04:18PM (#10209205)
The language around ‘good faith’ and ‘best effort’ seems really dicey. Leaves a lot of room for legal trouble if someone wants to cause it.
Re:State court orders Kickstarted game creator to pay $54k f... by lotharbot on Saturday September 12, 2015 @04:23PM (#10209226)
https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/1/1-201#Goodfaith

The term appears about 3000 times in the US Code overall.