"shops" doesn't mean anything. Ultimately it will be for a judge to decide the rights and the duties of Kickstarter... or the supreme court.

You sound like Uber when they say "we're not a taxi company". It's not up to them to decide what they are and cherry pick which law to follow.

> the point of crowdfunding was to invest in potentially interesting ideas

Where is the equity? Kickstarter is certainly not an investment plateform technically.

A purchase is when I give you money in exchange for a product. You're right, this isn't exactly Kickstarter's business model. However, an investment is when I give you money in exchange for an equity stake. This certainly isn't Kickstarter's business model.

If you give a Kickstarter money, you might get a product; you won't get any equity. Whatever that makes it, it's more a shop than it is an investment platform.

Its a donation platform with the possibility of receiving something for your donation.

We're starting to see that idea come about with platforms like https://www.seedrs.com/ where if it goes swimingly the backers do well out of it, which kind of offsets the risk.

I think the problem with standard crowd-funding is the people doing the project obviously have an interest in downplaying the risks, and the platform does too, so with no regulation that's exactly what'll happen, and then we get a lot of very late, underdelivering projects which will sour people on the whole concept.

At some point pretty quickly Kickstarter turned in to a speculative pre-ordering service.