Kickstarter may not be, as its tagline states, such a “new way to fund and follow creativity” after all. On the heels of last week’s article about the site comes news that it’s involved in a patent dispute with another site with a similar crowd-funding model.
ArtistShare (tagline: “where the fans make it happen”) has been around since 2000 — nine years longer than Kickstarter — and allows “fans to fund and directly participate in the projects of their favorite (recording) artists” in exchange for certain rewards. ArtistShare, which, like Kickstarter, is based in Manhattan, was awarded a patent for that model in February of this year (though Techcrunch’s Devin Coldewey notes in his article that the site filed for the patent back in 2003), after which the site contacted Kickstarter about paying to license its patent. Kickstarter responded with the lawsuit (which you can read on paidContent.org along with Jeff Roberts’ take on the suit), filed on September 30, to have ArtistShare’s patent declared invalid.
Kickstarter’s spokesperson, Justin Kazmark, mentioned in my interview with him a few weeks back that crowd-funding (a term Kickstarter is loathe to use) is not a new concept, and in fact was used by Joseph Pulitzer to bring the Statue of Liberty to America way back in 1885.
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