[otakucode]

It certainly should go to court... but that would be an international lawsuit, which is far from cheap. And the people who were wronged are the ones who would be ponying up the cash for a long, long time before they might see any restitution... I can't understand going public, and really I'm glad they did. I'm sure the other side will whine about 'libel', but in order for it to be libel you have to prove that it is false, and prove that the other party knew it was false and intended to do harm. I don't think Woodshed can even manage the first of that, let alone the other two.

[late2part]

I don't know what "international lawsuit" means. The plaintiff would sue the defendant local region.

It's implicitly an "international" transaction, so why would rectifying the problem be considered unfairly burdensome when they entered into the relationship.

[otakucode]

If I understood the article correctly, the PR company is in the United States and the Kickstarted company is in another country. If they tried to bring a suit in their country, the court might not have jurisdiction. Even if they did say they had jurisdiction, the likelihood of them being able to compel US citizens to suffer penalties levied by a court in another country is extremely slim. So most likely, they would need to hire a lawyer in the US to bring the suit in a US court. That requires finding a lawyer who is familiar with the intracacies of international contract law, the details involved in establishing jurisdiction, etc, and they would need to travel to the US many times (possibly very many if the opposition thinks they can drag the case out and make it too burdensome for the plaintiff to continue) for various hearings.

Then there's the issue of finding a lawyer who won't start off by asking 'and what is a kickstarter?' which is harder than you might expect. Also, I just thought, Kickstarter might have some kind of standing in this which might also require the case to occur in a US court. Not sure about that.