[voisin]

I am not sure why the use of the money you earn from your service is relevant. It isn’t a charity or a non-profit. I find the whole discussion revolving around why you did it extremely off putting, no different in my mind than if you said “help me buy a yacht by subscribing to my new SaaS startup”. Either the product/service is worthy of payment or it’s not.

[fleetwoodsnack]

They’re not all actually students. Based on a simple google search and the information that one of the co-founders posted here, they’ve already graduated and this is their way of “getting out” of the debt they already have, not will have to take on to pursue their education.

Pretty sure this doesn’t constitute doxxing as I got the information from a publicly available LinkedIn and from the posters themselves who use their full names as handles, but here’s some more background on at least two of the people behind this:

https://in.linkedin.com/in/abhishek-fundingfyre

https://www.linkedin.com/in/ayushsoni1001/

The misrepresentation of their backgrounds, and the fact that this site is potentially illegal (based on comments in this thread) sends up some real red flags for me. Buyer beware.

HN mods, please let me know if I’ve broken any rules and I can remove the direct links.

[abhishek_soni]

Hi fleetwoodsnack,

Ayush and our other co-founders are high school and undergraduate students, except me, I am a recent grad and we have also clearly mentioned this in your about page on fundingfyre website and our LinkedIn profiles. (About page link is in header on FundingFyre.com)

I am the only one trying to get out of debt, and the rest of the co-founders are trying to make enough to pay their tuition fee.

We are not trying to hide anything, we have very clearly mentioned it on our website and our LinkedIn profiles as well.

Though, in this post Ayush made a mistake and forgot to put in my background details, and then there was no edit option once posted, so he couldn’t update it.

There is no misinformation, and we are more than willing to show documents proving our background details, if the community want us to show.

We understand the comments in the post here are concerning, and we are in talks with legal advisor, but for the most part, on basis of their first inputs, we are not breaking laws here, and we just need to be make some structural changes, and clearly share our offerings, and what we are charging for, and the decks are owned by their respective owners.

Though we are really thankful to the community for pointing these things out to us.

Also, we really appreciate you putting effort into adding our profiles, and making your point, but with due respect, I want to assure you that we have clearly shared who we are, and we are not trying to hide anything, it’s just Ayush made a small mistake and forgot to add my background, for which I apologise on behalf of our whole team.

Thanks a lot for understanding.

[saaaaaam]

Your legal advisor is incorrect I’m afraid.

You are charging for access to copyright material. You can try to dress this up as “we are providing a service and we are charging for that service and it just so happens that part of the service offering is access to copyright material” but this is quite literally the argument that music file sharing services attempted - and which bankrupted them. Look at the history of mp3.com and Napster - they tried the argument of “we are a technology platform and if people happen to infringe copyright by accessing copyright protected material then that’s not our fault”. Because they kept a database of copyright protected content and their service provided the means to locate that content they were found to have facilitated copyright infringement. It put them out of business.

You don’t even have the safe harbor defence of UGC companies - because you are apparently selling access to copyright protected material directly. You’ve located these files, downloaded them, created copies and are selling those copies from your own site.

You could argue that Spotify or Apple Music is a technology platform that happens to offer a lot of value and that this is what you’re paying for when you subscribe to a service like this.

In fact, that’s absolutely true. A big part of the value proposition of a service like Spotify is their technology. However the other - far more significant element - is the complex and commercially valuable licensing deals that Spotify has done with copyright owners to allow access to their content as part of a paid service.

If your “lawyer” is advising you that you can charge for access to material protected by copyright then they are very likely wrong.

The only way you can avoid infringing copyright in this situation is to make all the decks available before your paywall, not after it. Putting them behind your paywall and “saying that they are owned by their respective owners” does not change anything.

[fleetwoodsnack]

Agreed on virtually all points. Based on my research this is a bald misappropriation of copyrighted material that is likely to persist due to the fact that the jurisdiction that these individuals operate-from is largely outside the practical reach of United States law.

They’re able to deliver these seemingly bizarre and largely incorrect legal opinions because they’re practically immune to lawsuits originating overseas (which for most of us means the United States).

This is strikingly similar to foreign bootleggers who once ran amok with American and British intellectual property in the form of copied PC games and DVDs. They were arguably simply copying and selling “access” too. The wares are simply being hawked online rather than on the sides of streets this time around.

[abhishek_soni]

Hi Voisin, we understand your point, and our intentions when we built the tool and also now is to create value for the users, and that’s what we want to make money from, nothing else.

We shared the story, because we wanted the people to know that we are real people building a real product and who we are, so our users can connect with us at personal level, and also that as students and recent grad, we are full of energy and we will be building a great value product.

The idea of sharing our story (which resounded with us) came from talking to some early testing users, and they shared that in a product where we are providing lifetime access, it is needed that we open up our story to people and let them know who we are.

From your point, I understand it might not exactly sound that way to everyone, and we need to improve our messaging more, but our intentions are to sell the product not our story.

We hope you understand and we would love to have you on fundingfyre.

Also, thanks a lot for your response, really appreciate it.

[voisin]

> we wanted the people to know that we are real people building a real product and who we are

I would encourage you to think more deeply than platitudes like this. Every product is made by real people, and by “real product” what are you even talking about?