| 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. |
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.