I have paid 75 bucks for this pen (incl. some cards and shipping) and one year later I still haven’t received it. I’d see how would feel about this. I haven’t tried to sell anything to anybody – all I wanted is to complain about the original pen situation, but apparently my residence in Beijing somehow robs me of this privilege here and I have to explain my IP situation to people, who operate on assumptions and no common sense. It seems I have chosen the wrong venue to bring my complaint.

Blind trusts are still your property, so they can still be seized in a lawsuit, but they’re designed in a way that you can avoid conflict-of-interest problems (e.g. you’re Secretary of Defense, so it wouldn’t be possible for you to directly invest in the aircraft industry without the potential for favoritism.) 

Cayman Islands bank accounts and similar systems sometimes work just by hiding their ownership, because almost nobody knows that John Doe #12345 is really Joe Deadbeat, whose ex-spouse or ex-business-partner can’t seize the money because they can’t find it or don’t even know it exists.  But often they work because they’re directly owned by a Caymans corporation (which has to pay some small fees but the Caymans government doesn’t charge income tax on the interest or profits), and the US or UK investor in the corporation is only liable for taxes on the dividends it actually pays him. 

The lesson here is before you take your product ANYWHERE, you have everyone who’s ever seen it sign an NDA. Then you sue the pants off them if they break it. Thankfully my friends had that and they were able to enforce their ownership. Not much you can do about sending it off to China, but as people have noted, it’s not the Chinese that ripped him off, it’s their American buddy.

“Business ethics” is an oxymoron. In business as in war, the entity with least compassion wins.

2) Never getting a shred of business again. This story blows up and links to his name for a long, long time. Who in their right mind will EVER trust him with an IP venture again?

Contact Torr Customer Service at http://torrpens.com/customer-service/ and let them know that their pen is very nice; but I’m interested in the original, and might they have contact information for CW&T?

Seems like Stanford would definitely have taught him about business ethics on his MBA.

http://csi.gsb.stanford.edu/stanford-business-school-named-leader-in-teaching-ethics-corporate-social-responsibility-and-environmental-sustainability

I’ll repeat that just to make this issue a little more clear: The RIAA is using IP as a means to use the legal system to steal money from artists.  They do not respect IP any more than the pirates do.  Probably less, in fact.  RIAA has more in common with this Allen Arsenau guy than with the kickstarter project guys. So actually it’s completely consistent.

That’s what makes this story so fucked up.

But also, grateful to an attentive moderator who pointed that out. It seemed obvious from the tone, the not-quite-perfect-English, and the time of day, but it’s great when community management is taken this seriously.

The Torr Pens guys don’t know how the internet works, that’s for sure. But I expect they’ll understand it better when all this is over.

By now they’ll have hired someone to deal with this for them, someone’s cousin, a “social media guru.” And perhaps they’ll be more creative in their defense than they have been in their design.

With the pen, however, the actual designer makes money from the sales.  Until he gets ripped off.  This is exactly what IP law was originally designed to prevent.  (So is the current state of the music industry, but the RIAA members have succeeded in suborning copyright to serve the exact opposite of the purpose for which it was intended.)