When A Kickstarter Campaign Fails, Does Anyone Get Their Money Back?
If you invest in a company that has nothing more than a rough sketch of a product on their roadmap, and the company folds 6 months later with no actual product, do you get a refund for your worthless stock?<p>Usually not.<p>Investing is a risky business. Crowdsourced investing only distributes that risk over a much larger group of investors.<p>An honest founder might do his best to return the remaining funds, and Kickstarter might even decree (as the article suggests) that a refund be made, but there's no guarantee that any funds will remain by the time the project is declared a failure.<p>So the real question is: When you fund a project on Kickstarter, are you making an investment with a certain amount of risk associated with it, or are you simply pre-ordering a shiny new gadget? If any failed Kickstarter project actually went to court, this might be the single most important question to be raised.