It Be Ya Own People Pt 2: How Three Black Men and One Black Woman Conspired to Steal Our Original App Concept and How We’re Fighting Back
Part two of the Saga
More than frustrated, their antics are both diluting our brand and attracting the wrong demographic of users to our app. We do not exist for celebs and clout and fad chasers, we exist for real Black people looking to connect to real Black people and that is the way we like it.
We have a strict application process for our app and have had to reject almost 85% of the users that have come over from hearing the name on Clubhouse for believing backwards ideas like “Trump is a great president” and “colorism affects light-skinned people just as harshly” and “There is no such thing as rape culture”. Those people are NOT our target demographic so we can not even be grateful for the free publicity. It’s just creating more work for us and people we reject tend to be salty and leave bad reviews on in the app stores, diluting our hundreds of 5-star reviews from people who are actually members.
This infringement does not benefit our infringers and it does not benefit us. So.. why infringe at all?
We have a retained an IP lawyer who has managed to locate their business information (we previously requested it in that email I mentioned earlier and they did not respond to avoid being served). We are having them issued an official cease and desist, and, if they continue their disrespect and malicious infringement- we will be forced to take further legal action.
The infringers have also attempted to trademark The Cookout in the same class of goods as us, hoping that will protect them from being infringers (a move our lawyer believes is hilarious, as the USPTO will likely automatically reject it when it is evaluated). This is the equivalent of copying our homework and then putting our name on it. It will not work. Jason Gershenson, the attorney of record for their attempted trademark, follows us on Twitter and has for years AND is a member of our app. He has known about us from Black Tech Pipeline for years. And following are some screenshots that prove that their own trademark lawyer knew about us and STILL conspired to help them steal our idea. Straight up lack of ethics. This appears like a pretty BLATANT conspiracy to steal our ideas.
How does one join our app in June 2020 and magically file someone else’s trademark for a similar app just a few months later?
If you’re out there, and you believe that it is messed up that someone could literally be so blatant about stealing a concept that Black women have been building on for over a year- let them know that. Advise people that they are pitching to that getting into business with people that have these serious moral and ethical lapses and violate the intellectual property of others is not a good idea or business move. Your voices are important.
The sad part about all of this? Our team LOVES promoting other Black businesses, especially Black-owned tech spaces (have you heard of Voice Blasts?). We believe that there is clearly more than enough space on the internet for all of us to win and would always rather collaborate than compete. The idea of clipping another Black-owned business’s wings is not something that makes us happy, but we can not let this blatant disrespect and willful plagiarism go unanswered.
I believe that often when it comes to Black women in business, we are not expected to have the resources or option to defend ourselves. This makes people more likely to TRY to take advantage of us than other groups.
When it comes to tech and the internet, this is even more true. So many Black women’s ideas, style, concepts, and even our hair and skin are stolen daily on these wide webs, claimed by someone else, who then capitalizes without so much as a whisper of our name. As mentioned, I guessed two years ago that there would be a shift away from larger platforms. I’m fortunate that I also guessed that someone would try it and that we had the resources to protect ourselves. There are too many Black women that would have found themselves in this situation and gotten steamrolled.
This will not be our story. We will not have it.
We have worked too hard for the last year and have invested too much in what we’re building- emotionally, in terms of time, and definitely economically.
To our lovely little Day One community of over 7.5k people and the 15k people on our newsletter list who will receive this email- we love you and are so appreciative of your trust and investment in the last year of this journey. Every day we strive to prove ourselves worthy. Even when we are not active, we are ALWAYS working for you.
To the people that are only just learning about us now and are accessing this article from a link- it’s nice to meet you and we hope that you’ll join us on this journey as well if anything stated here struck a chord.
To our infringers, I hope that when this post is called to your attention (because I don’t doubt that it will be), that you consider rebranding immediately. We are prepared to take this as far as needed to get you to stop and the longer you continue the more damages will ultimately be found in our favor for any investment you DO get as a result of your infringement. It’s not a smart business move for you… or your potential investors. As it stands, your product is not even live, but even if you were to continue, you are aware that we would have the option to have your app removed from both app stores because they have copyright infringement options for apps… right? You are limiting yourself and setting yourselves up for failure… and you’ve barely even started yet.
Being original is hard… but we were here FIRST, we were already operational and successful, and we’re not going anywhere.
Because I am a creative and a benevolent goddess, here is an ORIGINAL alternative name I’ve come up with for your project so you can find your own lane and discontinue swerving in ours:
The Wave (rebrand to include soundwaves in your logo/marketing). Still a Black culture reference. You could incorporate this without needing to change much of your branding, as your existing logo is wavy.
In closing, I end by saying the following:
Y’all (and this is a very general “y’all”) are going to learn to respect Black women. The easy way… or the hard way.
Stop pretending you are for the culture if you lack ethics in the ways that you do business.
Not All Black businesses are for Black people. Some are chasing clout and a buck and are just as exploitative as non Black businesses.
Thank you for reading. I hope it helped those of you with questions about exactly what was happening gain clarity. After this, we will be taking a little break from letting new users join our app. It’s a lot to process that our own people could be this sneaky, grimy, and manipulative.
If you feel so inspired and want to contribute to us reaching our goals faster and fighting back against this conspiracy against us and our intellectual property- You can donate to us here.