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The tl;dr for the long article: The company that owns the Sea-Monkeys trademark, Transcience, contracted with another company, Big Time Toys, to handle the 'fi
by zyxley 10y ago
The tl;dr for the long article:
The company that owns the Sea-Monkeys trademark, Transcience, contracted with another company, Big Time Toys, to handle the 'fishbowl' kits, marketing, and distribution. Transcience continued to provide the brine shrimp, which the company says are specially bred to handle the rigors of postal transport better than other brine shrimp.
Big Time Toys had the option to buy out Transcience completely for $10 million, with $5 million as a lump sum and the rest paid as a percentage of yearly profit.
In 2013, Big Time Toys stopped paying towards the $10 million, stopped buying the brine shrimp from Transcience (they switched to Chinese suppliers), and kept using the Sea-Monkeys name for their products.
Big Time Toys claims that the money they've paid Transcience for brine shrimp counts for the buyout, and that they now own Transcience (and its trademarks).
- biot 10y agoIt's a charming story that ought to be read in its entirety rather than being reduced to a dry, Reuters-like press release.
- uremog 10y agoThere's certainly much more in TFA but I do appreciate the effort of the summary.
- personjerry 10y agoI think it depends on the person reading. The article ran on a tad long for me, with too much backstory; I was more interested in the technical story and I appreciated the tl;dr.
- at-fates-hands 10y agoI really wonder how many companies have done this. They enter into an agreement for a buyout and then after a series of say 3 or 4 payments simply declare they own the company now and start using the trademarks and logo and effectively push out the original company. If I owned a small company and was engaged in some form of agreement like this I'd be petrified something similar would happen.
- dexterdog 10y agoThat's why you have to make sure you have a good contract with all potential what-ifs covered. Then the big company will have to find a what-if that you didn't cover and if you're luck it will be ridiculous enough that you won't need a massive legal team to defend your agreement. Either that or you go into it just hoping to get all of the money, but you make sure that the up-front money is enough to keep you floating down the river.