Kickstarter launched in the UK | Hacker News Reader

Kickstarter launched in the UK

bbc.co.uk

68 pointshalfmoth24 comments

The terms require:

To be eligible to start a Kickstarter project as a UK creator, you need to meet the following requirements:

• You are a permanent UK resident either creating a project in your own name or on behalf of a legal entity with a Companies House Number.

• You have a UK address, UK bank account, and government-issued ID (driver's license or passport).

• You have a major UK credit or debit card.

• You are 18 years of age or older.

How come they can exclude non-UK EU people? Isn't there a single market within the EU?

I suspect it's a legal minefield and much easier said, than done.

I was hoping that it would be a legal minefield to ban EU customers. The EU has lots of laws to make harmonise business law, so in theory it should be OK.

I think that's what zachinglis meant. You could easily challenge this under EU law I think.

Very doubtful.

'EU Law' doesn't make all of the countries that make up the EU one homogenous blob where everything needs to work the same.

EU Law provides many broad directives on how things should work in general, but the detail is country specific, and it's almost certainly compliance with all of the details that have meant that Kickstarter have decided to start with just the UK at first.

They'll probably start to provide Kickstarter for residents of other EU countries along the line in the future.

While I'm only speculating, a company can choose not to offer their service in a particular country. I imagine their exclusion is due to the overhead of administration than any legal exclusions.

No, companies can't refuse to sell to another EU citizen based solely on their country. But Kickstarter's going to be in all sorts of grey areas, based on what they do.

I'm unsure about that. A company can't refuse to sell based on nationality as that would be discrimination, but the country is something different due to geographical challenges in being able to supply the goods. There are far too many business who refuse to ship goods outside the UK mainland.

Kickstarter is a service provider so maybe that's different. An EU citizen living in the UK sounds like they should be eligible.

I know very little about this subject so I will probably stop talking now.

>• You have a UK address, UK bank account, and government-issued ID (driver's license or passport).

So as a Spanish guy working in the UK I could use kickstarter as well?

If you satisfy the requirements listed above then yes.

As an EU citizen (I assume you have a Spanish Passport) then you automatically have the right to permanently reside in the UK:-

http://www.ukba.homeoffice.gov.uk/eucitizens/documents-eea-n...

"Under European law, you do not need to obtain documentation confirming your right of residence in the UK if you are a national of a country in the EEA."

However, as you'll see from the list, having this right isn't all you'll need. You actually have to be living in the UK, have a UK bank account, etc. It's unclear as to whether the "Government-issued ID" relates to the UK Government or any other country's Government.

Given that they specifically prefix the other requirements with 'UK', I suspect that the lack of a prefix before 'Government' means that any government will do.

depends on their definition of "You are a permanent UK resident"

For non-British citizens living in the UK, that particular phrase can mean almost anything.

I've seen it mean "You must have lived in the UK for the last 2 years", "You must have ILR", "You must be naturalized", "You must have a visa with longer than {x} months/years left on it"

For EU citizens this is probably the same as "ordinarily resident", which broadly means having a UK address and spending over 6 months of the year at it.

As a EU citizen, you can freely move to UK and get all of the above.

EU is still not a fiscal union, so that any profits deriving from a kickstarter project are to be subjected to UK taxes.

> ... and government-issued ID (driver's license or passport).

This may be the hard part. Not everyone can get a driving license easily and for a UK passport you need to live/work in the country for at least 5 years.

The place of residence is almost certainly a taxation issue. Within the EU, an EU citizen pays tax in whichever country he is "ordinarily resident" in, which is (broadly) defined as the address in which he spends over 6 months of the year.

If Kickstarter Ltd in the UK funded a project run from Spain, there would be additional complications as the Spanish government has the right to tax some portion of that income.

One thing that I didn't see explicitly mentioned in the article: I really, really hope they don't segment the marketplaces. In other words, I really hope it's possible to log into Kickstarter UK with your Kickstarter US details and use the same payment details to support UK projects. I also hope the set up transparent currency conversion. Otherwise, the value proposition of Kickstarter to UK startups is radically lower.

I do a little bit of work than involves some ad networks and affiliate programs, and I find it astonishing how segmented commercial networks still can be.

For example, Amazon referrals only track to the country TLD you sent the traffic to. Refer someone to Amazon.com and the buy the product from Amazon UK after following the link prompt that appears on the landing page? You get nothing.

My retro 2D MMO is one of the first UK projects accepted on Kickstarter :)

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1375039912/mmoasteroids-...

The projects located in London (in £GBP):

http://www.kickstarter.com/discover/cities/london-gbr

Weirdly, some of those projects actually predate the official availability of Kickstarter in the UK by quite a while.

Great! Does this mean that one can use Kiskstarter to fund projects in UK only, or the whole of EU?

No, their terms state that you have to be a UK resident etc.

I've recently came across a project from Stockholm [1]. They went live before the UK announcement, so I suppose they set up a US entity.

[1] http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/martinkallstrom/memoto-l...

If you want all of EU, use another service, like Indiegogo, which has been international since day one.

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