Posted on 05/05/2023 1:30:30 PM PDT by nickcarraway
A software developer who worked with Kim Kardashian on her lucrative 'Kimoji' app claims he's been left financially ruined and is living out of his car.
David Liebensohn, 43, and two colleagues invented the Kardashian-themed emoji range, which resulted in thousands of downloads a second and the app supposedly generating $1million a minute.
But they didn't see a cent after their deal fell apart after what he claims were misunderstandings and Kim and her no-nonsense lawyer Marty Singer gave them little option but to walk away from developing Kimoji, losing out on a fortune.
Liebensohn sued Kim for $300million in 2019 claiming she stole his idea, ran away with the trademark, telling DailyMail.com: 'If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I want everyone to know the truth about the Kardashians.
'I refuse to be gagged.'
But Kardashian's team says that Liebensohn willingly signed away all rights to the app, giving Kim 'unfettered' ownership of Kimoji, and noted that his claims against her were rejected by an LA Superior Court judge.
Liebensohn and his colleagues had initially agreed on a deal with Kardashian's team for a profit-share on Kimoji and an anti-cyber bullying app they'd created called CensorGram, which Kim was eager to be the face of before the deal went south.
Kim's ex husband Kanye West even rapped about the success of the app in his 2015 song Facts: 'Kimoji just shut down the app store! And we made a million a minute, we made a million a minute!'
Liebensohn says he was forced to withdraw his $300million lawsuit as his legal fees spiraled out of control, along with the rest of his life.
He lost his home, his $2million business and his family, he told DailyMail.com. He now lives in his 2011 Toyota Prius to save on rent
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
He should have learned the family is a black widow family who consume males as a habit.
If it was truly making a million dollars a minute and he only got two million total, then he really did get screwed.
this seems to sum up the root of his problem:
Our team pitched them on a new project we created just for Kim called "Kimoji." Kim and her team agreed to be equal partners on Kimoji and split Censorgram 60-40% us. Everyone was excited after this meeting and Kim's team verbally agreed to sign off on both projects, with pending net contracts to come......Kim called us and asked if our team had filed a trademark and told us that her team would file it for us. Sadly, that never happened. Kim's team filed the trademark behind our back and cut us out of the deal completely.
Unjust enrichment?
It might have been an exaggeration to say a $1million/minute, but he thinks it was high revenue and they took it from him.
They have good lawyers and you can’t deal with the Kardashian family without first having locked down your creations so well that not even Disney can take it from you before you talk to them.
Still kinda pissed, but he's dead--cancer.
Bad Karma, according to Warren Zevon.
A verbal agreement isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. What you are supposed to do is first draft a letter of understanding, then proceed from there to negotiate the final contract.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_of_understanding
A guy this bright living out of his car? He’s on drugs or alcohol or both.
That was the most asinine statement I have heard today on FreeRepublic. You dont know the guy.
Is she famous for anything other than having a huge caboose?
he obviously did not have much going for him in the first place if he is now living out of his car,
The more money ya got, the more justice you can buy.
I fear there will be a lot more of us living in the ‘hotel Prius’ before we ever get ourselves out of the mess Covid and then the people who run puppet Biden have put us into.
This story reminds me of a cab driver where I lived 35 years ago. He was an older black man, and he carried a large file of documents with him in the taxi. Every time I got into his cab, he shared his story and showed this paperwork. He must’ve told every passenger the same story:
He’d invented a quality brand of baby diapers. He sent his idea with diagrams to a large diaper company and asked if they were interested, and he filed for a patent. The company sent him a rejection letter and filed for a patent for the same idea. Guess who got the patent - not the cab driver. So, he filed a lawsuit, showing he’d sent his idea to the company before it filed for a patent. He argued that he was the inventor, so he should have the patent. The company argued they’d already come up with the idea on their own, and they just happened to file the patent after they received his diagrams. The poor guy kept losing to this big, powerful company.
You appear to be articulating nothing other than personal bias and prejudice. Not sure how interesting that should be to others within your blast radius, but perhaps that’s due to a shortfall of creativity.
“...their deal fell apart after what he claims were misunderstandings and Kim and her no-nonsense lawyer Marty Singer gave them little option...Kardashian’s team says that Liebensohn willingly signed away all rights to the app, giving Kim ‘unfettered’ ownership of Kimoji.”
Nobody likes lawyers, but nothing beats a good contract lawyer. I spent a lot of time in R&D and in Sales OPperations working closely with our legal teams writing unambiguous, ironclad, no-misundertanding, highly detailed contracts that left no wiggle room on who owned the IP, deliverables, software and products.
Sounds like Liebensohn was really wet behind the ears.
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