The legal dispute over owership of Rocketboom is still up in the air. However this very public brawl does tend to bruise egos and result in far more emotional baggage than is good for a clean settlement.

If Amanda is smart enough, and I think she is, then there is a partner agreement, the one she refers to “in the bank”. This trumps everything else. This fact cannot be ignored by Andrew because it is an inconvenient truth. There has been mentioned of a “Rocketboom LLC” but not by the parties themselves. Amanda did not specifically say their was a legal structure, of which an LLC is, she said it was “at the bank”. A body corporate is registered by the Secretary of State’s office in a state of your choosing. A DBA is registered in the state you want to do business in.
This agreement (if it exists) will spell out the percentage ownership, the rights as to output, copyright, any media and importantly the mediation procedure to be followed. This is important on a good partnership agreement, because you don’t want it to denigrate into an all out legal fees fest, that is where nobody wins except the lawyers.

However this agreement, (if it exists) may limit Amanda’s rights to the economic benefit to shows she was actually contributed to. This is usual when one party has more confidence in the outcome, than the other party, one party may consider fighting for many rights as to be unnecessary.

This leads us down the difficult path of future value. Because Rocketboom was (presumably) not breaking even up to the point of the breakup, there is a difficult task of assigning value of the Rocketboom 1.0′s contribution to the Rocketboom’s 2.0. One could easily argue that the success of Rocketboom 1.0 (audience wise) lead to the success of Rocketboom 2.0, but to what value. This is further complicated because it is a partnership agreement, not a corporate body.

This is because the partnership as effectively dissolved by the partners parting ways, and the economic contribution is measured up to that point. Then the courts have to decide the residual effect of the partnership on the new combination, and indeed that the new combination has the rights to use the old combination’s assets (which sounds like it does).

There is also the tricky part of intellectual property such as the Trademark “Rocketboom” and what ownership rights each party has. I would suspect if a partnership agreement exists, then either this is discussed in the document, or Rocketboom 2.0 would need to pay for the rights to Rocketboom 1.0s intellectual property.

However, Amanda’s document may just be an employment document, in which case her rights are limited to the scope of Employer/Employee relationship. This means that she is screwed. This type of relationship confers no ownership, indeed it is quite common for the employer to assert rights to all output the employee produces. This is possible, if Amanda had been paid regularly from the start and was receiving a salary. In the absence of an agreement, if Amanda was paid in this manner, then Amanda is not entitled to ownership rights. This is interesting because Amanda uses the term “fired” to describe what happened, not “out partnership broke up” or “we parted ways” which is how you normally describe a breakup of equals.
What ever the case, the nastiness is going to be directly proportional to the future success of the show. Lets hope they can work it out and move on.

[this is opinion only and should be taken for what it is worth]

Technorati Tags: amanda+congdon, andrew+baron, rocketboom, joanne+colan

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