Faraday Legal News: Skramsoft Web Site and Business Practices

This page was published on the 17th of Febuary, 2007.

Skramsoft made a public request for beta testers for the First Cut product in April, 2005. This was some 8 months after Faraday's last worked for Skramsoft. The irony here is that Jan Skarbek had claimed on 2 separate occasions that if he had been doing the same work that I was doing, he would have been able to complete it in a shorter time. Consequently I had predicted to Ashley Revell that if Jan's claims were correct, a product should have been ready for beta release in less than 3 months. Apparently I had over-estimated Jan Skarbek's skills.

Another curiosity is that I was put under extreme pressure by a very tight deadline imposed by Ashley Revell. For some reason Jan Skarbek did not have to suffer the same stringent time limit. Consquently I wonder if the deadline was in fact some kind of ploy to place me at a disadvantage.

The Skramsoft web site became active on the 12th of March 2006. A few days later Skramsoft began to actively block my visits to their site. This was not successful.

However, as a result I suspected they may have used intellectual property belonging to Faraday and so I investigated the software in more detail. The software was heavily encrypted, so I was unable to come to a definite conclusion. A superficial inspection indicated that they had not used my table software, but had used Apple Computer's table software instead. If they are using Faraday software it would be only a limited amount in less visible areas of the application.

The irony here is that Jan had originally rejected my suggestion, during the initial contract discussions, that they use Apple's table software. Another irony is that Jan has not written his own table software for First Cut, even after he had claimed that he would have been able to do a better job in a shorter period of time.

Interestingly Jan Skarbek had rewritten the user interface of the First Cut application using the PPx Application Framework. Previously it had been written using the Powerplant Framework. Jan Skarbek had previously asked my advice about the best way to transition his MacOS 9 application to MacOS X. One suggestion I made was to use PPx. To test the feasiblity of this I wrote, with Jan Skarbek's agreement, some of the commissioned software using PPx and he was very satisfied with the result. It appears therefore that Jan Skarbek has used the Ppx software I had written as the starting point for his new version of First Cut.

Initially the Skramsoft web site did not provide their customers with an eCommerce facility to allow electronic purchases of their software. A customer had to make a purchaser via email. Eventually an electronic purchasing arrangement was set up. When I tested it this was broken. Eventually they reverted to an email-based sales arrangement a few months before they shut down the First Cut web site in November 2006.

Skramsmoft did provide a bulletin board service for their customers, but this was never popular. Eventually a Script Kiddie hacked the bulletin board and it was never fixed.

From first publication of the Skramsoft web site in March 2005, Ashely Revell provided a declaration on their web site, and in their program documentation, that both Skramsoft and First Cut were Registered Trademarks owned by Skramsoft. Having some insight into the way Skramsoft operated I checked this. The declaration was false.

Eventually in December 2005 Ashley Revell applied for the Trademark for First Cut. He made no application for the Skramsoft Trademark. The application provided by Ashely Revell to the US Trademark Office included, as example usage of the Trademark, a screen shot of the index page of the Skramsoft/FirstCut web site. In the screenshot the false Registered Trademark ownership declaration in the footer of the web page had been cropped off. Trademark ownership was finally granted in November 2006, just shortly before they shut down the First Cut web site.

Producing a successful software product is a risky business as most attempts fail. It takes highly skilled individuals and some luck to succeed. The performance of Skramsoft as a business turned out as expected, based on my previous assessment of Jan Skarbek and Ashley Revell's skills in the technical and business area. The weaknesses I noted translated directly into the way the First Cut product failed

1. Limitations in Jan Skarbeks' technical skills prevented them from upgrading the product with sufficient frequency to keep faith with their customers.
2. Ashley Revell was not able to dedicate enough time to the business between his movie engagements.
3. Ashley Revell was not prepared to pay for the necessary professional services to make the product a success.
4. Ashley Revell's suspicious personality meant that the product was encrypted and therefore unsuitable for the video amateur software market they were targetting.
5. The product was too expensive for the video amateur and too feature poor for the professional.
6. To present a convincing story that they were entitled not to pay Faraday, they had to maintain the fiction that the software Faraday produced was of poor quality. Consequently they had to defer releasing the existing software. Once they made that decision a complete rewrite of their own software to be more compatible with MacOS X became sensible. This meant that they lost 6-7 months of time-to-market in a market that was changing with new competitors appearing on a monthly basis.

Skramsoft deregistration