UPDATE: Dispute Resolution Process and “revised” MTA

There has been no response from the X PRIZE Foundation (XPF) since our last dispute resolution telephone conference on May 27th despite the fact that XPF promised to address the “easy” issues quickly. Instead XPF decides to release a Version 3.2 MTA and their “notes” from the May 3rd conference call that only 10 of the teams were able to attend because of the short notification. Many teams, including Mystical Moon, could not rearrange their schedule at the last moment to accommodate the leisure of XPF personnel. However, XPF brazenly makes an arrogant and erroneous statement that “All other teams were offered the opportunity to attend this conference call but declined attendance.” This statement was followed by an even more fictitious remark that “Each team was provided with time to express their questions or concerns regarding the amended and revised Master Team Agreement 3.2.” As previously reported, XPF allowed ~ 3 minutes total for each team to “express” their concerns in a very controlled meeting format. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that this meeting format only yielded 12 issues. Even with such a short list XPF refused to even attempt to address two of the issues merely making a statement equivocal to “tough luck – we do not intend to address this issue.”

Moreover, XPF did not even attempt to address Mystical Moon’s issues despite the fact that we spent over 2 hours discussing them in our dispute resolution calls. The X PRIZE Foundation is completely ignoring the fact that they have defaulted on the Version 3.0 MTA no less than 3 times within the first 2 months and therefore are in breach of the agreement. They also apparently are refusing to address the very serious issue of exploiting children. We informed XPF that we seriously object to "exploiting" children in any way, for any reason or for anyone's benefit (including XPF and Google). In addition, the Version 3.2 MTA is still overreaching, overly one-sided and unconscionable. It places all the teams in an oppressive position due to the unequal bargaining or ‘one-sided’ power distribution. This becomes even more egregious if the Dispute Resolution process, which is the only recourse afforded the teams to address issues, is worthless. Why should anyone, especially sponsors, partners and corporate team members, trust the X PRIZE Foundation to be fair if they are not even willing to address the issues raised by the Teams? It’s simply a matter of trust!

We have not had enough time to conduct a full legal review of the recent changes to the MTA but when we do we will let you know where our lawyers and, more importantly, potential sponsors and partners stand on the matter. We sure hope that our sponsors, partners and corporate teammates don’t back out because they are, plain and simply, tired of dealing with the X PRIZE Foundation’s (and Google’s) bad faith behavior.

Mystical Moon

magic@kelvin.net