In 2018, Warner Bros. made waves when it announced a partnership with Kano, a U.K. kid-friendly coding firm, to release a Harry Potter coding wand that brought the magical world of the franchise to life.
But five years later, Alex Klein, the cofounder and CEO of Kano, alleges that Warner Bros., which controls the intellectual property of the Harry Potter brand, has infringed on Kano’s technology to develop a new smart magic wand.
In an interview with Fast Company, Klein alleges that after discussions with Warner Bros. fell flat, the company took the intellectual property belonging to Kano—including its inventions, trade secrets, and assets protected by patents—to launch a competing wand, called the Harry Potter Magic Caster Wand.
“Unfortunately we have to be open about what’s taken place here,” says Klein. “Which is a pretty messed up scenario for a small company: to be really ripped off by a big company.”
In response to the allegations outlined by Klein, a Warner Bros. spokesperson told Fast Company, “The claims made by Kano are without merit.” In a separate letter sent to Klein on January 11, the studio’s legal representatives wrote: “WBD’s development of the Magic Caster Wand has nothing to do with Kano’s allegedly confidential information and did not involve any improper use of Kano’s allegedly confidential information.”
Founded by Klein, Yonatan Raz-Fridman and Saul Klein in 2013, Kano made its name and attracted tens of millions of dollars in funding by developing a series of kid-friendly, build-your-own computer kits that were meant to be as simple, intuitive, and fun to use as Lego. A 2013 crowdfunding campaign ended up being the fastest to hit its goal in the U.K. at the time, according to Klein, with endorsements from Mike Bloomberg and Boris Johnson. (Barack Obama even had a Kano computer in the White House.) It wasn’t long before the computer was stocked in retailers like Toys “R” Us and Target. “We had this complete inventor’s dream scenario,” says Klein.
Around that time, Kano developed a new range of peripherals, which were gesture and motion sensors that could teach kids how to code by moving their hands through the air. “The software would detect what you would do and then make something happen on the screen,” says Klein.
A contact in the toy industry recommended that Kano connect with Warner Bros., who were selling products tied to their Harry Potter brand: lunch boxes, T-shirts, bobbleheads, and the like. “They had no presence in this new and fun sophisticated consumer electronics market,” says Klein. “We were the beginning of that for them.”
In 2018 Kano partnered with Warner Bros. to create a Harry Potter coding wand, which included Kano’s programmable wand technology that could be used within an app-based Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and controlled objects and interactive elements within an app designed by Kano. Fast Company profiled the wand at the time of its release, calling it “highly satisfying.” “What was so cool about the product was we were living in this era where programming and tech was modern wizardry,” says Klein.
Emails from 2018 and 2019 show Warner Bros. was highly excited about the potential of the wand and its underlying technology. “I think the products you’re building, and the mission you’re pursuing, are really impressive,” wrote Thomas Gewecke, chief digital officer and executive vice president for strategy and business development at Warner Bros. in a November 20, 2018, email shared with Fast Company. Gewecke suggested there could be a route to miniaturizing the technology, so it could be used at the in-person Harry Potter experiences at Leavesden, England, and Universal Studios in the United States.
In February 2019, Kano was one of 10 companies chosen to present at CES on the Lot, an event held at the Warner Bros. studio lot. A February 11, 2019, email sent to Klein after the event says more than 2,000 company “executives, employees and creatives” attended the event, including the CEO of Warner Bros. A March 21, 2019, email from Josh Berger, Warner Bros.’s president of Harry Potter global franchise development, told Klein it “was really inspiring to see Kano up close and your thoughts on wands.”
Klein claims it was “a big feather in Warner Bros. cap.” “They sent it out to the whole company; the leadership team talked about it; it was a really great feel-good story of a landmark brand like Harry Potter coming together with cutting-edge technology to deliver a really cool experience no one had ever had before,” he suggests.
The two companies had agreed on a conventional licensing agreement, according to Klein: Kano paid for the product, its marketing, manufacture, and supply. In exchange, Warner Bros. gave Kano the right to use the Harry Potter IP and the likeness of its characters throughout the product. In total, Kano paid Warner Bros. more than $1.3 million under the agreement, Klein claims. “It was one of the most difficult projects I’ve ever worked on because of the number of stakeholders involved and the number of corporate hoops that had to be jumped through—plus the technology,” says Klein.
It proved to be a fruitful relationship. Following its 2018 launch, Klein claims the company has sold more than 230,000 units of the original wand (priced at $99 per wand) between July 2018 and October 2021, then spawned a number of related products using the same technology with Star Wars and Frozen IP that sold 450,000 units collectively. “The whole package around this thing was about 450,000 units, $25 million in revenue—a big part of our business and remains a part of what we do,” says Klein.
Kano patented the technology in July 2019, Klein says, because “we knew it would be valuable.” But before that patent, in January 2019, Klein and Kano representatives met with Sijia Wang, Warner Bros. then-director of corporate business development and strategy. In that meeting, Klein says Kano presented a proposal that would enable the wand to control more products beyond a smartphone, tablet, or computer.
“You could be doing Harry Potter stuff in the world around you,” Klein says he told the company. “You could be controlling your lights, your Sonos, your Spotify, and so on.” (Fast Company has seen a contemporaneous memo, written by Wang on January 16, 2019, following a meeting earlier that day, that suggests Warner Bros. was seeking “An ‘eye-catching’ demo that can be completed quickly to show a few in-home use cases clearly (i.e., turning on lights, unlocking doors, etc.)”.)
Wang welcomed that idea, Klein claims, and invited Kano in to meet with Warner Bros.’s technical team. “We even met with members of the AT&T leadership team because at the time, AT&T owned Warner Bros.,” Klein says. He claims throughout the process the Warner Bros.’s line was that Kano and the company would be partners on developing the wand beyond smartphone control. In a February 2019 email shared with Fast Company, Wang asked Kano representatives “are you still interested in a potential equity investment from WB? If so, could you share investor materials with us, as well as any additional details on the round (how much funding you are looking to raise, what valuation, etc.)?”
Because of that, Klein says, Kano flew out its team and showed Warner Bros. component diagrams of how the wand worked.
Klein says it was at that point that the relationship changed. First Warner Bros. said they wanted to bring in a design agency to work with Kano on the product, he says. Then Warner Bros. said they were going to put the project out to a request for proposals, despite what Klein saw as an already extant agreement and working relationship to develop the wand together. “We were like: ‘Hold on a sec,’” Klein says. “We’ve spent months showing you our technology, selling this product in the market, under the assurance we were going to have a deal to build the next generation of it together.”
Klein claims he told Warner Bros. they didn’t need a request for proposals: Together, they had sold 230,000 units of the original wand. Around this time, Klein claims Warner Bros. underwent a reorganization and a new staff member came in and decided to bring in a new partner on the project. “We said: ‘You can do a request for proposals, but we own this underlying technology. If you don’t choose to build it again with us, you’re going to have to cut us in on a license fee.’ I guess they didn’t like that, so they chose some other company to do the manufacturing of this new product.”
The Harry Potter Magic Caster Wand opened for preorders in October 2022 and shipped in early December, without Kano’s involvement. “Or consent,” adds Klein. “And it uses multiple aspects of the technology of our wand.”
A source within Warner Bros. disputes Kano’s claims, saying the company has been thinking of the idea of a smart wand for more than five years, but was unable to be more specific, first developing the idea within an internal business development think tank group. The source says a handful of companies were invited to pitch their ideas as part of the process involving Kano, but none of those ideas was taken forward, and claims the current wand on sale was developed by partners contracted with Warner Bros. who the source believes were not part of the pitch process, and in-house teams.
Klein first heard of the Harry Potter Magic Caster Wand in December 2022 when a colleague flagged an online promo of the product to him. He contacted Warner Bros. to express his displeasure, and says he was told by the company’s vice president of litigation that an internal investigation would be launched into what Klein saw as the similarities between his tech and that in the new wand. “We intend to review this matter in detail, which will take time,” wrote Warner Bros.’s Leah Montesano on December 13, 2022.
But a month on, without any sign of progress, and following an email from a law firm representing Warner Bros. claiming that Kano didn’t share confidential information with them, and were only involved in the request for proposals, Klein has felt the need to go public.
“WBD’s development of the Magic Caster Wand has nothing to do with Kano’s allegedly confidential information and did not involve any improper use of Kano’s allegedly confidential information,” reads the letter from Warner Bros.’s legal representatives to Klein. “As the owner of intellectual property rights to the Harry Potter franchise, WBD came up with the concept of a ‘magic wand’ that could be synched to other electronic devices or appliances and sought proposals from potential partners.”
Klein claims that the allegations made by the law firm are “completely factually inaccurate,”adding that the two devices are “clearly related.”
“As the owner of intellectual property rights to the Harry Potter franchise, WBD came up with the concept of a ‘magic wand’ that could be synched to other electronic devices or appliances and sought proposals from potential partners,” reads the January 11 letter from Warner Bros.’ legal representatives to Klein.
Whether a court would agree with Klein is difficult to ascertain. “It’s hard to come to a legal or a ‘moral’ conclusion about this without knowing various facts,” says intellectual property lawyer Martin Schwimmer, partner at New York firm Leason Ellis, who was provided with a high-level overview of the case. “The incident may possibly be an accident or misunderstanding.” Schwimmer says “a patent lawyer would need to look at Kano’s patents, determine their validity, and then look at the Warner Bros. product and come to some sort of opinion as to whether the product infringes the patents.”
Schwimmer points to a case back in the late 1990s where an inventor approached Universal Studios with a prototype of a backpack in the shape of Frankenstein’s monster’s head, where the scars were formed by zippers. “Universal didn’t want to work with the guy, for whatever reason, and went ahead with the product,” Schwimmer recalls. “The guy didn’t have the copyright in Frankenstein of course, and couldn’t claim the zipper idea as any form of intellectual property. Universal had made the guy sign all sorts of agreements signing away any right to sue for theft of ideas. The court, however, was incensed by Universal’s behavior—I’m reading into this—and concocted a new theory of ‘quasi-contract’ so that the guy could sue.”
Regardless of what’s likely to happen should the case go to court, the entrepreneur who believes he was wronged is keen to find a solution. “I want an acknowledgement of our role in creating this device,” says Klein. “I want a fair commercial agreement—either a licensing arrangement or an offer to buy out our rights in the underlying technology.”
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