JooJoo Pre-Orders Violate PayPal TOS? [Fusion Garage Already Selling the JooJoo Despite Pending Litigation]

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The CrunchPad has been a sweet dream of a visionary man but everything ended in disaster. Not only did Michael Arrington and his TechCrunch team cancel their collaboration with Fusion Garage and thus the launch of the CrunchPad but Fusion Garage also decided to sell the product on its own.

As we told you a few days ago, the JooJoo is what the CrunchPad will be known as once it hits retail stores. The Internet tablet is supposed to offer you a 12-inch capacitive touchscreen, a 4GB SSD, Wi-Fi connectivity and 5 hours of battery life. Those of you interested in purchasing it will have to pay $500 which is a lot to ask for a device that will only be able to help you surf the Internet. The device will run a Linux-based OS that will only feature a web browser. That was Michael Arrington’s initial idea but he also wanted to make the device very affordable to the masses.

$500 is not what I call affordable and the last mentioned price was somewhere around $300. And then the project died as the main parties involved decided to part ways. Now I’m not going to get into the whole legal matters behind the scandal. TechCrunch has sued Fusion Garage and it remains to be seen what will happen to the JooJoo in the future.

What’s interesting right now is the fact that Fusion Garage is breaking the terms of service of PayPal with the pre-sale of the JooJoo. The tablets will be delivered 8 to 10 weeks after pre-order which is not something PayPal generally agrees with:

ll.4 – Prohibited Transactions. [...] You also agree not to use your PayPal account to sell goods with delivery dates delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment, or to sell securities, business opportunities, franchises or multi-level marketing or goods with delivery delayed more than 20 days from the date of payment.

So what do you say? Will Fusion Garage stop pre-orders?