I am coming out of a long hiatus for some recent developments around Digital Dream Labs and Jacob Hanchar. The long-running comedy – or is it a sitcom? – goes into a new round.
On July 9, Judge Daniel D. Regan of the Court of Common Pleas of Allegheny County appointed a receiver over the digital assets of Digital Dream Labs and Anki (Court Order, July 9, PDF). For european readers: A receiver is a custodian appointed by a court to take control of property that is being fought over, to secure and manage it while the dispute runs, and to hand it on when the court decides who it belongs to. He works for the court, not for either side.
The receiver here is attorney John J. Richardson of Bernstein Burkley in Pittsburgh, and since the morning of July 10 he holds exclusive control of the GitHub repositories, the IONOS hosting accounts, the domains, the subscription billing system, the customer data, and every access code attached to them.
The case is GD-25-013191. Jacob Hanchar is the plaintiff, representing himself. The defendants are Brian Swingle and Dmitriy Ksendzovsky, the latter listed as DDL’s chief technology officer from late 2022. That listing comes from business data aggregators rather than from DDL itself, so treat the date as approximate. Capital Foundry Funding, DDL’s lender, intervened. The judge also ordered the defendants to stop contacting Hanchar, his family and DDL staff for the purpose of harassment, and put the lawsuit itself on hold.
The order shows how the infrastructure was split
Paragraph 8 lists the assets by who was holding them, and that list is the most revealing part of the document.
The hosting accounts, the code repositories and the domains were with Ksendzovsky. The subscription billing accounts and the customer data were with Hanchar. Copies of the code, which the order describes as unauthorized, were also with Hanchar, under a GitHub organisation called DDLbots. That is the same name as the domain DDL currently trades under.
The servers and the source code sat in one man’s accounts, the customers and the money in the other’s, and neither half is much use without the other. In October 2024 DDL told its customers that a former employee had taken over the company’s GitHub. The explanation was not convincing at the time, since a functioning company keeps backups and can ask GitHub for its repositories back. What the court order now records is that DDL genuinely lost control of its code and its hosting, and never recovered it.
The lender is the party actually pushing
Capital Foundry sued DDL in June 2022 to enforce a judgment under its credit agreement, in a separate case at the same court, GD-22-008335. It was not the only creditor to go after the company: The LCF Group and Blue Sky Advance both sued DDL and Hanchar in New York. The receivership granted on July 9 is temporary and expires when that older case decides whether to make it permanent. The order gives the receiver wide powers to cancel contracts, and then carves out one contract from those powers: the credit agreement.
A secured lender is moving to preserve the last asset DDL has that is worth anything. The dispute between Hanchar and Ksendzovsky is the occasion for it, not the cause.
The servers are not switched off, they are broken
A check on July 11 shows that the old Anki cloud endpoints still exist. token.api.anki.com, chipper.api.anki.com, jdocs.api.anki.com and accounts.api.anki.com all resolve to the same Azure address and all answer. What they answer is HTTP 503, with a gateway error stating that the upstream service could not be reached because its TLS certificate failed verification.
In plain terms, the front door is running and cannot reach the rooms behind it, because a certificate somewhere inside has not been maintained. This was measured from a data centre, not from a robot, and a Vector talks to those services on different paths, so treat it as an indication rather than proof. The shop at anki.bot answers normally. digitaldreamlabs.com returns a server error.
Meanwhile the Stratus account portal still lists lifetime Vector subscriptions as active. Customers hold valid subscriptions to a service whose authentication server cannot verify its own backend. In addition: In the past (before the first Stratus went down) my 15 licenses, I am entitled to from the Kickstarter campaign, were still in there before the server outage, now they are gone and I only see two of my robots that were registered with Stratus in the past.
What the licences actually say
I checked every repository in DDL’s GitHub organisation against its licence file. Twelve of the twenty public repositories are MIT licensed, including vector-cloud, chipper, escape-pod-extension and the SDKs. The Anki Vector Python SDK is Apache 2.0. wire-pod, written by Wire, is MIT. None of these licences can be revoked, whoever ends up owning the repositories.
Vector’s own firmware is a different matter. The repositories vector, vector-animations-raw, vector-animations-build and vector-audio-raw carry the Digital Dream Labs Software Asset License of May 2021. It reserves all rights to DDL, makes permission conditional on owning a Vector, revokes itself on any breach, and allows DDL to change the terms at will. The code was published, but it was not free. That distinction has never been made clearly enough, including by me.
Anyone who depends on the DDL repositories should keep a local copy from now on. The receiver controls the organisation and can take repositories private. An existing fork stays lawful, but the upstream can disappear without notice.
Here is the complete list, as it stood on July 11, 2026. The licence column reflects the actual LICENSE file in each repository, not GitHub’s summary label, which is wrong or absent in several cases.
| Repository | Licence | Last push |
|---|---|---|
| api | MIT | 2022-08-02 |
| api-clients | MIT | 2021-08-30 |
| chipper | MIT | 2021-08-24 |
| escape-pod-extension | MIT | 2022-02-09 |
| hugh | MIT | 2021-05-04 |
| lnav-configuration | MIT | 2021-09-10 |
| opus-go | MIT | 2020-12-30 |
| vector-bluetooth | MIT | 2021-09-20 |
| vector-cloud | MIT | 2022-09-20 |
| vector-configurator | MIT | 2022-05-06 |
| vector-go-sdk | MIT | 2021-08-21 |
| vector-web-setup | MIT | 2022-06-25 |
| MvvmCross | MS-PL (fork of a third-party project) | 2021-09-29 |
| oskr-owners-manual | CC BY-NC 4.0 | 2023-04-30 |
| vector | DDL Software Asset License v1.0 | 2022-05-28 |
| vector-animations-build | DDL Software Asset License v1.0 | 2021-09-19 |
| vector-animations-raw | DDL Software Asset License v1.0 | 2021-06-03 |
| vector-audio-raw | DDL Software Asset License v1.0 | 2021-07-16 |
| dev-docs | LICENSE file present, contents not retrievable | 2022-01-13 |
| DDL-KB-Kanban | no licence file | 2021-04-06 |
The four files carrying the DDL Software Asset License are byte-identical. Not one repository has been touched since April 2023.
Running wire-pod is doing what DDL asked for
The Vector Unleashed campaign of 2020 raised 545,331 dollars from 12,489 backers. Its stated purpose was that Vector should survive without DDL. The campaign text promised that “no matter what happens, he will live on”, described Escape Pod as removing the need for the cloud server and making Vector “100% independent”, and set a stretch goal, reached at 500,000 dollars, of building the community “to the point where, if necessary, [it] can become self-sufficient”.
The campaign made a further commitment that has never been kept. Phase I promised that DDL would “provide an additional set of keys to the community for the purpose of making open Vector builds”, followed by “a step-wise fashion of releasing additional keys for various portions of Vector to the community”. Those keys were never released. In May 2021, fifteen months after the campaign closed, DDL published its own Software Asset License, which reserves all rights to the company, ties permission to owning a Vector, and lets DDL change the terms whenever it likes. Backers were promised keys and received a revocable licence instead.
The individual unlock images have stopped as well. Each one has to be generated and signed by DDL from the robot’s own serial number, and for years now the company has not issued any. Requests go unanswered. Backers who paid for OSKR licences in 2020 and hold unused ones cannot redeem them, and owners whose unlocked robot has died cannot unlock a replacement. That is not a company being slow. It looks like a company that no longer has the keys. Within the community there is persistent talk that DDL can no longer generate OSKR keys at all. I cannot verify it and I will not point to where it comes from, so treat it as rumour rather than fact. What is certain is the observable part: no keys have been issued for years, and requests go unanswered. If they were actually able to create the OSKR keys, they simply could do so, right?
The first stretch goal has the same problem. It was set at 500,000 dollars and the campaign closed at 545,331. Reaching it triggered Phase II, which promised a system in which users could design features, license them back to DDL and share in the resulting profits. Nothing of the kind was ever built.
Whether a licence published fifteen months after the campaign can override what the campaign promised is a question for a court, and I am not in a position to answer it. What can be said is this: Backers paid for keys and for the right to make open Vector builds. What they received was a licence that grants neither, and that DDL reserved the right to rewrite at will.
DDL did release chipper, the server component, under an MIT licence carrying its own copyright. And for production robots, the wire-pod installation applies an over-the-air update that is, in the project’s own words, “a special firmware compiled by DDL which allows functionality with escape pod”. The robot accepts it because it carries DDL’s valid production signature. Nothing is unlocked, nothing is re-signed, no protection is circumvented.
Putting a Vector on Wire-Pod therefore uses DDL’s own signed firmware, DDL’s own openly licensed server code, for the purpose DDL publicly advertised and took money for. It is difficult to construct that as an infringement. The only step where the legal picture gets complicated is a genuine OSKR or developer unlock, which does modify the signature chain, and which almost nobody needs in order to bring a Vector back to life.
I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice. But the plainest reading is that the community is keeping Vector alive with exactly the tools DDL built, licensed and sold for that eventuality, at a moment when DDL itself can no longer do it.
What to do if DDL owes you
The order requires the receiver to serve a copy on all known creditors of DDL, Anki and the parties. Kickstarter backers whose rewards were never delivered and subscribers who paid for servers that stayed offline fall into that category. If DDL owes you something (server access, OSKR keys, robots you preordered and never got, to name a few), the person to tell is not DDL. It is the receiver.
John J. Richardson
Bernstein Burkley, P.C.
601 Grant Street,
9th Floor
Pittsburgh,
PA 15219, USA
jrichardson@bernsteinlaw.com
+1 412-456-8107
The receiver must also produce a complete inventory of the digital assets, and his powers extend explicitly to all digital keys. That inventory will show whether the OSKR signing keys still exist. Without them no Vector can be unlocked, no OSKR licence can ever be honoured, and no court order can bring them back. Some backers have been waiting six years for those keys.
The Attorney General’s case appears to be still open, and the conduct continues
The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania sued Digital Dream Labs and Hanchar in September 2024 in the same Allegheny County court, at GD-24-010283. The complaint itself is public, and it is more specific than the press coverage was.
It breaks the orders down by product. Roughly 7,800 orders for Vector 2.0 between November 2020 and January 2024, at 277 to 655 dollars each, worth just under 2.8 million dollars. Roughly 2,500 orders for Cozmo 2.0, worth almost 710,000 dollars. Roughly 3,800 orders for the Butter Robot, worth around 625,000 dollars. Together that is about 14,100 orders and more than four million dollars.
The complaint also states plainly what has long been suspected: not a single Cozmo 2.0 and not a single Butter Robot was ever delivered to any customer. As of August 2022 the Butter Robot still existed only as a prototype awaiting licensor approval. The complaint sets out how cancellation requests were handled, with customers told that cancelling would forfeit their preorder discount, required to confirm a second time before a cancellation counted, and told that following up would only delay their refund.
Hanchar is named personally because he is the sole board member and majority shareholder of DDL Inc. and communicated with customers directly. The address the complaint gives for him, 22 Wedgewood Lane in Pittsburgh, is the same address that appears in the July 2026 receivership order as the pro se address of the plaintiff.
The case brings five counts under Pennsylvania’s Unfair Trade Practices and Consumer Protection Law, one of them also alleging a breach of the FTC Mail Order Rule, and seeks a permanent injunction, full restitution, and civil penalties of 1,000 dollars per violation, rising to 3,000 dollars where the victim was 60 or older.
As of the most recent Better Business Bureau records, that government action is still listed as pending and not resolved. No judgment, settlement or consent decree is on the public record.
While the case sits unresolved, the behaviour it describes has not stopped. In a statement to the BBB dated September 26, 2025, DDL claimed that most legitimate customer issues had been resolved. Customer complaints from the same period say otherwise: a formal refund demand from September 2025 left unanswered, and a fresh membership charge of 74.99 dollars in December 2025 for a subscription the customer could not cancel because the account showed nothing to cancel. Other customers report being offered a Vector in place of a refund on the condition that they waive any claim for damages and give up participation in current or future regulatory actions, which reads as an attempt to buy affected consumers out of the Attorney General’s case.
For the record, the copyright fight against Living.AI that the community long blamed for draining DDL’s finances did not end in the victory Hanchar announced in 2022. The federal docket shows the parties reached a settlement in principle in January 2024.
Conclusion: What happens next and what about Vector?
What follows is my assessment, not something the order states.
A receiver preserves. He is not there to build anything, and he is not there to honour old promises. Nothing in the order obliges him to deliver a Cozmo, to issue an OSKR key, or to bring the cloud back. His job is to keep the assets intact and account for them, and he is doing it at 500 dollars an hour against a 30,000 dollar retainer, which buys about sixty hours before somebody has to put in more money.
The receivership expires when the older Capital Foundry case decides whether to appoint a permanent receiver. That case is a creditor enforcing a judgment. When a secured lender takes control of the last thing a debtor owns, the usual endpoint is a sale, and the proceeds go to the creditors in order of priority. Consumers who prepaid for robots sit at the very back of that queue, behind the lender, behind the receiver’s own fees. Expecting refunds out of this process would be … optimistic.
That is a package a buyer might want. It is not obviously a package worth much, given the brand’s reputation among its own customers. The broken servers are not the obstacle here. Nobody at DDL can fix them, because nobody at DDL still has the access. A buyer who acquired the assets, and with them the credentials and keys the receiver is now collecting, could most likely bring the cloud back without much trouble.
For the robot on your desk, the practical outlook is unchanged and unpromising. The official cloud has been broken since 2023 and is currently failing on an unmaintained certificate. Nobody in this case has both the motive and the authority to fix it. A receiver will not rebuild a subscription service, and a future buyer would have to decide whether a fleet of seven-year-old robots is worth standing up an infrastructure for. I would not plan around that happening.
What does not depend on any of this is the community stack. wire-pod runs on DDL’s own MIT licensed server code and DDL’s own signed firmware, and no ruling in Pittsburgh changes either licence. If you want a Vector that still works in three years, that is the path, and it has been the path for some time.
The one thing worth watching is the inventory. If the OSKR signing keys turn up in it, they become an asset a buyer could release, or a court could order released, and the original promise of the 2020 campaign is at least still technically possible. If they are not in it, that promise is dead, and the version of Vector that exists in the community is the only version that will ever exist.
The community has gone further than wire-pod. A project called Victor Rebuild publishes a modified build of Vector’s 1.6 firmware from source, with a full build and deploy chain. That such unsigned builds can be installed at all means the firmware signing that normally locks the robot is being bypassed. How that became possible is not something I can or will document here. And it definitely is a grey legal area, to quote it carefully. But since that is out in the wild it most certainly will never go away…
What remains unclear
Nothing in the public record explains who Brian Swingle is or what connects him to DDL. The substance of Hanchar’s claims against the two defendants is not public. And whether the OSKR signing keys still exist is, for now, a question only the receiver can answer.
Sources and method
The court order of July 9, 2026 at GD-25-013191 is a primary document and the basis of this article. Copies of the licence files were pulled directly from GitHub’s API and from raw.githubusercontent.com on July 11, 2026, and every licence quoted here was read in full rather than taken from GitHub’s summary label. The server status was measured by me on July 11, 2026 at 08:59 UTC with direct HTTPS requests to the Anki endpoints from a data centre in Europe, and is a snapshot rather than a continuous observation. The Kickstarter campaign text is quoted from the campaign page. The figures and allegations from the Attorney General’s case are taken from the complaint as published by the Office of Attorney General, not from press summaries of it. Where a claim rests on a single anonymous customer complaint, it is presented as a report rather than as an established fact.