Here’s the Napster case description directly from Wikipedia:

The music industry made the following claims against Napster:

(1) That its users were directly infringing the plaintiff’s copyright;
(2) That Napster was liable for contributory infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright; and
(3) That Napster was liable for vicarious infringement of the plaintiff’s copyright.

The court found Napster liable on all three claims.

Napster lost the case in the District Court and appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Although the Ninth Circuit found that Napster was capable of commercially significant non-infringing uses, it affirmed the District Court’s decision. On remand, the District Court ordered Napster to monitor the activities of its network and to block access to infringing material when notified of that material’s location. Napster was unable to do this, and so shut down its service in July 2001.

Let’s see what we have here:
1) The company’s users were directly breaking the law
2) The company was liable for contributing to them breaking the law
3) The company was liable for vicariously breaking the law

The company went back and said that it’s product can be used in significant number of legitimately legal cases or which the court agreed on the condition that they stop the illegal uses. The company was unable to do this and shut down it’s business.

Now go back to the above synopsis of Napster and substitute “The company” for MonaVie. Doesn’t that seem ominous for MonaVie? What’s different? If I were a MonaVie distributor, I’d be very careful not to count on the income stream to feed my family.

The CEO in a Newsweek already said that it is unable to filter out the illegal activity:

Meanwhile an 18-person compliance department investigates distributors suspected of making false claims—although with a million sales people on the books, that’s easier said than done. “It’s next to impossible,” Larsen concedes, “like herding cats.”

Fruits are generally high in fiber, water and vitamin C. Fruits also contain various phytochemicals that do not yet have an RDA/RDI listing under most nutritional factsheets, and which research indicates are required for proper long-term cellular health and disease prevention. Regular consumption of fruit is associated with reduced risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer disease, cataracts, and some of the functional declines associated with aging.

Let’s break that apart into sentences:

Fruits are generally high in fiber, water and vitamin C.

This isn’t all that exciting to me. I could get all that from some Metamucil and a vitamin C pill. However, it’s worth noting that MonaVie has less than 1 gram of fiber per serving, so it lacks one of the key important factors of fruit.

Fruits also contain various phytochemicals that do not yet have an RDA/RDI listing under most nutritional factsheets, and which research indicates are required for proper long-term cellular health and disease prevention.

Ahh, this is the good stuff. I can’t get phytochemicals just from Metamucil and vitamin C. So eating fruit is indeed a good thing as it may (according to the words “research indicates”) help long-term cellular health and disease prevention. So fruit maybe prevents disease. Sounds like seat belt to me. Seat belts may prevent me from getting seriously injured in the case of a car accident. However, if you chose not to wear a seat belt and get into an accident, putting it on afterward isn’t going to help you or treat your injuries.

Regular consumption of fruit is associated with reduced risks of cancer, cardiovascular disease, stroke, Alzheimer disease, cataracts, and some of the functional declines associated with aging.

This looks to be an excellent reason to consume fruit – I’m going to grab and apple right now. Just note that it says your risk may be reduced of getting those diseases. There’s nothing that says or implies giving a lot of fruit to someone with Alzheimer’s will cure him or her.

Analysis of Fruit and MonaVie

To my knowledge no fruit has been approved by the FDA to help treat any disease or medical condition. The only disease I can think of that fruit may treat is scurvy (which comes from a lack of vitamin C) – something that is extremely rare in today’s world. Everything about fruit here is about the prevention, not treatment of medical conditions. By extension neither MonaVie Original or MonaVie Active can help treat medical conditions (again outside of scurvy).

There could be a case made for drinking MonaVie as a preventative measure. However, even in that case an apple is more effective than drinking MonaVie. Also, the scientific tests have largely been done on fruit which has significant fiber, so it would be a stretch to apply them to MonaVie which has little fiber. There’s a chance that fiber is part of what makes regular fruit effective. With that being the case, it’s not logical to go with something like MonaVie that is less proven and potent than fruit.

Let’s imagine for a minute that MonaVie can treat a medical condition or disease. What a medical breakthrough that would be! Fruit hasn’t been shown to do it, but if MonaVie stumbled into some formula it would be groundbreaking. It would make the company billions of dollars. Here’s how:

• Increased sales from doctors prescriptions – MonaVie likes to claim some pretty lofty sales numbers… however, those sales numbers are tiny compared to what a single drug can make for a single company. This would open up a whole new path of sales – one that would dwarf the currently way that MonaVie is distributed now, since it would be scientifically proven to help the people it’s being marketed to.
• Increased sales from distributors – Right now a distributor can’t do too much to sell the product. According to MonaVie’s guidlines “No testimonials of any kind will be permitted.”. With FDA approval, a distributor could legally use the claims that the FDA allow about what the juice has been tested to treat. That would be a huge selling point.
• Free advertising – If MonaVie were to prove that it’s juice could treat medical conditions, it would make the headlines of every newspaper and be on the 6 o’clock news for weeks. Distributors would never have to say, “I know of this juice called MonaVie.” They’d get people coming to them, saying, “I here you can get your hands on MonaVie that’s proven to work with my [fill-in medical condition X].” What a much easier sale to make!

If MonaVie could treat medical conditions, distributors should be very upset with MonaVie for not providing them with the iron-clad proof to make everyone’s lives easier. Of course if it can not treat medical conditions, it’s best not to embarrass yourself by failing in an attempt with the FDA. That seems to be the path MonaVie has chosen which makes the conclusion obvious

This edit removed the company’s Income Disclosure Statement. What possible reason would they have to remove information on WikiPedia that they publish on their own site? Is it so damning that MonaVie would go against Wikipedia policy to delete it. That’s the only logical explanation. This is especially true since 99% of MonaVie distributors earn an average of $3.75 a WEEK back in 2008 (it hasn’t changed significantly since then). It’s worth keeping in mind that those drinking the juice pay $30 a week in juice to earn that $3.75. Sounds like a good deal.

• MonaVie does not treat medical conditions.
• MonaVie knows their juice can’t treat medical conditions
• They come from anonymous people and are unverifiable – I could post on any forum that MonaVie gave me rabies or any sickness. As outlandish as it sounds, it’s true. Someone could argue that I’m lying, but how do they know? I could simply post back they don’t know me. I’ve seen time and time again, someone post their testimony about MonaVie helping them with some medical condition. It’s similar to me posting that MonaVie gave me rabies. There is no way to verify either fact. If you say it’s completely illogical for MonaVie to give someone rabies, I would respond with the first bullet point above – it is completely illogical for MonaVie to treat medical conditions.
• Testimonies are potentially biased – There’s a high probability that testimonies for MonaVie could be biased. Distributors could be putting the testimonies out there sway the public opinion, and to drive sales for the product. They understand that even if they don’t make a direct sale, they may be helping a colleague make a sale. That down the line might be helpful to them. One the other hand, people who claim that MonaVie doesn’t do anything, have nothing to gain. It’s not like, they are going to sell you another juice or product. It’s called being a good consumer advocate which has it’s own rewards – the warm fuzzies of having helped someone.
• Any perceived medical benefit of MonaVie could be due to the placebo effect.

It all adds up to MonaVie medical testimonies not being helpful for much of anything in deciding if purchasing MonaVie is the right thing for you.

The CEO didn’t start out at janitor and work his way up to CEO. The typical CEO graduates from a very difficult business school and almost typically starts with a salary upwards of $150,000 a year in an executive position. I have not seen MonaVie value an education like this and just start people at Gold or Ruby levels.

There’s another major difference… in some industries there are often significantly more people at the top than at the bottom. Think of your average restaurant. How many chefs do they have for every dishwasher or bus boy? I think you get where this going.

If you think that MonaVie isn’t a pyramid, why not look at the tips outlined by the FTC. I particularly like this article on illegal pyramids, because they add much needed common sense.

Warren Buffett has invested in Network Marketing company Pampered Chef. You can read a little why he did that in this CNN article. Some will be quick to ask, “What’s the difference between Pampered Chef and MonaVie?”

When you go to a Pampered Chef you get to see the objective benefits of their products. From one Pampered Chef distributor in the above article:

“‘How many times have you pulled those brownies out of the oven to find that they are done around the edges but still not set in the middle?’ she asks, as she lifts a 12-inch diameter cookie from the Pampered Chef’s round baking stone. ‘On our stoneware the heat is distributed evenly, and your cookie will come out perfectly.’”

You can clearly see that the product works right there in front of you before you drop a dime. If it doesn’t work, you don’t pay for it. That’s what I mean objective benefits. It’s clearly observable by all parties.

What objective benefits occur at a get-together for a health product? Do you drink it and are you instantly able to do more push-ups? We know our bodies don’t work that way (unless there’s adrenaline involved). The “benefits” of MonaVie are subjective and very possibly due to the placebo effect, since we know that MonaVie lacks nutrition.

Pampered Chef’s products seem comparable in quality and in price with what retail store Williams-Sonoma offers. Using that link above and the information there, we know that MonaVie lacks nutrition (it’s main purpose) making its quality quite questionable. Also MonaVie Active’s retail price of $45 for 25 ounces is, ounce for ounce, about 10 to 20 times more expensive than V8 Fusion Acai Berry or Tropicana Pure Acai Raspberry… and that’s not to mention that Welch’s Grape Juice was shown to have more nutrition in previous paragraph.

So to recap:

• MLM products that are health-based have difficulty proving their value to consumers. MLM based health products should always be a red flag to consumers.
• MonaVie’s product by all measurable methods falls short making it’s quality quite questionable. That’s not going to Warren Buffett’s sign of approval.
• Pricing a product at 10x to 20x more than comparable products without showing the quality is also not going to endear you Warren Buffert’s business team.

How is J.D. Drew Breaking MonaVie’s Terms of Service?

J.D. Drew has two websites promoting MonaVie : Join J.D. Drew and A MySpace Page. MonaVie’s Terms of Service say that you can only have a MyMonaVie.com until you read a certain level. It’s worth noting that J.D. Drew isn’t at that level. In addition, I tried to contact him through those websites, but couldn’t. Manager Terry Francona’s son, Nick Francona is taking all the contact information. How much retailing of the product is J.D. Drew doing if he’s not even making himself available to talk about the product?

Does MonaVie drop him as a distributor? No they shout from the rooftops that J.D. Drew drinks MonaVie. I don’t understand why anyone thinks he’s an authority on the benefits of juice. Does he do that for a living or is just one of the best few hundred players in the United States at hitting a baseball. I fail to see how one skill translates to another.

Also, ask yourself if you make as much money as J.D. Drew. He had signed a $70 Million dollar contract. The cost of MonaVie isn’t a concern for him. If he puts some of his money in a savings account that accrues interest, he’ll never have to care about the price of anything in his life. For the other 99.9999% of the population, there’s a danger that they will not have a secure retirement and possibly not be able to pay for proven health care.

Lastly, if you plan to become a distributor of MonaVie ask yourself how you can possibly be more successful than J.D. Drew. He’s got millions of fans, yet he can’t seem to sell enough juice to get to the higher levels of MonaVie. Even the aforementioned MySpace page gathers tumbleweeds because no one is interested.

One thing that I found interesting is that you don’t even get the trunk that’s in the picture. Why call it a trunk of tools and put a picture of a trunk, if there’s no trunk? It’s marketing designed to confuse the buyer. It would have been a lot more accurate to just take a picture of the tools themselves.

If TEAM wasn’t trying to steal your money with it’s trunk trick, Amthrax has shown that the trunks are a waste of money. Many would agree that the sales tools are a waste of money, but he points out that you can buy all the items in the trunks for less than the bundled package. Who has heard of paying more for buying a bulk package? If I buy in bulk, I expect to get a discount, not a surcharge.

Clearly anyone who is buying these trunks are not making a wise purchasing decision… and the seller looks bad by trying to pull a fast one on his customers.

MonaVie says that it can’t disclose the amount of acai in it’s blend because it would be giving up a trade secret. In theory, someone else could use the information to help decode part of the MonaVie’s secret recipe.

One thing we do know, acai is the first ingredient on the MonaVie label. With 18 other fruits in the juice, there’s likely at least 5.3% acai. As a consumer, one should take a skeptical look with their money and not assume there’s any more than that. I don’t know anyone who drinks Coca-cola for health. They pay a small amount of money for the taste. The ingredients or secret recipe is not important to the value that one receives in buying Coke if they just want good taste. If MonaVie wants to bill itself as something that tastes great and price itself similar to Coke, I’m fine with that. If it wants to bill itself as a healthy beverage, it should have to show why it’s healthier than other competing beverages at less than 1/10th the cost (like V8 Fusion Acai Berry).

It is my belief that a premium price requires proof of a lot of premium ingredients. Is that what’s in MonaVie? Only MonaVie knows, and they aren’t saying.