On Friday, Sept. 14, the team at Vinted Goods was riding high. Their Kickstarter project for a line of vintage-style leather bags and accessories had doubled its original goal, Details magazine had dubbed them “Another Kickstarter Success”, and they were closing in on the deadline. Then, 10 hours before the project was due to succeed, it vanished — replaced by a page that simply says, “Sorry, this project is no longer available.”

According to Vinted, the project (which is still cached on Google) was taken down over an intellectual property dispute: Spencer Nikosey, former mentor to Vinted Goods’ product designers and owner of design shop Killspencer, issued a cease-and-desist letter to the team, then invoked the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in a notice to Kickstarter. Kickstarter responded by summarily yanking Vinted’s campaign.

It turns out Vinted Goods’ leather isn’t the only Kickstarter project to be silently removed from the crowdfunding site. At least five projects have been removed by Kickstarter since April, replaced with the same terse message. This despite Kickerstarter’s stated commitment to openness and transparency, and language in Kickstarter’s FAQ promising that it doesn’t remove projects at all. “Projects are not closed or taken down, they remain on site for reference and transparency,” the FAQ reads. “For the same reasons, projects cannot be deleted, even if they were canceled or unsuccessful.”

“Like any site, Kickstarter removes content due to intellectual property disputes, inappropriate content, and terms of use violations,” says Kickstarter’s Justin Kazmark, who otherwise declined to comment on the issue.

It’s only the latest pain-point as Kickstarter navigates between its lofty goals and the complicated realities of raising money online. Earlier this month, the crowdfunding site published an update on accountability and refunds partially in response to NPR’s coverage of these issues as they related to the Ouya videogame console. And last week it updated its policies again to state “Kickstarter is Not a Store” while disallowing the use of renderings and simulations in pitch videos for hardware projects.

The policy changes appear intended to dispel the clouds of uncertainty that surround projects like the Wi-Fi-enabled LIFX LED lightbulb, which managed to raise $1.2 million in six days despite concerns about whether the team has any hope of delivering on its promise. With tremendous funding successes like Pebble, the e-paper watch and Double Fine Adventure, the site’s newfound mainstream attention is at risk of attracting scam artists, copycats, or the naively over-ambitious.

But in the spate of silent takedowns, the DMCA seems to be the driver. Under that U.S. law, if a site receives notice of copyright infringement, it must promptly remove the content or face civil liability itself. The site isn’t required to give notice to the alleged copyright infringer until after the takedown has occurred. At that point, the alleged infringer can file a counter-notice, and if the complainant doesn’t file an infringement lawsuit within 14 days, the site can put back up the disputed content.

Vinted Goods disputes Nikosey’s infringement claim and has filed a counter-notice with Kickstarter in an effort to get the project reposted, says Vinted’s art director Jason Yeh in an e-mail. “[Kickstarter] sent us a brief reply notifying us that our counter notification was actually forwarded to the mentor,” says Yeh. “We haven’t gotten other comments or questions from them.” He expects to hear the result by Sept. 27.

But journalist Dan Misener, who runs Kickstarter project-tracking site The KickBack Machine, says Kickstarter should be clear about its policies, and provide a public explanation when it removes a project. “There’s a built-in public education opportunity here, and it would indeed be more transparent,” says Misener.

It was Misener who discovered Kickstarter’s DMCA takedowns, after the code that powers his tracking site began glitching. “I noticed that a handful of Kickstarter projects had been caught in my software’s ‘lint trap’ because their project pages didn’t match the usual Kickstarter page format,” he says. After investigating further, he found a pattern of IP disputes in the removed projects, such as the Drone DMND Controller which Forbes called “a copycat scam” or Gubble 3D, which quietly cancelled development in April.

As for Vinted Goods? For now, the takedown stands. “When we learn of a product that appears to infringe on our rights, we are put into the unfortunate position where action must be taken,” wrote Killspencer’s Nikosey, without elaborating on the dispute.

“Going forward, we are further detailing our products in terms of manufacturing in order to deliver the best product possible for our fans, if given the chance to,” says Vinted’s Yeh. “Under the threat of a lawsuit, it does hinder us in multiple aspects of the operation … At the end of the the day, we are focused in our vision and strongly believe in our originality.”