SRAM and Fox have both filed documents that dismiss all claims and counterclaims in a legal battle that stretches back to 2015,
Bicycle Retailer and Industry News reports.
The original dispute arose over chainrings, produced by Fox-owned Race Face, that SRAM alleged infringed on two of its patents. SRAM had
previously licensed the X-SYNC technology to Chromag and the Accell Group, but Fox later challenged the validity of that patent. That case was followed by Fox suing SRAM for infringing on several Fox-owned suspension and axle-related patents in 2016. The battles have been the subject
of plenty of column inches as the component heavyweights butted heads
in courts throughout the USA.
In the end, both sides filed documents with courts in Colorado and Illinois last Thursday saying they were dismissing claims and counterclaims, with no admission of liability by either and with each side to bear their own costs and attorneys fees.
Industry titles are speculating that the costs, which are believed to have spiralled into the millions, simply became too high for either party to continue pursuing the matters.
SRAM is granting Fox a non-exclusive license to make and sell products using SRAM's chainring-related patents in exchange for royalty rates. Fox is granting SRAM a non-exclusive royalty-free license to make and use products and services covered by Fox's axle patents.
SRAM and Fox have both been contacted for further comment.
Behind closed doors we need to increase EPS - consumers can suck a carrot .
"One chainring to rule them all!!"
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Shakespeare was right.
R&D money is what both of these companies already spent on developing the products in question in hopes that their patents would allow them to make good return on that R&D investment. Innovation and R&D spending are discouraged if there isn't some sort of patent system and legal defense of those patents. But I agree that weaknesses in our patent system and self-interested excesses in our legal system can squeeze far, far too much money out on this end of things
“Imagine these millions going to athletes”
Wild
That doesn’t mean patents are actually essential to the R&D process like air is for your tires, just that there’s no reason for it to be discussed in the first place.
Maybe there’s some study sorting it all out one way or another, but the subject is far to complex for intuitive assumptions to be definitive one way or another.
I don’t know which company you worked for, but at the size of Fox (public company) and SRAM, it is essential to protect their intellectual property to recoup their R&D spend. Or else, like others have pointed out, the competitor would just copy it and then there will be no innovation.
Read Fox’s annual report:
“ The Company devotes significant resources to protecting its intellectual property, relying upon a combination of copyright, trademark, unfair competition, patent, trade secret and other laws and contract provisions. There can be no assurance of the degree to which these measures will be successful in any given case. Policing unauthorized use of the Company’s products and services and related intellectual property is often difficult and the steps taken may not in every case prevent the infringement by unauthorized third parties of the Company’s intellectual property. The Company seeks to limit that threat through a combination of approaches, including offering legitimate market alternatives, deploying digital rights management technologies, pursuing legal sanctions for infringement, promoting appropriate legislative initiatives and international treaties and enhancing public awareness of the meaning and value of intellectual property and intellectual property laws. Piracy, including in the digital environment, continues to present a threat to revenues from products and services based on intellectual property.”
So there you have it. Also I worked in corporate strategy for a publicly traded component manufacturer for 9 years. And yes it is a real common concern that comes up and most have legal teams and processes to file patents to protect their intellectual property. You either just don’t see it, like others mentioned, or the company is too small to truly be innovating much.
Since my professional experience is apparently important, I’m an engineer for Denso, the second largest automotive supplier in the world. I think our revenue last year was around $60B. And yes, we are absolutely obsessed with protecting IP. I’m sure patents are one of the tools we use, but it’s WAY down the list behind maintaining confidentiality, restricting pictures in our facility, monitoring product drawing databases to prevent mass downloading etc.
So I maintain my statement that I would like to see evidence - real evidence not fluffy words in corporateese- that patents are a major factor in a companies decision to innovate. Because looking at the real world and stories like the one above, they seem quite impotent to actually protect IP despite adding significant costs to the process.
All I see is an insane waste of economic resources in litigation.
I can certainly see how it *might* be a deterrent and proactively acknowledged as much in a previous post.
Can you see how it *might* be a massive waste of resources in a negative sum game that only lawyers win?
You don’t have to get sarcastic about my ‘credentials’ - I know how stupid they are but I’m not the one who brought them up.
I give up. Ask your legal team if you think it’s important or not. Based on your expectation of evidence, it is impossible to “prove” that it is important and it deters others from ripping off the technology companies put time and money to develop. I have no clue what you are looking for.
The company you work for is important because depending on the size, economic value generated from the IP will be different, and this may not be worth the time and effort spent on protecting it.
But in any case, a simple fact is look at medicine and generics. If pharmas didn’t have a way to protect their IP, they wouldn’t bother making it will they? Why do you think the generic mfgs wait till the patent is over and just copy the formula? Obviously because it’s cheaper and there is no development cost incurred.
But in any case I give up.
Pharmaceuticals is certainly the obvious case where they are important. But as an industry it's an outlier among outliers - astronomical R&D costs coupled with easy to copy products. To extrapolate from that to infer that without patents we wouldn't have wide narrow chainrings or updated seals on suspension is a bit far.
Consider this: if patents were not a major factor in most technological innovations, how would you know given the current system? Because the current system is so omnipresent that a company simply MUST care about them, even if they don't actually care about excluding others from their innovations. And if there's not a way to falsify the importance of patents, maybe we should be a little more cautious in defending them given the easily provable costs that come with them.
Writing this comment is one of those things.
If you've got WalMart money, you can pay for McTrails built on a per linear foot cost basis.
Hah! We all know that Specialized will sue you for misusing someone else’s name faster than Cannondale will for misusing the Cannondale name.
Oh well your greed cost you