You say that, but how many years of moving light development did it take for a company to realize it was a good idea? Remarkbly many.
To that end,
ETC has many patents that are ornamental (i.e. no specific design feature -- just the
look of the
fixture). Which given how many no-name brands tried to mimic the
Source Four with subpar products, is not wholly unreasonable. Similarly -- do a search on Amazon for "
Makita" and you'll get
tons of products that are a non-Makita tool but put "for
Makita 18V battery" in the product title so you land on their search results -- and they have the same color scheme as
Makita to deliberately deceive consumers.
There are plenty of issues with US patent law -- but I'm not sure this lawsuit between
Martin and
ETC is really that indicative of the larger problem. The many lawsuits ClearOne has generated, on the other
hand, show what happens when a company lets their sales fall off a cliff and they try to make up for it through IP litigation. One of those being the lawsuit against
Shure where the primary grievance wasn't the technology in the digital beam-steering of the microphones, but the fact it was a beam-steering mic that mounted in a 2x2 ACT
grid. Well -- there are literally
millions of products that mount in a 2x2 ACT
grid.
Similarly,
Rosco sued
ETC over using their
gel names in their software. Not wholly unreasonable on its
face in terms of the value in
Rosco curating those color recipes over decades, but very dissociated from why
Rosco's position in the market was flailing.
Rosco stuck to
gel where
Apollo pivoted to
LED's and widgets. Still not very material in their claims, but
Rosco may have taken a PR hit from at least some small slice of the industry that pays attention to those things.
Just the wording in the lawsuit that presumes
Martin lost sales to
ETC because of similar handles on the
yoke and not because of a myriad of other reasons is what is laughable to me. I don't see how they could prove that to a jury.
That's not material to the suit itself except in terms of damages. If they go to trial,
Martin will seek discovery of
ETC's sales data and have an "expert" put an opinion on the possible sales lost to
ETC -- on top of royalties that
ETC should've paid per
fixture sold. I say "expert" not to disparage
Martin -- but because that's how any lawsuit like this goes. You get someone with credentials to
throw big round numbers out there to try to encourage a settlement for what they actually wanted in the first place.
However, there can be a PR hit from those actions. Wouldn't expect much in this instance, but when ClearOne sued
Shure,
Audio Technica,
etc, there were a lot of dealers and consultants laying into ClearOne about that. You log into their
DSP's with what looks like a GUI made for Windows 95 -- they haven't remotely kept up with industry expectations and until recently, many of their products were wholly unusable if you weren't entirely within their own ecosystem. None of that affected the litigation, but I know many people, myself included, laid into our ClearOne reps about it. ClearOne can file all the lawsuits they want, but ultimately if they want to make product sales, they're going to have to fast-forward a couple decades in the development of their ecosystems.
FWIW, my opinion for the last decade has been that Harman kills everything they touch -- but
Martin probably has some
ground to stand on here. Fair chance they'll
settle for some degree of royalties on past sales considering it's a discontinued product that, by all accounts,
ETC didn't sell much of in the first place because it awkwardly straddled the HES acquisition where suddenly
ETC has a plethora of fresh IP and talent in developing moving head products and the combination of Covid reduced sales before Lonestar hit the market.
It does seem though like patent law could use some tiering. If a feature is extremely novel and complex -- a Tier A patent that gives them the full period of exclusivity. If it's marginally novel over something like a handle -- you get a Tier C patent that's good for 5 years -- not 20. But...the patent office barely has enough staffing to maintain its
current mission much less get into the squabbling over categorizing the magnitude of specific patents in specific industries.
