At 04:25 AM 12/18/02 -0500, James T. Voorhies wrote:
Semantics surely are a device by which we all measure what we call a "clone". The person buying it has his standards, the person selling it has his, and the guy who made the "original" design has his. When a designer makes a clubhead, he starts from some point of reference. That point is to make a golf clubhead or entire club with certain characteristics. Those characteristics have various properties; weight, material, angles, COG, hosel dimensions, sole, etc etc and so on. Each of these characteristics are the components of good clubhead design. Someone has made each of the original component designs or very similar designs at one time or another. Each of these components of clubhead design have theoretical and empirical properties that compose the overall design. To make something completely new requires use of some or all of these components.You failed to mention the most important characteristic of a clone -- if you mean "clone" to brand something as inherently unethical. That characteristic is not an engineering characteristic but a marketing one. If your goal is to piggyback on someone else's (generally an OEM's) marketing campaign through cosmetic (as opposed to performance) characteristics, then that is a "clone" in the worst sense.
I don't have any problem with trying to copy the performance characteristics of any other club, as long as you don't violate patents in the process. (BTW, patent violations are seldom an issue in clone cases -- a couple of interesting exceptions below.) If you are trying to give a customer something that will behave like a TaylorMade driver, it's fine (and probably necessary) to copy the head volume and weight distribution, as well as other things. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem if you then also:
* Copy the [completely non-functional] design on the sole.
* Choose a paint color that is as close a match as possible.
* Give it a name like "Tour Made".
That goes from a "performance clone" to a "market leech"!
Here are a couple of interesting patent-related tales from the clone wars:
(1) Adams sued the maker of the Super Concorde for patent infringement. Adams actually had a patent on an aspect of their design to lower the CG. But the courts decided that Super Concorde did not infringe that patent; it used a lot of the same techniques as the Tight Lies to get a low CG, but did not use the one thing that Adams had patented. That's OK in my book, since it didn't use a hokey name (like "Loose Truths") or an Adams-like paint job. BTW, I did wait until the suit was decided before I made any Super Concorde clubs.
(2) It is possible that you won't get clones of the 2-ball putter -- at least not clones that withstand a lawsuit. Pelz holds the patent, and he described the principle and why it works in his 1989 book (I just looked it up). I once read the patent, and it looks pretty defensible. Of course, by now it's probably less than ten years from expiration -- so maybe you WILL see a legal clone before TOO long. (Hmmm! Just looked it up. It is patent 4,688,798 from August of 1987. Took a REAL long time to market it properly. If the patent lifetime is still 17 years, then it will expire in 2004!)
Just my 2 cents,
DaveT
