All good points. One further thought (and again, I'm not out to defend Joe, his product, or his, uh, marketing style): I just read the article on the Disney suit. Now I'm no lawyer (do we have any on the list? would that be a good thing or not?) but I'm pretty sure that once he'd reached a settlement with Disney, he *obligated* himself, under the hurtful and dated system (how right that description is!), to "vigorously defend" his patent against all other potential infringers. That is, unless he now pursues legal action against anyone and everyone who has a similar product that isn't *explicitly* proven to be non-infringing, Disney could effectively argue that he wasn't really protecting his rights, but was only going after their deep pockets, and perhaps invalidate the settlement. And don't think that Disney wouldn't be that petty...
My feeling is that if Yeti is going to mention names, they need to describe what led to the impasse. Was it a case of Joe's attorneys writing a nasty bigfoot letter out of nowhere, or was it a long, civilized conversation that ended in disagreement? For all we know, Joe may have invited them to high tea to discuss the matter and Yeti said, "Nar, come and get us, you *(%^&&%!" (For the record, I do not believe this is what transpired.) All I'm saying is that it's generally unfair to lay blame at a specific person's feet without some explanation. On Sun, Apr 29, 2012 at 10:16 PM, Raffaele Fragapane < raffsxsil...@googlemail.com> wrote: > To be honest, I'm happy the Yeti guys are mentioning context and names. > The patent crap too often goes on behind closed courtains, unless it's > Apple and Google battling it out on a global scale, and people don't > realise how hurtful and dated the system is. > > The fact that a "best obvious" solution is getting in the way of > development is NOT good for any of us, and that a small developer, because > Joe isn't a large evil corp, decides to attack a much better competitor > that could wipe his only succesful product off the market in the next two > years through patent walling instead of through quality and improvments to > a notoriously flawed and aging product doesn't paint him in a good light. > Is this the kind of small developer you want empowered? I can only speak > for myself, but I'll say no. > > There are many patents that are just first come first served deployments > of ideas that had been around, sometimes even implemented, for a long time, > this is on the edge of those cases, if not squarely within the domain. > >
