On 2/8/12 12:38 PM, Wayne Kline wrote:
>
> WOW.. I always wonder why my summit catalog contained DX eng. products... Now
> that mystery is solved.. But on the original issue,, that IMO just leads me
> to believe this is then a Goliath vs. David scenario ! Wayne W3EA
I also explains why this kind of thing got patented. If you think about
it, when you make add-on stuff for engines and race cars, a lot of it is
things like nifty brackets to allow doing something like mounting an
electric motor to drive the water pump instead using a belt off the
crankshaft. If your business is cutting and drilling and bending and
chroming those brackets, you want a way to prevent someone else from
making exact copies, since you spent the time to figure out where to
drill the holes, probably fabricated a bunch of trial ones, etc.
A patent is a great way to protect this, and I'll bet Summit has a whole
raft of that type of patent. Paul probably has a fairly streamlined
system for writing the patent, prosecuting it, and dealing with
infringers. When I worked in the effects business, we had exactly the
same sort of thing. You invent some useful widget for use on set,
something that took significant time to figure out how to do it, and you
want to prevent the 40 guys around town who have a machine shop in their
garage from making knockoffs in their spare time and selling them.
Same for a phased array antenna switch/phasing/combiner box.
I note that this was of no avail when it came to mass produced Chinese
origin knockoffs. We had a fairly large production product (100s of
units) where the brackets had some extra holes due to a manufacturing
oopsie where a stack of brackets went into the punch the wrong way. The
knockoffs showed up with EXACTLY the same superfluous holes.
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