[TowerTalk] DXE Patents - Summit Racing

[Jim Lux]

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.