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CES is full of wild sights, but you don't often see US Marshals raid a display booth.
On Thursday, gadget lovers were treated to the sight of federal law enforcement officials packing up a booth run by Changzhou First International Trade Co., which makes a one-wheeled skateboard called the Trotter.
The raid was prompted by an emergency motion for injunctive relief filed by California-based Future Motion, which makes a similar board that balances over a single wheel, imaginatively called the One Wheel. The raid was earlier reported by Bloomberg.
The Marshals' actions highlights tension at the country's biggest consumer gadget tradeshow over cheap knock-offs and copy cats. The annual Las Vegas tradeshow often features bargain basement tech that appears to closely resemble existing products, some of which are protected by patents.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09 2016, @04:27PM
And what's interesting is that this product was backed by kickstarter. I thought the whole point of patents is to recoup your R&D costs but here you have kickstarter providing the initial funding and you have kickstarter contributors making donations not in return for ownership and profit but in return for seeing the product come to market. What they did was more than just risk their money hoping for an ROI, they gave their money freely hoping for a product. Necessity is the mother of innovation. Yet these selfish people developed something with someone else's money and took the patents for themselves to personally profit off of. Kickstarter should either forbid this or they should require kickstarter recipients to disclose their intent to possibly enforce or not to enforce patents to all potential contributors beforehand. If the recipient indicates that he won't be enforcing patents beforehand then that should be legally binding if they receive money.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 09 2016, @04:36PM
And of course said patents should be unenforceable even if transferred. Because our legal system always manages to intentionally create some sneaky backhanded gotcha.
(Score: 2) by Whoever on Saturday January 09 2016, @04:55PM
The root of the problem is laws that are supposed to protect the less well off from predatory "investment opportunities". Kickstarter and its ilk cannot offer a share of the ownership of the company producing the product because those types of risky investments are reserved for the wealthy (supposedly sophisticated investors) . For similar historical examples, look at how "The Closure" was the beginning of the end of Venice as a major trading power.
(Score: 2) by CirclesInSand on Saturday January 09 2016, @05:50PM
I thought the whole point of patents is to recoup your R&D costs
No. It has become that, but it is a bad reason.
Originally the public reason was to prevent knowledge from being lost. If you patent something, then you have to describe how it works. The monopoly is a trade for disclosure, any R&D reimbursement is just coincidental.
This is also why designs that can be deduced from a working product shouldn't be patented. There is no public benefit of disclosure, because the public knows the design sufficiently just from inspecting the product.
If someone wants R&D to be reimbursed, he should just get in line with the rest of the well dressed Washington DC beggars.