DenisMenchov

Apparently mine is good enough<sarcasm>. I cannot reiterate enough how patents provide a vehicle to monopolize. While it may not be as prevalent in bikes yet…I still don’t like it, and I don’t want it on my frame. I believe in open source, so that competitors can improve on a product so that technology can evolve more quickly. I don’t think consumers should have to be gouged because a specific brand holds the key to a patented design. .

Moreover, why does Specialized have to paint their patent numbers on my bike frame? This is what ticked me off even more. As far as I’m concerned, specialized lost a customer. I will no longer buy specialized bikes. I’m not going to dog the bike though, it’s great, but patents, and especially labeling the product with patents(totally unnecessary) is my absolute biggest pet peeve.

Does anyone else have a bike that is patented? Did they stamp the patent No. on your frame? If so, please provide your patent no. if you have it on hand. I’m interested to see if all brands patent their bikes. Perhaps it’s just the big brands like Specialized. And if that’s true I might just buy from a less prestigious brand next time. Here is a picture of the patents on my frame. That is actually the picture taken from my frame by the way...just spiced it up a bit..



Patents 5.509.679 - 5.678.837 - 5.899.480

Braden1550

Although I agree with the "open market" aspect to your post; is it worth the effort being p!ssed off about it? Find a bike that suits your needs and aesthetic preferences, then ride it like you stole it.

Matt Gaunt

This.

Also, you probably weren't held at gunpoint when you bought your Specialized...

mrvrsick

It's probably better than those "warning" stickers under the clear coat in 'dales. Probably.

daytonian

i think a cervelo s1 has a patent on it

grwoolf

Without patents, companies would shift $'s away from R&D because because new ideas would no longer be defensible investments. Good or bad, it would become a fight between companies for who can make, market, and support the same old product the cheapest with no reward to the company with great product ideas. I personally think that would be very bad.

I think patents are only defensible for 13 years, which actually curtails R&D in some industries because you could spend that longer than that developing a complex idea. Would you expect a drug company to spend hundreds of millions of $'s to develop a new drug and then hand their final product over to the 'open market'?

I personally think that innovation on bikes is about 90% marketing and 10% real R&D, so it's tough to draw comparisons, but many industries would absolutly disappear without patents to protect their intellectual property.

foresthill

Is there an echo in here? You just posted this 11 days ago, a number of us responded. Anything new to add?

https://www.bikeforums.net/showthread.php?t=582905

bigtea

I don't know about patents, but my bike is good enough to have me on it.

DenisMenchov

That was regarding death ride. This thread is in regard to patents on bikes specifically. Oh and I want to see who else has the patent no. labeled on their bike, and which other brands / bike models patent their frames. If you don't like this thread, you could go to pcad's bike schwag post.

ericm979

Your issue does not seem to be fact-based so I am probably wasting my time, but I am awake so what the heck.

Patents don't prevent others from improving on ideas. In fact one can patent an improvement to someone else's patent. What patents do is to provide a way to legally prevent someone from using your ideas and making money from them. They were originally intended to keep corporations from stealing indivual inventor's ideas. A patent doesn't automatically prevent others from using the idea, it just means that they need to get legal permission to do so, or face potential lawsuit. Licensing terms can be whatever the assignee (patent owner) wants. If you want to make an idea freely useable, you can patent it and license it for free.

All three of those patents were invented by Horst Leitner, a well known innovater/inventor in the area of motorcycle and bicycle suspension. The most recent of those is assigned to Specialized, which probably means that he developed it while under contract or employed by them.

But the first two are not assigned to Specialized, so they are being used under license. Leitner had his own small company making motorcycle suspension stuff. So those patents served to keep Specialized from using small inventor Leitner's ideas without compensation. I'd say that fosters innovation, since it allows small inventors some legal protection so they can obtain renumeration for their ideas.

Filing a patent also requires that the invention be disclosed. So others can read it, understand how it works, and start thinking about how to improve it. Without patents, inventions would be kept secret so they wouldn't be stolen. That would make it harder to improve on them. Patents expire after a fixed time. At that point they become effectively public domain.

The patent system certainly does have its problems, but in this case (at least as far as I can tell from the patent documents) it's served to encourage innovation.

ericm979

Used to be 17 years from when it was issued, now under WTO rules it's 20 from when the application was filed.

I am not sure which rule older patents like the Leitner ones are under, but either way it will only be a few more years before 5,509,679 expires.

cshell

69

nycphotography

Dude, you're disturbing his bliss. Stop that.



Seriously, he's whining about how corporations use patents to stifle innovation and stuff the little guy. Yet can't be bothered to do the 30 seconds research it took to discover that his poster child case was in fact showing how patents protect the little guy from the big corporations.

God how I do love the internet, where any clueless wanker can prattle on like he actually knows something.

dcbikeguy

You have an infantile understanding of our patent system.

AEO

Get off my internet



the patent is for their suspension. Other companies have their own design.
suspension and rubber compounds are really big business.

HED3 wheels: designed by specialized originally, but they sold their mold to HED.

big john

Horst Leitner, what a guy. Amp Research, ATK motorcycles, bicycle suspension, software for cars, electric running boards for trucks, etc. The guy just thinks too much.
Specialized bought the mtb suspension design from him and other manufacturers pay the big S touse it.
I have a KHS mtb with a sticker that says Specialized on the swingarm. Big deal. Turner has stopped using the Leitner/Specialized design and is now using the DW Link design.
People will pay to use whatever works. People will design stuff that works so they can get paid.

urbanknight

Intellectual property is a touchy subject, but I don't see them as a vehicle to monopolize. They provide protection for a person who has a great idea and deserves to be compensated for taking the time and research to develop it. The buying public decides how valuable that idea is by paying the price or not, and the patent expires in time, allowing everyone to profit from it eventually. If you didn't protect the creator in the beginning, they wouldn't see the point in developing it, and the product would never be made because nobody wants to spend the time and money to perfect something someone else can steal and sell so cheap that they would never get their research efforts paid back.

Also, as AEO pointed out, the patent is on the suspension design. You can't patent the idea of putting a triangle between two wheels because it's already been done.

pinwheel

have you ever thought of something good enough to even consider patenting?

urbanknight

If and when he ever has a brilliant idea that will require hundreds of hours from a team of high paid engineers to develop and hundreds of more hours from a marketing team to sell, he will understand.

SpongeDad

I would also note that if you don't "mark" a good covered by a patent, you may lose the right to recover damages for infringement of that patent later.

The debate over the utility of patents is a old as the Constitution (signed 2 days, 222 years ago), which calls out the ability to grant patents and copyrights as a specific power of the federal govt. Thomas Jefferson was initially opposed to the idea of patent, but then became convinced that the social benefits (encouraging innovation) outweighed the detriments (short term limits on conduct).

Were it not for the patent system, the US economy would be seriously impaired.

TandemGeek

Yes, yes and see attached.

WCoastPeddler

Dude, you so don't get it. What's the problem? Everything is patented, what makes you think that the suspension on your bike is any different from the millions of other patented items that you run across in your daily life.

But you can protest, as you say, and not buy a bike that has patent information on it (which is not to say that just because an item does not have a patent attached to it that none exists -- lots and lots of things have patents without making mention of it).

Ask yourself this question, if company A develops a new widget and patents it so that company B must develop their own technology or design to compete with company A, how does that inhibit the advancement of better design?

There's good reason why patents exist. If you do some checking into it, I'm sure that you'll reason that your claims in your OP are not well founded.

Fixitman

8675309

umd

lambo_vt

My Jamis Quest is patented; that's why Jamis is the only manufacturer that makes 631 steel frames. It really pisses me off!!!!!!