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cpoxon

iFLY / ISG Patent Battle Ends, Fliteshop Project Terminated

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ISG were probably advised by their lawyers that they would lose and the deal on the table was better than taking the risk hence they settled.

I wish they'd have left the UK out of this though. We could have done with an ISG tunnel here.

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Not an attorney either, but read the docket available to the public. IMO: the patent office action was totally screwed up by the lawyers. Not ISG's fault, but the patent office mess ups, and lots of bad lawyering in the case left ISG with no choice but to settle on very bad terms. Too bad for skydiving. Some other company should challenge the patents using good lawyers.

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I didn't read every word of the case either but have known quite a few lawyers as friends over the years. I have been told by more than one criminal defense lawyer that once you are in front of a judge it is usually a crap role as to who wins.

A life long friend of mine was charged and wound up in court a couple of times. I helped him and his lawyer by providing many years of rules on the subject that constantly were changed by an agency plus we both provided an in depth education and background of the activity the charges involved for the same lawyer who defended him in both cases. He won both cases totally and the lawyer said the education and info we gave him (which wasn't readily available) made the difference.

Bottom line may be that ISG failed to be able to educate their lawyer well enough about the industry/tunnel design and all it's facets and idiosyncrasies.

Then again it is hard for me to conceive that any players at the level of these folks are not very competent.

It may just be that Skyventure kicked their ass badly fair and square.

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We have all heard of people going to jail because they had bad lawyers. Why do you assume lawyers are competent? A law degree is easy to get.

IMO: the patent office case was bad. There was lots of old tunnels etc in the materials that ISG provided. The legal rules for presenting the information were not followed. ISG's lawyers tried to fix the mess by saying it didn't understand the rules. The motion and the courts response shows it was bad. see http://www.natlawreview.com/article/indoor-skydiving-germany-gmbh-v-ifly-holdings-denying-request-rehearing-regarding

The lawsuit filings show lots of other mistakes. It looks like ISG hired a new lawyer before trial and that lawyer probably told them they had to settle.

I hate to see all the discussion about iFly being the true inventor and discussion about ISG's problems in the market when there is more going on here.

The facts are that no one would settle on the terms in iFly's notice after litigating the case so long if there wasn't some thing more going on. We will never know but can't assume that iFly's monopoly can't be challenged with a better effort.

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wan2doit

It may just be that Skyventure kicked their ass badly fair and square.


Poor lawyer advice leading to a complete capitulation isn't "fair and square" in my book. Not to mention that an action in another country now has impacted the world market for indoor skydiving. Let's hope that another player in the market will step up and be better at defending their *rightful* claims than ISG.

How did the judge eventually rule on the case in Germany? :S

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Quote

Apparently at some point ISG understood they would not win this case as it was presented to the court by them so they pulled out while agreeing to many of the plaintiff's demands. One doesn't usually do that IMO unless they know they screwed up in a fairly large manner.


We've settled in a similar manner even though we didn't screw up. (In fact we had demonstrated they had effectively stolen the technology.) But we also knew we were going to lose, because they had better attorneys and managed to portray us as the evil huge corporation attacking Mom and Dad. At the time we had about 800 people, and "Mom and Dad" were Texas Instruments, so they were good salesmen indeed.

There are a lot of reasons for settling a court case.

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wan2doit

Actually I thought it was a newer article since it just popped up in an IBA newsletter.


As you can see, same exact article except for the tracking code query string parameter attached.

The article itself does a pretty poor job of covering the situation which has a significant impact on the indoor skydiving market in the US and, the rest of the world. Doesn't mention even a hint of impact on consumers (that's us) or any sense that there's some oddness going on here that ISG would do an about face with clearly negative results for themselves. The title of the article should be "Metni writes letter that we publish a section of".

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wan2doit

Thanks for the correction - shame on me!

For better or worse though ISG pulled out and gave iFLY concessions - any ideas on why ISG would do that other than being insecure about continuing to prevent a perceived wrong being foisted upon them??



Because the US legal system is incredibly skewed towards setting out of court, and because the patent system is broken, and because US courts have historically been much more likely to uphold bad[*] patents than throw them out, a trend that has only strengthened after all patent matter appeals were consolidated into a single court, so with a sufficiently big fuck up on the USPTO part, the ISG lawyers might've rightly (or wrongly, see above!) concluded it was cheaper to settle than to fight it out. It usually is cheaper at some point to settle for one of the sides, even after the case has gone to court, because the US system is built in a way that makes cases seeing conclusion a very rare thing, so a side settling is no news.

This, however, proves absolutely nothing about whether ISG was right, not even from patent perspective, to say nothing about actual common sense. The case was not heard by a judge, therefore there's no legal decision (which is sometimes the reason to drop out, because fighting out a bad case might be more harmful than pulling out and letting a better case build. A court decision creates a precedent, a settlement does not, and being right is only very loosely related to a side's ability to win a case, so giving up may often increase the overall chances of winning in the future). All it proves is that ISG no longer felt they could afford to continue.

And lastly, tunnel time in the US is expensive as fuck, and this has nothing to do with quality or safety, and a lot with iFly being a monopoly built on patents. There are plenty of tunnels with facilities matching or better than those of iFly's, built for much less. That's what having functioning competition does.

[*] All patents are bad. Patents are a fundamentally broken system that benefits only patent lawyers, and are based on handwavy assumptions and no evidence whatsoever. But some patents are bad even compared to that baseline. And no, this has nothing to do with protecting the inventors, which isn't even established that we should be doing in the first place. Patents are all about protecting patent lawyers from having to have real jobs and big companies from having competition.
"Skydivers are highly emotional people. They get all excited about their magical black box full of mysterious life saving forces."

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danielcroft

***Because the US legal system is incredibly skewed towards setting out of court ---


This may all be true for the US system but, the ISG/iFly situation was precipitated by a patent case in Germany, not the US.

My understanding was they had won their patent battle in Europe. Right?

Patents are not bad per say. The system may be broken, but providing some protection to innovators so they can recup their R&D costs makes sense as a general concept. How it's been applied lately (not just in this case) is kinda f'uped tho...
Remster

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danielcroft

The article itself does a pretty poor job of covering the situation which has a significant impact on the indoor skydiving market in the US and, the rest of the world. Doesn't mention even a hint of impact on consumers (that's us) or any sense that there's some oddness going on here that ISG would do an about face with clearly negative results for themselves. The title of the article should be "Metni writes letter that we publish a section of".



To explain, I wrote the article based on the only published material available on the subject (known to me). I work hard to keep ISS unbiased. The industry is obviously split and heated over this subject. True, I could have covered more aspects of the decision, but it would have become an opinion piece - something I don't want on ISS. I actually purposely wrote it as dry as possible. The goal with the website is to promote the sport of bodyflight as a whole, not one perspective. It's a touchy thing to do when you're reporting subjects like this.

Clearly there are enough opinions on the subject and plenty of outlets to voice them (the comments section of the article being one). I will continue to report published information from whatever sources have something to say on the subject. The letter has been published so that is what I've covered.
Indoor Skydiving Source - The Leading Indoor Skydiving Resource

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I don't know what happened in Germany but the iFly v. ISG case in the US was about a US patent. A US patent can only exclude competition in the US. There are problems with the US patent system and that is why there is the new procedure to help invalidate patents. That process has been very successful in removing weak patents from the US. The problem was that ISG's lawyers failed to meet the requirements for that procedure. The fact that iFly was able to get ISG to agree to leave other markets when all that was at issue was a US patent tells you they had no faith in their case or their lawyers. I don't fly in Germany, only in the US. It is too bad for people like me who want more competition in the US. I hope other companies stand up to iFly and fight for competition in the market.

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