Intellectual property (low Alfa content)

["Scott Johnson" <scott@domain.elided>]

The way it works in the land of high tech (as it has been related to me)
is this:

1. You get a group of engineers that pick apart the product you wish to
copy from company X. They get their information any way they can
(usually honestly by tinkering). Then this group of engineers writes up
very explicit, very complete ENGINEERING SPECIFICATIONS for a "new"
product.

2. You then get a lawyer to interview a *new* group of engineers. The
lawyer asks lawyerese questions along the lines of "have you ever worked
for company X" and "have you ever seen technical specifications for
product Y" and so on.

3. These "virgin" engineers then use those very, very complete
engineering specifications to create your product. This apparently
satisfies all extant patent laws, since the people who designed the copy
never actually saw the original product.

This is not a simple, quick, or cheap process. In the world of
electronics, it seems to take about 3 years to reverse engineer gizmos
this way. This gives the innovator who cooked the thing up time to
recoup their investment, and hopefully by the time the clones come out
they will have amortized development costs away and can lower prices
anyway.

It should be noted that Eriminas (sp?) has had a monopoly on the chassis
stiffener market (such as it is) for, as I recall, nearly ten years. At
no point has the price been lowered. While it may not seem fair for
someone to come along and copy what is sure to be a low-volume product
from a cottage-industry manufacturer, the extended time that the
designer has had a monopoly on this market has hopefully allowed them to
amortize their development costs.

And, ultimately, competition is always good for the consumer

MY OPINIONS ONLY!

Scott Johnson
Alfa Spider FAQ Author

------------------------------