| Hey!
At least this company (Auto Wax) actually makes clay. When I worked in the CTI world (Computer Telephony Integration) my company got "I'm gonna sue" letters all the time from lawyers who had simply gone out and bought obscure patents that related peripherally to CTI. Then they would send out scads of letters hoping at least some would contact them back to settle out of court. Weasles and skunks, all of them. A pox on their house. Usually they didn't even know what your company did - they would get your name from trade show vendor lists. They assumed that if you showed a product at a CTI trade show then you must be infringing on one of their worthless patents.
We also got sued by a couple of companies and had to pay royalties to them (out of court settlement...) We spent over 1M dollars in legal fees and ended up having to pay about 100k royalties. The only people making any money at this game is the laywers. And these patents were so old and moldy (one of them was a patent for using DTMF (touch-tone) keys to make a computer record audio onto cassette tapes) We never used tapes but no matter, you never know what a jury is going to do.
The Auto Wax company apparently invented clay and if they patented it properly, deserves to get a license fee for use of their invention. That's what a patent is all about. Sucks when you are on the receiving end of litagation, though. Nothing like having a marshall show up at your door to serve you with a supena. |