Right to repair, Gardner Brothers, and Paintball

[jokers]

So there are times that I will find connections where there are not any, I think this might be one of those times but I wanted to ask. I will not go into the history as that has been covered extensively here, reddit, wikipedia, and all over the web but the Gardner brothers lawsuits that nearly killed the paintball industry remind me of the current lawsuit tactics of future motion / the one wheel and other anti right to repair tactics that are an ongoing issue in that realm of technology.
Disclaimer: I am not a right to repair expert i just watch Louis Rossmann a little, an expert of the history of future motion, the one wheel or anything else please check the facts for yourself. If you know more about this please share so I can learn and others can as well.
For those not aware there is a company called future motion, there were some small communities that developed an electric skateboard with a single wheel that you can balance on and is self propelled. Future Motion, took the idea and patented it, and started to develop it into a product. When it first came out they allowed upgrades to the board but sued anyone making anything close. Recently they have locked the board down to the point that it is impossible to work on and must be sent back to future motion to do any work, think if smart parts made it so their markers had rechargeable batteries and if the battery was removed at all you were forced to send the marker to smart parts, no local tech, no outside expert, no one can work on them. The other thing they are doing is suing anyone that makes anything for their device, most recently they sued a guy who developed a better battery management system.
That last part about suing anyone who makes anything for their device reminds me of how smart parts and a lot of the bigger companies killed the aftermarket parts industry that was a large portion of paintball in my opinion. I understand that is not the whole story as a major killer was not the lawsuits but the fact that markers got good enough that you did not need aftermarket parts as much, if at all.
With all of that said i see that happening still today and it seems like the paintball industry is starting to follow the thought process of making things impossible to repair, I hate to point fingers but it seems like Dye started it and Luxe and the others are taking it on. Look at the amount of orings and some of them proprietary that are in a typical new marker. Try and find a guide with oring sizes and durometer for a new marker. Granted i think that the paintball industry has stagnated and the only reason to buy anything new is the features and the colors. That however is a story for a different day.

To Long Did not Read : Future motion is starting to sue people like smart parts did for making one wheel parts and there seems to be an anti repair mentality going around.

What my question if there is one is am i seeing something that is not there, did the Gardner brother start the anti right to repair trend and now everything else it taking their lead, or was it just that paintball got hit early by this trend? Is anti right to repair a norm in the paintball industry already and getting worse?

[Toestr]

A fellow Louis Rossmann fan I see?

Sent from my Pixel 4a using Tapatalk

[jokers]

Maybe a little.

[the_matrix_guy]

Interesting post, I don’t know anything about Future Motion, I hadn’t heard of them before but I think it speaks to the dark side of the legal system. Patent trolling, specifically, became rampant in the late 80’s and early 90’s as companies sought to litigate smaller competitors out of business. It’s a pervasive problem that still plagues the legal system even this day and age . Something like 70-80% of IP / copyright infringement law cases are bogus and just meant to choke competitors out of business, in addition, ambulance chasing shady law firms looking for a quick payday are more than happy to facilitate and exploit the dynamics of free market capitalism and the law.

[the_matrix_guy]

Moreover, on the “right to repair” topic, most companies seek to maximize efficiencies (for better or worse) and most of the private label companies like DYE and PE started out as smaller custom shops themselves, then after attaining first-market-status either by acquiring an IP, such as DYE wit the Matrix or PE beating WGP to the punch with the Ego — they implemented (hypocritically) vertical integration models where they prohibited smaller custom shops out of business, quite literally, by issuing cease & desist letters and prohibiting the production of aftermarket parts. Anyone is allowed to repair anything by law. But they implemented a vertical integration model in every regard even down to the proprietary hose-less in-line regs. Ironically, this in combination with the big soulless mergers and acquisitions, and the 2008 housing credit bubble crisis had a very detrimental impact on the industry. Apart from the smaller custom shops, many shops and fields closed. And revenue has never quite recuperated fully, since.

[jokers]

Anyone is allowed to repair anything by law.

Just to clarify a little on this part Future Motion and many other companies are not making it illegal to repair your device they are making it very difficult. Think Apple, they make getting into their device difficult using glue hidden screws and stuff like that, they do not release schematics or repair manuals, they block the purchasing of parts for your device, and bring lawsuits against anyone that makes something that would allow you to work on your device. It is not illegal what apple, future motion and many others are doing it is just shady, in my opinion.

[Chuck E Ducky]

Good to know. I was actually looking to buy a Onewheel. I have friends that got into them and there a lot of fun. But I won’t support a company with that business model. It’s unfortunate because they make a cool product. I can live without one.

[maggot]

It's a complicated issue, especially for companies that offer strong warranties.

Think of AGD, a company generally thought of as angelic and flawless. They would refuse to honor their warranty: wouldn't work on AGD valves that had any aftermarket parts on them or signs of part replacement.
A little different of a situation, I know, but still relevant.

[Euphie]

I think it is more or less fine if the factory doesn’t want to fix something, so long as they are willing to sell parts. Almost all warranties have strings attached, but so long as there are third party shops and available parts it works out okay for the consumer. The big problem these days is companies not even allowing you to repair it yourself or use third party shops,

[the_matrix_guy]

I refuse to buy anything newer than 2005 unless its one of the new custom cockers

[Ecapnation]

Do tell me please how exactly the smart parts lawsuits "nearly killed paintball" let's actually analyze the effected companies.

AKA - By lawsuit time already was floundering and losing market share to other smaller more refined lighter markers. Very little shops carried them let alone knew what they were..... The next gen marker, the evil m died because the engineer designing it quit and went to planet eclipse with the design. Regardless of lawsuit they would have likely stopped producing guns anyway.

ICD - basically was already irrelevant by the time they were sued. Freestyle was a waste of time and a flop. No teams used them after naughty dogs. The promaster though designed by them was made over seas and sold by nps..... Ultimately left paintball when sales slumped in 08 to pursue other machine work....still doing well today.

AGD - basically unaffected as sale la were slumping and the emag was old by the time of the lawsuit.

WDP - fought sp tooth and nail ultimately died after smart parts declared bankruptcy.

Kingman - paid out survived long enough to be absorbed by the monster of nps/kee/gi/Kore Outdoor

Luxe - though an off shoot of SP ultimately survived and had Custom Products do their machine work.

Dye - bought the rights to the matrix countersued sp for infringing on the spool valve patent. Still going.

Smart parts - here's the funny one..... Bankrupt in 09 later reformed as gog.... More or less irrelevant still.

The real monster in kee/Kore buying everyone and milling off the little guys

[Euphie]

It had a huge chilling effect on innovation, there were so many small shops trying new things but Smart Parts scared anyone small, and that kicked off the era of lawsuits; if Smart Parts wasn’t going to sue you for electronics, Dye might sue you if you were to try to make a mechanical spool valve, once WGP got acquired the cease and desist letters started going out to Autococker manufactures. It seemed to all start with the Gardeners but once that happened and the trend had been set it made little sense to try to stick around in paintball

Not to say the Gardeners are uniquely evil or anything, capitalism is gonna capitalism and ultimately the legal system failed to rein in capitalism’s greed. their patent should never have been as broad as it was, and in later cases they had little evidence to suggest prototypes nearly as early as claimed, so it is possible that they hadn’t been fully truthful. This is a systemic issue in a world motivated by greed and with a Byzantine legal system, and if it weren’t the gardeners it might have took longer but it still would have happened eventually

[Ecapnation]

Other thing worth noting is that most of what people consider innovative companies were also the ones taking large risks and suffering a lot of the results. In the course of three international amateur opens that I went to from 99 till about 2002 I could tell you at least two dozen companies that went out of business in that same time.

What companies were are you considering innovative that were affected by the lawsuits?

Alien PB? Because their early model marker barely functioned and was never really publicly released and that was not a matter of electronic issue or lawsuit issues it just mechanically was a turd.

Perhaps maybe you mean powerlyte their isis spool valve electronic gun? That was around the same time before the lawsuits except it didn't work as well they threw a lot of time and money at the concept whereas they were already bleeding out from their cocker clone also suffered the same functionality issues later on in its lifetime.

It definitely wasn't genE but most of the innovation that was coming out of them was actually designed by The matrix center and continued on for quite some time until ultimately that platform was abandoned for the dm4s.

But I'm getting at is that the companies who are innovating and actually succeeding in their innovations were willing to pay the piper and continue on. If you look at the case with planet eclipse because of previous relations that they had with smart parts and basically paying into the lawsuit they were able to innovate quite easily and produce quite a large and lasting stream of markers to this day they are probably one of the biggest juggernauts of coming up with new markers. If anything the smart parts lawsuit forced companies to realize that certain projects were not worth following through with or even developing on because they were going to lose their hat anyway.

[Euphie]

All of them were potential innovators not to mention all the people that never even bothered to try because the legal risks were too high, heck even I considered trying to do some things with building electros but it just seemed like too much of a risk without lawsuits the risk potential was quite low the worst thing that would happen would be to lose some money building something no one wanted but no one was gonna sue your house away from you

The thing is these people potentially could have gone on to do great things, hence it had a chilling effect as people didn’t bother to try. It is impossible to know the full effect it had

[the_matrix_guy]

Ironically, SP allowed Adrenaline to comeback by making custom PL Shockers and Luxes. Oh the irony, given how they’re one of only a couple manufacturers making custom, PL’s based on “modern” 2021-2022 model lines

[SignOfZeta]

The only reason you can go to Autozone and buy a code reader that works on any car is because the US government mandated it. If they hadn’t, you can bet automotive ECUs would be a different world.

John Deere has evaded this, mainly because they computerized their stuff decades after the car industry did and the government doesn’t really work very well anymore or at all when it comes to corporations. (See: 737 Max murder machine).

Things like computerized skateboards and electronic paintball guns fall into the “you’re only screwing yourself” category, well below any need for legal intervention. They still make Santa Cruz boards, they still make Phantoms, it’s still quite possible to avoid these issues. Don’t buy from companies that do this kind of crap.

To me the most interesting right to repair story going right now is with McDonalds shake machines.

[DocsMachine]

[cracks knuckles]

The Smart Parts thing had nothing to do with "right to repair", even in a tangential sense.

As a hopefully brief recap, SP hired outside firm PVI to develop the sport's first electric marker. PVI developed the first Shocker, had them made, and sold them to SP for resale, under contract. At one point, SP places a huge order for Shockers, and PVI has to borrow in order to fill it. Through extremely shady legal tricks, SP managed to refuse to pay, without legal consequence, and yet by contract, PVI was not allowed to sell the markers to anyone else. And, thanks to already having to borrow heavily, could not afford to fight it in court.

That drove PVI to bankuptcy, at which point SP bought them out at the bankruptcy auction, for literal pennies on the dollar. Including both inventory and IP.

The elder Gardner was a patent attorney (and by that point already having once been prosecuted by the FTC over patent fraud, and lost) and he took PVI's patent for the Shocker- the complete marker- and filed an extension on it. The extension also partially rewrote it so that it was not so much a patent on the marker, but a patent on the very idea of using electricity to fire a paintball gun.

They let that stew for a few years, while other companies got their electric guns off the ground, and then started filing cease-and-desists. A couple companies, as I recall, simply made licensing deals, which is what SP wanted. They were hoping for a slice of every E-gun sale.

Most, however, refused. As Ecap notes, Kaye knew the E-Mag and X-Mags were losing sales to lighter, faster and cheaper guns, and Aaron Alexander of AKA kind of saw the same thing, so both of them basically decided to fold their E-guns before any legal proceedings. ICD told SP to piss off, and so SP sued. At the time, the elder (Jerry?) of the family was going through cancer treatements, and no one in the family had the time or money to fight. SP basically won by default, and used that win as a legal cudgel to go after the rest.

Stuff with DYE and Bob Long, etc, was a lot more complicated, and was more back-alley, so I'm not as familiar with them. Basically DYE and SP came to a sort of co-licensing agreement because DYE guns were electric, and SP guns were using DYE spooler tech.

Anyway, what eventually happened was SP went after WDP, their chief competitor. WDP found the guys that developed the Shocker in the first place, got him to testify in court that he, not SP, invented the gun (he had notebooks full of technical specs and times and dates, whereas the Gardners couldn't even describe how the gun worked) and the judge awarded him half the ownership of the patent.

WDP then bought said ownership, and basically told SP, we're not paying you a dime in licensing.

That took the wind out of SP's sails at least as far as the patent thing went, and round about... what, 2013 or so? The patent itself expired so the whole thing, after that, was moot.

And of course the recession of '08 had already killed SP because, in part, they'd overleveraged themselves during the previous years when the sport itself was seeing double-digit growth

There's a LOT of detial in there I've left out, and I probably have a few details wrong. But suffice to say that it was never about "right to repair". For several years there, I was one of the top "shoebox" Shocker techs, and extensively modified thousands of them. Up to and including circuit board replacements, using KM2's "Glacier" boards. Never once got a cease-and-desist, neither did KM2, or John at HyperSportWorks (who was making full replacement grip frames, etc.)

Today's marker repair issues have a lot less to do with the factory trying to stop people working on them (if that was true, why would they make it so easy to remove and dismantle the "core"?) and far more with trying to maximize efficiency and performance. If a nonstandard O-ring lasts longer or gives 5% more shots per tank or improves shot-to-shot consistency, that's what they're going to go with.

Players constantly complain about leaking macro-line, so they route the gas internally, or through rigid external lines that are both more leak-resistant and look better. Can't replace the reg? Do you need to? Back in the day, there were a lot of crappy reg designs on the market- the original WDP MiniReg was only okay, the Gladiator wasn't all that great, etc. - and in those cases, sure, swap that thing for a stab or a Uni or a 2-Liter. But really, the modern regs are so good, personally, I can find little reason to swap them- especially since we're no longer all that worried about trying to squeeze 25 or 30 BPS out of these things.

Doc.

[jokers]

Alright so i was seeing things that were not there, thank you for the lesson and all information. Also thank you very very much for answering all of my questions so clearly.

[MrBarraclough]

My understanding of how WDP ended up with half the rights to the patent is that PVI contracted an outside consultant to help develop the original Shocker and the contract between him and PVI gave him a half interest in the patent as part of his compensation. So what SP got from the PVI fire sale was never the complete ownership of the patent in the first place.

Interestingly enough, the whole "Lure your partner firm out onto a limb with a big order (or promise of one), saw the limb off behind them, then pick up their assets at a fraction of their worth" tactic was used in a case I have currently. My day job is as a bankruptcy trustee. A local tech company got into a financial squeeze, one of the companies they often worked with was poised to bail them out in exchange for a significant equity position in them, but then the other company figured out they could acquire their IP cheaper if they strung them along for long enough that there were no other options for saving the company and then walked away from the deal, letting them crash and burn. They file Chapter 7, I come in to liquidate the assets, and guess who turns up as the high bidder at the auction? Yep, their old friends, bidding less than half what they'd been talking about in negotiations prior to the bankruptcy. Business is brutal. At least I was able to bundle the physical inventory with the IP, so the buyer had to buy all the actual stuff off me in order to get the patents. Otherwise I would have been stuck with a warehouse full of electronic components that would have been hard to move due to the licensing issues.

[latches109]

I hate to point fingers but it seems like Dye started it

There is a backstory on why.

Quoted and paraphrased from writings of z.vetter-
The Matrix started life in 1994 after a conversation between Mike Lukas, Roger Hurst, and Lee Kirwan. Mike owned a paintball shop, Superior Firepower, in Ontario and had an idea for a new gun. He talked to machinist Lee Kirwan and his friend Roger Hurst about the idea. Intrigued, they set to work on making it. The design in question did not work, but gave Lee the idea for the spool valve. For the next few years they tinkered with various ideas and changes, finally submitting a patent that was approved in 1997.

Mike searched for a manufacture and eventually stuck a deal with Richmond Italia and procaps. One of Richmond’s stipulations was that he wanted to convert it to electro-pneumatic instead of the manual valve. Lee explained this wouldn’t be a problem, just replace the manual valve with a solenoid valve. However, electronics were not Lee’s strong point, so Procaps had to outsource and try to find the right person for the job. Sadly, this also marked the end of Lee, Roger, and Mike’s direct involvement with the design of the gun. Richmond set out to find someone to make the matrix electro-pnumatic.

Richmond sent the matrix to Jack Wood at eclipse - who had a working prototype in "5 min" but an agreement could not be made and the prototype was sent back.
Around this time, Richmond was introduced to Greg Duncan (who later started Aardvark Custom Paintball Products). Greg with the help of others developed the matrix, until it was finally unveiled at SkyBall 2000 under the AirTech brand. Gen-e got involved as a distributor until Dave Youngblood (dye) bought the rights to the matrix in late 2003.

Dye made a few aesthetic modifications to the gun and began mass-producing it as their company’s flagship gun. Dye offered full service and support for all Matrix guns, even Gen-E models. However, they quickly tired of people sending in guns with aftermarket bolt parts installed wrong, causing gun malfunctions. To counteract this, in 2003, Dye sent out their infamous cease and desist letter, threatening legal action to anyone making aftermarket Matrix parts that infringed on the Omega patent filed in 1997 by Lee Kirwan and associates. This stopped the majority of aftermarket parts and Matrix components. Dave had bigger plans for the gun.

Later, in 2004, a completely revamped version of the Matrix was unveiled as Dye’s DM4. It featured a completely redesigned contoured body shape, and had every other component completely modified. The only interchangeable parts between a DM3 and a DM4 are the grips and the feed neck. Since then, every year, Dye released a slightly lighter, slightly more compact DM, with a sequential number that corresponds to the year. After the DM4 came out, people began referring to the traditional Matrix as the DM3, as Dye’s production run began in 2003.

[the_matrix_guy]

Cool history on the Matrix but the bit about DYE being tired of people sending improperly installed bolt pieces doesnt ring true. By 2004, the whole industry was moving towards vertical integration. DYE already had plans to make the DM4 with their own drivetrain and were already phasing out custom vendor licensing agreements and issuing cease & desists. The same was happening with the WGP buyout by Kee and PE was also setting an industry precedent in 2005 by also employing a vertically integrated model for their Ego line and were very selective about which companies could produce their markers. I believe Warped Sportz being one of only a couple if not the only one.

[latches109]

It is a sound business choice and I respect it.. however, I have a better appreciation for companies who allowed others to make a living on PL & aftermarket parts.

"Richmond did bring it to us and we did look at it. At the time he wanted us to take up the reins and develop the gun into a working electropneumatic marker. The one stipulation he had was that we didn't touch the internals. We could not alter them, change them, improve them, modify them, nothing. We got it working as an EP in about 5 minutes and it did work. No problems there. No issues with bounce (it had little kick, very slow bolt speeds and weighed at least 4 pounds!) at all. That was not the problem. The problem was that the original Matrix internals were some of the most complex and confusing set of parts I have ever seen in a paintball marker. We said yes, it could work, but we would never want to do it in its current form. It was too crude, too complex, and unnecessarily so! If we were allowed to refine the internals, we probably would have picked it up and run with it, but Richmond was adamant that we could NOT change anything inside the body. So we said thanks, but no thanks, that's not going to work for us, and we sent the prototype back to him.

The irony is that what became the DM version of the internals was pretty much exactly what I drew up and suggested as the definitive refinement of the original design!"

-Jack Wood, Planet Eclipse

[the_matrix_guy]

Yeah same here, the industry lost its soul with the big M&A’s (mergers & acquisitions) and the vertical integration models. Not only did they push small custom shops out but it had a far-reaching effect on the whole industry with many stores and fields closing. And the 2008 recession was an additional compounding factor that accelerated this downturn which the industry never fully recovered from.

And as I was pointing out, it was extremely hypocritical given how DYE and PE started out as smaller custom shops improving on existing gun designs themselves.

[zinger565]

As an ICD zealot I for one have a strong dislike for Smart Parts and everything that went down.

However, I'll freely admit I'm irrationally biased and emotional when the subject comes up.

[Trbo323]

I think the lack of o ring sizes/duro in manuals has more to do with 80% of players have no idea what those numbers mean. That last 20% is the company trying to make money on rebuild kits

Sent from my motorola edge 5G UW (2021) using Tapatalk

[imped4now]

I think the lack of o ring sizes/duro in manuals has more to do with 80% of players have no idea what those numbers mean.

I think that's being too kind. Oring specs/callouts are a dark art to most paintball players. Given how easy that system is to learn and understand, it's bogus.

And yes, some manufacturers hide or give their seals wacky/non-standard call outs or part numbers to make it more difficult. But, a smart owner can figure out the real specs with minimal work.