Quote:
Originally Posted by SeamasterSig
As a business owner, I sympathize. But only a little bit. Patents expire, new competitors enter the market. You can't rest on your laurels, you have to keep proving yourself to potential customers. If you can't recommend a holster to the OP, then maybe you can tell us about your plan for competing with the newbies in a separate post.
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Indeed I do compete with the newbies with my own, novel designs (see the new American Handgunner May/June). I'd like to see the newbies show some self-respect and 'not rest on my laurels' and create their own :-). I started in the late 1960s, earned 50 patents, and never stopped innovating to this very day. Copyists are the very definition of 'not innovators' -- and that's not good for you, the market.
Empathy as a businessman: I'm not a businessman, I'm an industrial artist; and artists protect themselves with trademark and copyright law rather than patents. Unfair competition law is design to prevent 'passing off': copying the ornamental appearance of another's inferior product to induce them to purchase the superior one.
Years ago, my youngest son Colby wanted to be a cartoonist (now he runs his own graphic arts company), and I explained the value of his name this way: imagine your comic strip, called 'Colby', is published to critical acclaim; and another artist starts up to capitalise on that and calls his strip 'Coby' (a common mispronunciation of his name); and consumers and businessmen come to you and say, "Geez, Colby, what's happened to the quality of your strip, it's junk!?" because the strip marked 'Coby' isn't very good. NOW do you care if someone is copying you? He 'got it' and was just 17 at the time. We build our reputations, and understandably don't appreciate lazy people capitalising on it.