falling off bikes since 1975

Turns out the US Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a re-examination of Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent.

Not so related to bikes.

Well, it shouldn’t be.

But any thread about four-bar v. faux bar rear ends these days inevtiably involves a slanging match between the Turner and Ellsworth owners about the rights and wrongs of the ICT patent and Tony Ellsworth’s business practices, especially since Turner dropped the Horst-Link design due to “licensing difficulties”.

First of all, what is or isn’t ‘obvious’. Turns out that most patent attorneys want grads with biochemistry degrees, so basic mechanical engineering isn’t necessarily obvious to them.

But the basic idea of the deforming parallelogram four bar link is obvious, and has been used in lots of designs and applications for lots of years, well before the notion of using it on vehicle suspension. And the notion of positioning pivots/axles to modify the axle path is also not new to motor vehicle designers.

Most lists of different classes of bicycle rear suspension designs go well over the top, some have twelve or more! In reality they can actually be simplified into just two.

1) a simple deforming triangle, where two sides stay constant length and the shock forms the third side that has to change length to acccomodate the deformation.

2) a deforming parallelogram, where the sides of the parallelogram stay at constant length and are controlled by a deforming triangle that contains the shock, as per arrangement 1.

(GT’s I-drive doesn’t obviously fall into one of these categories, but analysis of the moving parts shows it to fall into class #1. Some pull-shock designs are awkward too, e.g. the K2 Razorback, but it’s effectively a deforming triangle, class #1. A Maverick is class #1).

Anything else is just arrangement, detail and geometry.

Playing around with lengths and pivot locations is only that - playing around. There is nothing “inventive” about moving a pivot a few mm, or even a whole lot of inches and seeing if the effect is beneficial or not. That’s just innate curiosity and iterative engineering. No ‘leap of imagination’ is required.

This is especially true when we’re talking designs that so obviously fall into the same deforming parallelogram class as the Specialized FSR, Turner, Ellsworth, Fisher RS-1, Yeti Lawill, Kona Stab…

Unfortunately there appears to be a flaw in the US patent system that effectively allows patenting of a particular geometry and not a truly inventive idea that has got out of hand in recent years.

Yet this is so inconsistently applied that this is how bonkers it’s got.

The Santa Cruz Blur LT and the Intense 5.5 EVP are both covered by the same patent. Yet they have different linkage geometries and lengths and very different handling as a result.

On the other hand the Ellsworth ICT and original H-L Turner RFX have - from an engineering viewpoint - more similar geometries than the Blur/Intense. Yet Ellsworth was able to patent their ICT geometry, despite acknowledging as prior art the existence of the other, and then prevent Turner from practising iterative engineering. At the same time a Giant NRS falls further outside the Specialized Horst-link patent geometry window than an Ellsworth ICT, but it’s Specialized who put a stop to Giant selling the NRS in the U.S.

So why not challenge ridiculous patents?

Well it has nothing to do with whether an idea is obvious. Those that suggest that Giant and Scott have not challenged Specialized because the idea of the H-L is not obvious are making only that, a suggestion.

More likely it’s just not worth it.

Two reasons immediately spring to my mind.

1) The costs of pursuing a claim when other designs can work nearly as well, or possibly better - depending on the nature of the bike/target audience and one hundred and one other imponderables - are going to run into millions.

2) The costs of licensing may be so small as to make it reasonable to accept the design and pay to use it instead.

I suspect case in the case of Giant/Scott that even if you have a good technical case #1 is a pretty good reason not to pursue the matter, after all who’s ever seen a poor lawyer?

As an example of the case #2, Dave Turner did not change the rear end of his bikes because of problems licensing the Horst link that he helped develop, but the ICT geometry - the licensing conditions being too burdensome.

If the case against Amazon succeeds then a small step towards restoring some sense into the US patent system will have been taken.

Learned US judges from an era when common sense was still available had some startlingly amazing foresight:

Atlantic Works v. Brady, 107 U.S. 192, 200 (1883):

“It was never the object of those [patent] laws to grant a monopoly for every trifling device, every shadow of a shade of an idea, which would naturally and spontaneously occur to any skilled mechanic or operator in the ordinary progress of manufacturing . . .

Such an indiscriminate creation of exclusive privileges tends rather to obstruct than to stimulate invention. It creates a class of speculative schemers who make it their business to watch the advancing wave of improvements, and gather its foam in the form of patented monopolies, which enable them to lay a heavy tax upon the industry of the country, without contributing anything to the real advancement of the arts. It embarrasses the honest pursuit of business with fears and apprehensions of concealed lies and unknown liabilities to lawsuits and vexatious accountings for profits made in good faith.”