For quite a while, the patent office was very lax about searches for prior art.  They've tightened up a lot in the last few years...but there are a lot of shaky patents out there.

JS

Sorry, my words may have been a bit harsh, it's just that the article seems a touch biased.

Rossignol has over 180 patents. Line for sure has a patent on Twin Tips, that's common industry knowledge for years. Maybe the patent is now assigned to K2, try that search. and they would cease and desist anyone that made a true twin tip, every ski company has design arounds. For years most ski companies had to pay 5 bucks per pair of twin tips sold to some guy in Seattle and it never was made public knowledge, but this guy got rich and it never affected our prices. He had a patent.

There are more patents than you think out there in the ski industry, and this kind of stuff is probably pretty common I am guessing. The S7 is so similar, maybe it was the right thing for them to do. I certainly don't agree with Rossi suing Armada, they should just work it out.

I am not too familiar with DPS so I cannot comment on whether or not they copied, but with Armada's team like and the inspiration and proximity of McConkey, it would be unclear as to how or why they could do that. They definitely applied for a patent before DPS, so clearly they were working on it at the same time or before. They have always claimed to have patterned ARG after spatula.

It won't make any difference to innovation (it will only encourage) and certainly no difference on price. Rossi already charges WAY more than Armada for the same ski, so they have plenty of profit, because they make their own skis and have a huge factory.

I will continue to update this post to correct any errors I may have made, and to reflect additional facts brought to my attention.

As far as other ski patents: Line has no patents assigned to them, so I don't see how they can have patented twin tips. (Please correct me if I've missed it.) The Spatula patent has apparently been abandoned, as I mentioned. And the ARG is clearly patterned after the DB/DPS Lotus 138, not the Spatula.

The author removed the claim after I posted this and it is in the comments below. He did have it saying that Armada was suing Rossignol. Which seems to just shred the credibility of author right away, that he could mistake the entire situation.

I love my S7s, and I paid 150 bucks more than the JJs to get them, because I liked the ski way more.

But it does seem that in looking at patents that Armada applied in August 2006, http://appft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO2&Sect2=HITOFF&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsearch-bool.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&co1=AND&d=PG01&s1=%22Ar.....da+Skis%22 so maybe they have a claim here. It would only cause greater competition, meaning lower prices for all. Not sure what the concern is here, Line has a patent on twin tip skis, if anyone actually made a true twin tip, they would do the same thing that Armada did.

Armada did not patent rocker, camber, or any of that stuff, just merely a combination of them right? It seems like just a few skis copied them, but I assume primarily the S7, that's why they went after Rossi. Armada has always given credit in press to Shane McConkey for inspiring designs. They just put rocker and made some tweaks and made it way better. Pretty sure the Spatula is patented. Atomic would now own that patent because they purchased Volant.

Maybe there is just not enough info.

We will see when the court case comes, but there is just so much need for clarity here.

I am betting that most objects you own are patented, even the thing you clean your sink with.
Or better yet, that computer you are on? yep, probably patented too.
Maybe the tire tread on your car too. I am pretty sure patents are only enforceable for 7 years anyway.

Patents encourage innovation, not the other way around. People wouldn't innovate if they could just always copy...

Like to know your thoughts. You want better skis or are you happy with the JJs and S7s?

Personally, I would like to see what comes next.

Still don't really get why Rossi is suing Armada over the ARW, but I can only assume that it is a power play by a huge company to crush the small one.

http://www.exoticskis.com/ExoticSkis/Industry/Rossignol_ArmadaPatents/Rossignol_v_Aramada_2010Oct_Complaint_Case%20210-cv-01008-CW.pdf

Thanks for putting out this article. Very helpful.

Clearly you're not a very careful reader. Nowhere in this article is the claim made that Armada is suing anyone. The article states, correctly, that Armada sent several "cease and desist" letters to small manufacturers and Rossignol. The nature of the letter is essentially, "Pay us royalties for using our patented tech, or we WILL sue for damages up to 3x the amount."

Rossi THEN filed suit as a response to the letter.

As far as I can tell, the Spatula patent was never granted: the application is available online, but a search of the USPTO database yields no results for any of the inventors in combination with "Ski". I suspect their application may have been abandoned when Volant basically disappeared a few years later.

"During the summer of 96 at a bar in Las Lenas Argentina while hanging out with some friends I quickly sketched a picture of some fat skis with reverse side cut onto a beer napkin...Then in 1998 the Volant design engineers came out to Squaw Valley...And then the light bulb flashed on. I dug up my old beer napkin and began pondering the concept. I thought about hard snow and soft snow and began comparing the similarities of powder to water. I realized that the effects of riding on powder snow would be very similar to riding on water. Water skis have reverse side cut. So do surf boards. And they both have decamber or rocker...So nothing happened for 2 years. Finally after stewing over it for too long I began talking to the design engineers at Volant about just gong for it and jury rigging a pair or two together in the shop in their spare time. If it wasn’t for the hard work and extra after hours put in by Ryan Carroll and Peter Turner in the Volant factory the first and only four pairs would never have been made in the summer of 2001."

Here is the whole thing: http://www.fuzeqna.com/evogear/consumer/kbdetail.asp?kbid=61

I *think* that the Spatula was the first reverse-reverse ski, and DPS was paying homage to it's shape with the 138. I don't, however, know if Volant had any patents in place...

That is why Rossi added all the dependent claims on various shapes of rocker: so that if the first, broadest claim is invalidated, they can still claim the subsets of rocker shapes defined by the dependent claims, of which there are many.

I agree with you that the Armada patent shape (tip rocker starting at the sidecut transition) isn't the best way to build a ski, and it's better to continue the sidecut some distance up into the tip/tip rocker.

You are correct that the patents, for the most part, don't differentiate between a regular and rockered tip, which is why I wrote the article…because everyone was saying that "Armada has patented tip rocker" or "Rossi has patented tip rocker", which is not true at all.

vitamin i: Thank you for the information, both on effective edge and on the Rossi tensioning cable! I'll update the post accordingly.

Powderhound23: You're right: according to the complaint, Armada sent a cease & desist to Rossignol (as well as to several other ski manufacturers, AFAIK) but did not actually file a lawsuit yet.  I've updated the post to reflect this.

However, since Rossi refused to comply with the terms of the C&D, I'm sure a countersuit is coming presently.

That's not the case, it's the other way around: Rossi is suing Armada:

http://www.rfcexpress.com/lawsuit.asp?id=65892

In searching the database, Armada does not appear to be suing anyone.