The legitimacy of a trademark on an opensource design

Smoke and mirrors.

“Look away folks, nothing to see here…”

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My understanding was that the name vesc was trademarked, however the code project being open sourced simply meant you had to call it something else. Anyone asked Benjamin?

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@psychotiller Six Shooters. All day

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Yes, or @Kug3lis has some I think. Anything but trampa.

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I’m not one to actively post on this forum, but coming across this thread made me laugh. Especially with you guys posting the Scrub Boost trucks.

I saw the following truck as attached below on some Chinese website. This look very much similar to Trampa’s trucks truck

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I don’t think a ban is the right solution.

Whilst @trampa is clearly off base here, he does represent a large brand which many of us own products from. He has contributed meaningful content such as the Tampa build instruction threads and also is quick to respond to customers questions and problems.

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Yes and he’s also quick to throw out bogus allegations in an attempt to discourage smaller, newly started business’s from going to market for fear of being sued. Issuing allegations that are so absurd that it’s clear to everyone he’s in the wrong, yet if he says it over and over again somehow it’ll magically come true. Over charges dramatically on certain products, and if you try and make a similar product from open sourced material, prepare for the Frank song and dance distraction, intimidation shit show… Enjoy :slight_smile:

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I can see from numerous postings that frank is making a fuss about the HW 6 looking exact way their products look like. differences 3 spots on both the VESC6 and ESCape already show that it is an “exact” look.

Red rings - Connectors are positioned differently Yellow rings - Different logo Blue rings - ESCape have larger rounded corners as opposed to VESC6.

Heck, the positions of the screws are all different too.

As much as I like Trampa’s product, this issue about the VESC6 and other HW6 ESC based on BV’s hardware design that he made a fuss about is pretty darn stupid.

As a form of mobility tool that an E-skate is, what most people are trying to reduce are redundancy in materials which also means shaving off unnecessary weight. So if BV designed the hardware looking like this

Which stupid fool will build or design something that not as form fitting and waste additional materials while also affecting the overall weight of the E-Skate?

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Well I guess everyone has a different sense of humor :slight_smile: I didn’t plan to go that rout but someone post it first so I shared may observations. What you showed is well know truck from China and it has nothing to do with what we were trying to find out. Frank of course didn’t say in simple words who was first Trampa or Scrub but in the end it doesn’t matter because for almost all people similarities in look are normal thing. All except Frank.

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From my POV, when I saw the trucks that is on a Chinese website, it was my first impression that it was a clone of the Trampa truck. So in terms of marketing, trampa did do its job I guess.

I am not bashing on trampa in its whole entirety, but just pretty much how they are making a rant about the HW6 of a OS design. Trampa do have some awesome looking products, but the way how this current issue is handled sure leave a sour taste in some consumer’s mouths.

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I think they are more MBS clone. I like Trampa products as well and if they were not around it would be a huge lost for all of us. I just can’t agree to nonsense in any form.

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I will give you guys some stuff to think about:

Open Source technology and software have nothing to do with the design of a product or the design of a user interface. It is about the technology.

Example: If you work with OS Stuff, you can simply copy the existing technology, or you can try to play around with the technology and try to innovate and change things. The last will benefit a project, since new ideas are developed. The first doesn’t bring innovation on the table.

From: www.vesc-project.com

Another reason for not publishing the official hardware layouts as-is, is that it leads to many companies and individuals who have no background in electronics just giving a github reference to a manufacturer to make hardware and start selling it. Currently there are more than 25 places where V4.x hardware can be bought, with quality varying from excellent to not working at all. If the same thing would happen with the VESC6 it would be confusing for the customers. If you are serious about electronics, the VESC project provides everything you need to make your own custom hardware to fill a missing spot in the market, and then sell it. If electronics is not your area, but you want to sell your own hardware independently anyway, you can refer to the HW4.12 layout or wait for the three shunt reference PCB. We do however recommend and encourage that you get into electronics and design your own hardware if you are serious about what you are doing.

I can’t understand why everyone is so keen to see replications of the same thing, rather than seeing a variety of choice. HW 4 was a pure copy paste game, not really contributing to product variety. This was not in favour of innovation and moving things forward faster.

You don’t always need to reinvent the wheel, this is not what I am talking about. Changes can be smaller or bigger.

So before jumping on the train, saying that we are over protective and blocking technological developments, you should shine light on aspects of the matter. The tech is free to use, it is not blocked at all.

A clone product doesn’t move things forward, or in other directions. Many users here demand different hardware and there is probably a market for that. And even if you decide to make the exact same thing technology wise, you can still decide to create your own design for the device, so that users can easily identify the different models and vendors from another. This is not a big task and it should be more than just placing your graphics on the same design.

If you start from scratch, designing your hardware, and you end with the very same design your competition came up with earlier, you probably didn’t innovate, but rather copied. In addition to that, you placed your product inside the danger zone of being found infringing inside the EU where published designs are protected, whether you register them or not. I will post a link below…

Some examples what you can do with ease:

  • The connectors can be in different places.
  • the housing can be designed differently (there are probably 100000 ways to do that)
  • form factor can be different
  • you could ad features, or you can drop features you find not very useful.
  • you could make twin layouts (which is debatable)
  • you could use other components
  • you could create lower power HW and higher power HW.
  • you ccould…

All that would help the community get access to different HW and it would help to generate choice over clones. I think we all enjoy choice, when going shopping and building things. Most builders here don’t clone, they have their own ideas, which is great. Imagine we would see one clone build after another.

Another thing that is problematic about clones is the difference in quality, which is not always obvious, especially for inexperienced users. I think @Anorak hit the Nail on the head yesterday when saying " I rather buy this than that when can get “the same thing” cheaper, reffering to our and @stiwiis hardware. Is it really the same thing thing? Only because it looks identical, it doesn’t mean it is the same thing. HW 4 has proven that big time. Only time will tell…

From: www.vesc-project.com Currently there are more than 25 places where V4.x hardware can be bought, with quality varying from excellent to not working at all.

Going down the clone way means the same thing will happen again and especially inexperienced users may will waste money again.

My positions the following: if you design something from scratch, you can make the product differ from other products, even using the same technology. This is no magic. You can then build up your own reputation and your design stands for your product reputation. The community will benefit from that, by getting access to different hardware and availability of choice and improvements are made available faster. Even if the technology is the same, you can still dress things up differently.

If your position is fixed to the mindset that OS is predominately about CTRL C CTRL V, than you overlook some of the points above. The idea of OS is to move things forward, not to get stuck on one design.

I think it is always worth to shine light on all aspects of the matter and I can also understand the opposing position, wanting the same thing at different levels of quality and price tags and being furious when a certain design is blocked in a certain market. On the other hand this fact doesn’t block anyone from choosing one of the other 100000 design options that free to choose from. It is a baby step that doesn’t hinder anyone from placing HW on the market.

One problem about copy paste is also that you don’t really understand all aspects of the design. You copy without thinking about the detail that lead to the decision to go for a specific solution. In consequence copy products very often lack a certain standard when it comes down to the detail. The more complex a design is, the more likely it is that important detail get lost during the copy paste process. This is one reason why HW 4 exists in a terrible variety of quality.

I would like to see a fair discussion around the matter, rather than seeing all that ranting.

And now to the Truck: I designed the baseplate that you can find on our Trucks.All existing designs had major weaknesses, so we decided to strip out these weaknesses and get the weight down as much as possible. MBS copied our design and then China copied it from MBS I guess. I think the copy truck is horrible, but you can judge that yourself.

For everyone interested, this is some literature about design rights in the EU:

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frank do you have a # for your registered design? the one you referred to previously being the box the opensource BV hard & software resides?

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And yet @trampa still doesn’t mention any patents or copyrights or trademarks after typing for 90 minutes. Still. At this point, I’m going to call it. They don’t have any. Because obviously if it’s important enough to not “copy” as he says, we should at least know what not to copy. At this point, it seems a wood-framed house is an infringing copy because it’s a rectangular solid with wires coming out.

Are you saying that no sock manufacturers are innovating? Because they all look rather similar. Have you considered the possibility that they are similar shapes because they are designed to solve similar problems? Namely, protection of a human foot using cotton thread? Maybe they are innovating on the production process and not the end product. Now, what if it was driving of a 3-phase motor from a battery using the same open-source schematic?

If you’re implying ESCape looks like VESC6, well, it doesn’t – not any more than a Chevrolet sedan looks like a Ford sedan. That’s just simply untrue at a minimum, and a greedy disingenuous money-grab at a maximum. In fact, they are more different than that even. Anyone who thinks different must have trouble buying milk at the store and frequently find out they bought orange juice or apple juice by mistake, thinking it was milk.

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seriously guys the only thing any of us need is the registered design#… I’m not going to say it does not exist? yet, I looked and could not find it :open_mouth:

hence I ask humbly for the design number…

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The Tesla and shoe metaphors especially fall apart if you consider the stemma of those relationships. Tesla, a proprietary company, released their IP they created for research and learning purposes and they control the licensing of that content. They are the parents of any subsequent children in that senario. Any subsequent descendants are subject to the parents licensing. However in this ESC senario the parent is an open source project. Bbox, escape, and trampas vesc6, are siblings all descendant from an open specification. Their variation is of the open documents not the trampa ESC. The common ancestor explains the similarities. @trampa’s problem is that he has assumed his product as the root ancestor because it was first to market which doesn’t seem to be a valid case. There is no link to variations shared between these sibling escs. The likeness in asthetic is due to the asthetic being derived from engineering requirements of the common parent and not due to being derived from tramp’s parts.

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Also hasn’t @trampa explained to us how this doesn’t conflict with his design:

Housing is different… Features are dropped… There is a twin layout… (But apparently that’s debatable) There can’t possibly be all the same components because we don’t know trampas component supplier

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Shall we look to Android as a good example?

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