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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

Who is stealing from whom?

Future Motion applied for their patent on July 21, 2015 and the application was published and publicly viewable on Nov. 12, 2015.

http://www.freshpatents.com/-dt20151112ptan20150323935.php

Changzhou First International Trade Co was established in 2011. I wasn't able to tell when they first started selling these scooters.

Were they really able to clone a product and get it in stores and demoed at CES between Nov. 12 2015 and today? Amazingly agile if so.

And not even addressing the issue that all these products really seem to be violating Dean Kamen's patents.

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Once they get the patent, that is no longer the issue. If you think the Chinese company had the product and was selling it in the US before Future Motion even applied for their patent, then that is the fault of the US Patent Office for granting the patent in the first place, not the fault of Future Motion.

If there is an issue, it is with the USPTO, not with the actions of the federal marshals as tipped off by Future Motion.

And if you look at the website posted by soheil, is is obvious that ripping off other people's inventions is this company's bread and butter.

I have yet to see a Chinese company that isn't on the wrong side of patent/copyright infringement. They don't seem to understand patents at all.

Chinese companies understand Patents are a nice blue print to make their own products and sell them in places the patent holder self never heard of and right in the patent holders backyard... all the hoverboards that are exploding are knock offs

> all the hoverboards that are exploding are knock offs

Which are the original ones for this most popular design?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NL58ZSeXz-s

It takes a long time to get a patent from application to publication.

If you look closer at the patent, what will be considered the priority date for that patent is the date the provisional patent application was filed -- May 6, 2013.

I agree, however the first date Changzhou could have seen the patent application was its actual date of publication.

I am skeptical Changzhou could have gone from reading this application, which is about ideas and not specific implementation and design, to engineering a manifestation of that patent, setting up a production line, testing, marketing, boxing, and selling these products between November and January.

I would say that Changzhou has obviously been working on a similar design in parallel. When they started is not clear though.

Both are also clearly derivative from, and in violation of, Kamen's patents.

There's already several products from other companies that are one wheeled unicycle kamen devices. The hoverboards are mini Segways without the needed handle for stabilization. The more sensible front to back skateboard concept has been discussed in various places. It's not unreasonable to expect that many people were working on the design in parallel.

The facts are though that the Chinese company failed to secure a US patent. That is their downfall in the US market.

To say they stole the design is premature.

The onewheel design using a hub motor on a large wheel is quite distinctive and novel.

The patent publication date also has nothing to do with when Changzhou may have begun development -- OneWheel launched at CES 2014, 2 years ago getting A LOT of media coverage as well as a million dollar crowdfund campaign. That makes it rather attractive to knock off. The start date on Changzhou's development was anytime after January 2014.

You copy the product in the market, not necessarily the patent itself. It is at your peril to copy so directly and ignore "Patent Pending".

It would not take more than 3-6 months for a company like this to have a knock off to show.

I have not looked at Kamen's patents, but it would be hard to imagine the OneWheel displacing a Segway's use case. Of course if Kamen's patents well cover the core "self-balancing" technology he could push to get royalties. It would be a waste of money for Kamen to completely shutdown a skateboard though.

The OneWheel launched before the hoverboards started showing up. The timeline may even place hoverboards as less blatant derivatives of OneWheel.

> The onewheel design using a hub motor on a large wheel is quite distinctive and novel.

Or not so much... The Chinese have long used wheelbarrows that featured a centre-position wheel[1]. Adding a motor to that doesn't seem like a big leap of innovation to me.

[1] http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/12/the-chinese-wheelbarr...

An alternative narrative is that One Wheel are manufacturing in China - or purchasing multiple components from Chinese factories - and their plans were leaked to another factory owner. This is relatively common.

In this scenario the Changzhou company is able to start manufacturing soon after One Wheel starts manufacturing.

Sometimes the factories that are making the legitimate product run an off the books "Second shift" to make totally identical knock offs.

I've seen knock offs from china that are so identical they even copied the patent marking my client had molded into all their products. The knock off actually had my clients patent stamped into their product.

It's even more common in China that people that work on products especially manufacture design engineers simply walk down the street with an existing design they worked on and start their own company. Just look at the ecig business Chinese knockoffs of "western" brand designs that are manufactured in China are available before the real product even hits the market.

Is it required that they steal the design and idea from the patent documents, and not from the actual product, which almost certainly came out before the patent docs?

No. Stealing and patent infringement are separate issues. Stealing might be something like walking away with design drawings, source code, etc. This could happen at any time, including before the patent application is filed. Infringement means using the ideas claimed by the patent document.

Among the many possibilities, one is that the Chinese company sincerely believes that the US patent application is invalid, for instance if they think that they have discovered prior art. Also, if and when the US patent issues, its claims may bear little resemblance to the application, for instance if the Patent Office discovers prior art.

Disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, but I have a handful of patents.

This company filed a provisional patent long before they contacted their first manufacturer. It's a pretty common (and some may say racist) claim to assume chinese company can't invent anything, and that white company never steals anything. But evidence showing either of these claims is lacking. Do you have such evidence? Does anyone?

I was simply using the term "Chinese" and "US" to identify the two parties by their country of origin. And I was just describing what I understand about patents.

And I should add as a note: It's only infringement if the patent is valid, something that hasn't been established yet AFAIK.

NPR's Planet Money podcast released an episode a few weeks ago where they tried to find the original inventor:

http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/11/27/457404184/episo...

This is a different kind of hoverboard. One single wheel in the middle, ridden sideways, not wheels on each end ridden forward.

The onewheel has been for sale for about a year now. Not sure when they shipped their first board but I got my first onewheel in August 2015.

Thanks for that datapoint which shows that a customer received a working chinese onewheel board before the american company's patent application was even first published, and long before that american company had a working product based on those principles for sale.

Onewheel is Future Motion's product, not the Chinese company. The kickstarter was in Jan 2014 so that's how long a copycat would have had.

> Were they really able to clone a product and get it in stores and demoed at CES between Nov. 12 2015 and today? Amazingly agile if so.

Actually, Future Motion showed the product at CES last year... so Changzhou First would have had a year to develop it.

Using Wayback Machine at least on their website nothing was listed as of August 2015. [1]

[1] http://wayback.co/www.cztrotter.com

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