Who the hell wrote this article, the CEO of Acushnet?
"Don't get the wrong idea, small businesses love being sued over frivolous patents they never infringed upon!"
You don't often see such a laissez-faire attitude towards one's livelihood amongst small businesses.
> “We weren’t infringing. But we couldn’t afford to fight the case,” he says. Instead, his company settled the 2015 claims with Acushnet by agreeing to get out of the golf-ball business altogether; it received no payment from Acushnet, nor did it pay.
> “We laughed when we got the lawsuit. We knew we made it.”
So, what? They were just like "lol we're getting sued"? I have a hard time believing they were perfectly OK with the situation...
Yeah, really not understanding this thinking. The preceding sentence claims that they received no payment from Acushnet/Titleist, but I can't understand this attitude otherwise. Maybe they'd laugh if they were playing a round of golf, but this is a real life business, not a game.
The linked 2015 Golf Digest article [1] uses very different language and responses, calling the decision to shut down "painful" and "very tough". Further, they say:
> "Each company denies Acushnet's allegations and intends to vigorously defend itself in the case."
I'll grant that there is some time which elapsed between these articles and the incidents surrounding them, but I find it hard to imagine that their attitudes could have changed so drastically.
[1]: http://www.golfdigest.com/story/five-golf-ball-companies-nam...
The whois data for golf-patents.com lean toward this line of reasoning. The domain appears to be registered to an IP law firm. I'm not going to claim that they are a troll or a firm which enables trolls, but it is suspect in itself that they are referenced directly.
Acushnet Company does in fact manufacture, market, and sell golf balls, so it is reasonable that they could bring a patent suit as long as it does not turn out to be frivolous. It would be nice to have a system of laws which makes it fair for genuine victims of infringement to file and try suits without bankrupting competitors before the case is settled.
In this case, based on just reading the article alone, it would be a very hard claim to make against Acushnet. Even if the patents could be invalidated, until they are they have the presumption of enforceability.
Unfortunately, these are the rules of the game. Small players may know this and plan accordingly. So when the inevitable happens, they may not like it but they don't need to hold a grudge to the company that did exactly as planned.
The only solution would be to change the rules.
Because suing someone for patent infringement is a "legitimate" course of action, i.e. it's a lawful thing to do. In fact (AFAIK IANAL etc etc) it's the only way to ascertain whether a patent is being infringed or not without working with the opposition directly and sharing trade secrets outside the context of a court room with proper protections, something I doubt anyone would be particularly happy about.
If it's the "don't really begrudge the approach" part. I don't know that any of us really have the knowledge from within the golfing industry to know what different companies think of the practice.
> “We weren’t infringing. But we couldn’t afford to fight the case,” he says. Instead, his company settled the 2015 claims with Acushnet by agreeing to get out of the golf-ball business altogether
A writer can try to be an objective observer, or they can pick a side, but trying to pick both sides is just confusing.