Steyr sueing Sig

[Kain]

The answer is simple...............Money grab!
Sig just won a major contract and there is a ton of money involved, Stery wants in on that money. If there really was/is a patent issue, that should have been brought to light with the introduction of the P250 BUT the P250 was not near as popular and sought after as the P320........Guess we can all just sit back and see what happens.

I still don't buy that. Glock sued s&w over the Sigma, which has been panned as a barely better than Hi-point POS. If you are in a business, and maybe I look at things a little more viciously, if a competitor is infringing on patent rights it makes sense to try to stop them as soon as you have the opportunity, unless you don't have a solid case. With them going after Sig now, and not with the 250(Which yeah had plenty of issues) and not Beretta with the APX(which may or may not be a huge success Beretta is still a large company with money) or Remington which lets be honest seems to be run by monkeys, but still seems to have good monetary backing in the rear, I just am not seeing logical reason to wait until now to attempt to sue or stop another company from using your idea, or at least send cease and desist or at least something that would have been running in the rumor mill before now, unless it is a situation where perhaps you are looking at risk vs reward that maybe we win and get a pay out because we know the patent may not survive a court battle. TT33 being brought up here. Now, layman out look verse patent perhaps the argument can be made that a hammer verse striker patent is different enough to get it's own idea, the 250 was hammer fired DAO if I remember correctly, so maybe there that. But, if not, the idea and concept has been around for decades at which point Steyr may end up paying Sig before this is all said and done. I just not seeing everything here in the OP being all there if you know what I am saying.

[Bret]

I agree with PaLEOjd. From a financial standpoint, the benefit may not have outweighed the cost until now. Of course there's always the possibility that Steyr did warn Sig, but Sig chose to proceed because they think they can win a lawsuit or because they decided to just pay Steyr later.

[.XL]

[.XL]

[Interrupt]

"Sig as a business sucks" is an interesting way to put it. Maybe a "miserable place to work" would be more accurate. From an outsider's perspective, Sig USA had less than a hundred employees and was facing bankruptcy when Cohen took over, and now they're approaching 1,000 employees, the company has experienced tremendous expansion, and they've been lucrative enough to venture into new markets.

And all at the expense of the reputation for reliability and durability they had carefully cultivated--and earned--up until that point. That expansion generated, and continues to generate, numerous QC issues and an outright asinine business model.

Hopefully this is an opportunity to get a more appropriate pistol chosen for the Army.

[_Stormin_]

But doesn't Beretta's APX and Remington's new 9mm have a similar removalble fire control group? The patent is pretty vague, and should'nt it expire either in 2019 or 2021? Don't patents have a 20 year life sapn so when this court case ends the patent will have expired.

It doesn't matter if the patent expired tomorrow. The infringement occurred while the patent was valid, and Sig is going to deliver thousands of pistols while infringing upon a patented design. If the Sig legal team feels the suit is warranted, they will settle this one long before it can reach anything close to trial with an equitable per pistol royalty. As has been said, at this level and dealing with this much money, this is how the game is played.

[_Stormin_]

Hopefully this is an opportunity to get a more appropriate pistol chosen for the Army.

That contract is going NOWHERE and nobody wants it in place more than Steyr. Earning a bunch of money on pistols you didn't have to make isn't exactly the worst way to derive revenue.