The Sun reports this morning that Sir James Dyson has been in court again defending his vacuum cleaner designs and, this time, it’s the DC02 cylynder Dyson cleaner pitched against alleged copy from the now Chinese owned VAX.
Sir James Dyson yesterday warned British jobs would be put at risk by a court ruling in a vacuum cleaner copycat row.
What British jobs? All Dyson does now in the UK (to our knowledge) is design new products and fix the ones in the field, all manufacturing is overseas!
The Appeal Court decided the Mach Zen made by Chinese firm VAX was not a rip-off of the DYSON DC02 designed and developed by the British company.
Mr Justice Arnold said it was clear the Vax machine was “somewhat brutal” compared to Dyson’s “smooth” device. He added any “informed user” would get a “different overall impression” from the two products.
A French court backed Dyson in a similar battle three months ago.
And Sir James told Sun City: “We developed a breakthrough design in 1996 and what is obvious to me is they have just copied it. It has clear knock-on effects for the amounts companies invest on research and development in the future. It puts jobs at risk. I’m surprised. It’s disappointing and a very bad decision.”
Really? Or is it perhaps that the courts across the world are getting a bit sick of all these silly patent rows (wars) which are starting to look like schoolboy squabbles?
dyson products are over rated and over priced plastic crap from a service engineer give it a miss
Any idiot can see its a copy of a DC02If you can’t I would suggest a trip to spec-savers.
dyson moved manufacturing from the UK years ago.
“schoolboy squabbles” ?Hardly. It’s protecting your business and it’s investments.
Of course Dyson has moved manufacturing overseas, he has no choice, because he has to be able to compete with chinese junk being dumped on his home markets where he is supposed to have patent protection. patent litigation needs to be made more technical and less adversarial and British manufactureres should be supported in British patents, or we will, as Mr Dyson says, see more jobs go overseas in order to be able to compete in the marketplace with vastly inferior oriental copies.
If you invent something that is so great, so wonderful and changes life as we know it, is it really proper that it should be able to be patented?The design? Can we really patent the notion of a wheel? Or, how about the re-invention of the wheel?I can fully appreciate that certain design cues should perhaps be able to be patented, maybe even certain technologies, I might also agree that this Vax cleaner looks like a copy. It may well be, may not be. I don’t know and to be honest I don’t much care.But with squabbles between Apple, Samsung, LG, Whirlpool and goodness knows who else it looks like childish fights over design rights to things that often shouldn’t be under the ownership of any one company in my personal opinion. And, if the companies were so sure that their products were superior, surely that’s enough without the need to sue the competition.Which then leads to others not innovating for fear of legal repercussions, which startups cannot afford to defend.It actually often hampers innovation and progress. Let me ask, where would we be if penicillin had been patented, or TV, or radio, or… the list runs on and on. All far, far more important than a vacuum cleaner that uses the same principles used for generations only with a slight twist on them.As for no option to move to wherever, of course there’s an option, there’s always options. Fact is that to compete globally on price you need to get the unit production costs down as it’s too much hard work to convince consumers into valuing a quality product. Or, these days, it seems too much effort to build and market a quality product that is superior to the competition.
Agreed, Dyson meticulously engineers “down to the knuckle” – not a gram of wasted material anywhere,everything designed to wear out in a reasonable duty-time. I have always assumed that when his market is saturated, we’ll see a die-cast metal commercial version, built for long life, a’la Kirby (which, love or hate them, are robustly built.)Overpriced, certainly, but his innovations deserve the protection of Law, the same as any other genuine innovation. Unlike Penicillin, TV ,etc, this was simply a better way of doing the job, as opposed to a brand-new market-place. The punters have a choice of vac’s, they didn’t have much option in the other examples.
Here’s the problem though.If you don’t patent something then it’s not so much about the money more about proving something can or can’t be done.If you do allow patents then they serve only one purpose, to prevent others from copying the patented whatever so that you can monopolise the invention or improvement, so it then is all about the money.So any patent scrap we see is about one thing and one thing only, money.It’s got diddly squat to do with anything else and I can see why courts would think this a waste of their time. I’d much rather see the justice system and court time used to less frivolous matters.I get that Dyson and/or whoever is trying to protect their investments completely, but it’s all back to being about the money.
Firstly, I admire Dyson for his tenacity in getting the ‘vortex vacuum’ system into production after many prototypes but who is to say that by now someone else would have come up with the idea. Indeed within months weren’tr there loads of copycat votex vacuums ? What’s so special about this one ?Also I fear he appears to be a one trick pony inspite fo all this wealth of R&D. His other major invention (the ball wheel-barrow in the 80s) has now been merged with the vacuum cleaner – Wow Gee Whizz ! Then there’s the pointless bladeless fan and the hand dryer that’s only marginally better that the cr@p we have had to suffer over the past 30 years. So, move on employ some better design engineers and get a pipeline of decent products..