Does anybody have any facts about the HO entry by MTH. They have run the same ad now for several months. The EBay listings have almost dropped off the radar screen. Not looking to start the war again but I conclude this hasn;t worked out (yet).
Not wanting to start a war either, but maybe a small skirmish!LOL. I don’t lijke the negative way they portray their competition in the ads I have seen. I also don’t like the way they went about suing other manufacturers over copyrights and patents. I think in the long run this will hurt them more than help. I have not seen the HO loco (a Pacific i believe). They are also taunting their sound control system as being better than most. I have a Digitrax DCC system that controls up to 18 functions at no extra cost I might add. I have a BLI Moutain that runs and sounds excellent. I have a couple of diesels with the Soundtrax LC decoders installed that sound good. Tweet.
In the interest of clearing some thing sup, I’m helping a friend build his layout and his law firm has represented MTH in several things. He checked some information for me - the common rumor is that MTH threatened to sue all DCC manufacturers. The truth is, there is no such action. Nor did MTH make an attempt to claim that they owned the patent for using BEMF to control trains.
What MTH did do, it seems, is a very poor PR job of clearing this up before it became so ingrained on scale modelers that MTH was trying to litigate our favorite manufacturers out of business.
The one we should be more worried about at this time is KAM vs JMRI. Both from a model railroad standpoint and an open source software point.
–Randy
Is this the same MTH in the 1/07 of MRR. Who went against UP to avoid paing copyright fees? and won, and had them include his competitors. At least that is what the article on PG8 talks about.
I am new, and have never dealt with them, but if it is the same, sounds like he is looking out for the hobby, not just his piece…
It is the same MTH - it’s just that in that case, as opposed to other cases, they were fighting for the MRR community as a whole, and not just their own piece of the market. That suit could have gone completely differently, and MTH could have just gottem themselves out of the UP shackles.
That one is a big concern. It sounds like KAM patented several inventions previously made by others and made public prior to the patent application. Through legal rangling, KAM’s lawyers have suppressed this evidence in court, making it difficult for JMRA (the open source free software project) to prove that KAM’s patents are invalid. See http://jmri.sourceforge.net/k/index.html There is another thread about this issue too.
While the apparent intention of the MTH letter was to say we have these patents so don’t infringe, the letter sent to the other DCC companies came accross as a threat to sue. Given that MTH had recently successfully sued Lionel for something Lionel’s supplier did, MTH was already not very popular around here and this added to the distrust of MTH.
Then MTH further put their foot in their mouth with the original ads for their HO scale PRR K-4 Pacific by bashing the other manufacturers in the arena of friendly competition in the HO scale market. There was mass protest here on the forums and MTH did tone down their ad by the next issue of MR, but the damage was done.
I personally couldn’t bring myself to buy MTH or KAM products.
thanks,
More info is always good to us new people. I never thought there would be so much legal fighting over a hobby that promotes your industry. I would think that UP would want it’s name everywhere t could get it.
But I am not in business either.
Yes UP wants it’s name everywhere. The problem comes from allowing others to use it without permission so you get situations like all celeophane tape being called “Scotch” tape or “Xerox” being synonomous with copying. Then the company loses its distinctive brand name which is part of an area called “Good Will”. If and when they merge or sell an asset in the case of major corporations this can be valued at a billion dollars or more and something they have to guard against. As an example if Starbucks would allow people to say, “I am going to get a Starbucks” when they meant coffee sooner or later someone would advertize, “Come get a Starbucks” at our new location so they need to be zealous in protecting the definition. Now lawyers don’t know much about anything but law and so they have no idea what benefit there is in modelers running UP equipment on trains. ATSF did when Lionel asked them to pay for the dies for their F3 in the 50’s. ATSF couldn’t get them the money fast enough because somebody saw the benefit of all that free advertizing. Sometimes common sense does win out.