All,

In recent light of the copycats coming out of China, there is a pretty good solution to this madness. I think it's time for us to give back to the industry by providing good pertinent information.

We have lawyers in China and even contacts in all the "trade" sites (ala alibaba, etc) that we learned from to stop copycats from staying on these sites. It's very possible to limit/stop the exposure of copycats through this method. It goes beyond just going for a patent, etc. It's HOW you go about with patents and also WHO you contact to stop copycats from being posted to the public. Also, HOW to be most efficient with your money and time on protecting your innovation/design. Issues on SPEED will also be included so you don't wait for a patent pending to be published 3 years later. We have ways to create patent documents in 6 months to STOP them in China which is unheard of compared to normal methods.

I've been meaning to write it all up for Gaston (fk irons/spektra) and have no problem sharing this info to all of you who are interested as well. This strategy is being written by one of my partners including screenshots, etc. and should be ready to go by mid-week. The cool thing is this strategy has been proven to work and though I am not guaranteeing 100% fault-proof, it's worked for us on a few products we added protection on. The same approach can be used on any product, be it machines, etc.

I don't want to post everything on the forum because there are a few supply companies whom I will not mention that may take this strategy and try to find loopholes to get ripoffs over here. If you are a builder or manufacturer (big or small) and want to know about our experiences and resources, please feel free to PM me your email address, name, and company/shop name. Once I verify you are legite, I'll send this info over to you with no strings attached. Took us many years of trial and error to come up with a comprehensive solution (5-10 minute read).

On a side note, if our strategy was implemented, I can say with 99% confidence that the whole dragonfly/firefly/whip knockoff fiasco could have been extremely limited or stopped altogether.

-Billy