Purple in Sector 1

On Wednesday Dec 10 HANS Performance Products filed a patent infringement suit against Innovative  Safety Technologies in the District Court, Southern District of California.  The suit coincides with the announcement of the defNder G70 head and neck restraint system at the Performance Racing Industry show this week in Orlando.  HANS has long had a lock on the head and neck restraint business, with only Hutchens and LFT Tech the only competition.  Awarded the fifth patent on the device in September, HANS has been able to maintain a near stranglehold in that sector of the safety market for a while, commanding a premium price though recently introducing a budget version.  Still, even at a premium it works and it’s a lot cheaper than a basilar skull fracture.

I’ll update the post with links to the patent HANS alleges was violated and a copy of the complaint from Pacer.  Interestingly, I can’t find a patent application for the defNder though they say there is a patent pending on the the site.

UPDATE 1:  Jayski has pulled the blurb off his site but here is the PR Newswire copy of the release from HANS http://news.prnewswire.com/DisplayReleaseContent.aspx?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/12-10-2008/0004940184&EDATE=  My PACER account was locked because I haven’t used it in about a year and the card I was using on it expired.  The gov needs to manually turn my account back on.  I can sell engines on the other side of the country for a couple grand,  update banking and bill pay info in real time, buy race parts or welders at the click of a mouse but to access a public records database they need to have some gov IT guy do it by hand?  You’ve got to be fucking shitting me…  This is stuff that I was doing in 1997.

In the meantime, here is a link to Hubbard’s patent that is claimed to be violated.  I’ll post the other Hubbard/HANS patents as I dig them up.  The URLs at USPTO are real ball busters (not that the PR Newswire URLS are any better), thankfully we have Tiny URL  http://tinyurl.com/5u7ruc  .  The patent is a good read.

UPDATE 2: I guess they weren’t shitting me but I did get PACER access restored this morning.   Here is a link to the file hosted here at PI1.  It’s pretty standard, general and bland document that loosely claims that because Innovative manufactures a shoulder worn head and neck restraint that transfers the load to the vehicle’s restraint system they have caused harm to HANS and violated the patent.  As Lumbergh might say (the VP at Initech Lumbergh, not the Lumbergh Joanna slept with)  ”uuuuhhmmm, yeah”.  The complaint reads pretty much like a rank and file TPS report.  It will be interesting to see the Innovative response.

hans-v-innovative-complaint