I get a few of these every year.

Oddly, when given the opportunity, none of them have ever been this rude to me in person. :-*

Shai Hulud - If you don’t know someone, or anything about them, maybe don’t openly insult them in a public forum. It definitely weakens your position when you’re trying to set yourself up as the new expert here and you spin off at the mouth about things you know nothing about. While plenty of people don’t like me for totally valid reasons, even the people who don’t like me can admit that I really do know what I’m talking about, even if I can sometimes be a bit of a jerk about it.

The patent for 5A was never meant to protect the “style” of play, it was meant to make me some money for a few years off the equipment. Had I realized that it would actually cause more harm than good, I would never have allowed the application to be submitted, period.

The patent was filed on my behalf by Flambeau Products / Duncan Toys, and permanently assigned to them as payment for the filing costs and defense. Patents are ludicrously expensive, and I knew I’d never have the resources for it. I was 24 years old at the time, and as you can clearly see from the behavior of some people on this forum, the average 24-year old cannot be counted on to know anything about anything. So, at the time, it seemed like a way for me to HOLY CRAP HAVE A PATENT, and guarantee some royalties from my shiny new employer. We were still in the honeymoon phase, after all, and it sounded like a great idea at the time.

What 24 year old, upon inventing something that is admittedly as sure-fire awesome as a totally new way of playing with a two thousand year old toy, would not want the world’s largest manufacturer of said toys to pay them to make them, slap their face on the packaging, and then send them all around the world to promote it?

It sounds like a pretty sweet deal, and it would have been if I’d done it right. If I’d held out for a better royalty rate (I didn’t), if I’d put in some kind of buy-out clause if I ever left the company (wish I had), if I’d put in some kind of clause that guaranteed I had some control over licensing decisions (argghh), if I had done it RIGHT, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at all. And every single yoyo company would sell at least one counterweight model, and I would have money to bring my kids to Worlds in Prague for their summer vacation (they’re adorable).

But I didn’t do it right, and the reason I didn’t do it right is because I wasn’t greedy enough. It never occurred to me that I should ask for more, because they little bit they offered me sounded like the world for a white trash kid from Florida who barely made it out of high school. It was so much more than I had that it never for a second occurred to me that it was well below industry standard.

So, the reason we’re all in this ridiculous counterweight patent mess in the first place is because 24-year old Steve Brown thought the best of people, and couldn’t believe his luck, and wasn’t greedy at all. If I had been exactly the kind of awful person that Shai Hulud clearly thinks I am, counterweight play would be better off, the license would be cheap enough for everyone to utilize it, and I’d have forum trolls picking me apart for a completely different reason. (Probably my general attitude towards ignorant forum trolls, which is absolutely deplorable, let me tell you.)