Crossbreed Holsters, as the name implies, makes some damn fine holsters. Although the religious connotations behind the name don’t really jive with me the company’s customer service and warranty are good enough that I’m willing to let it slide. At least I was. I just found out that the company is suing Alien Gear for violating its intellectual property. Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know that I am against all forms of intellectual property so that’s the first strike. The second strike is against what the patent covers:
The abstract of the filed patent is as follows:
A concealable handgun holster is disclosed with a handgun encasement supported within clothing of a wearer by one or more attachment clips, the attachment clips being hidden “in plain sight” by decorative features that deceive an observer into thinking the clips are decorations rather than part of a holster. In preferred embodiments, the holster is a hybrid holster with a handgun encasement formed by a leather sheet attached to a rigid plastic cover, preferably made of Kydex.RTM.. The clips can be plastic or metal, preferably steel, and can be attached to the encasement by rivets, screws, or any other suitable fastening means known in the art. Decoration of the attachment clips can be by shaping of the clips, perforation of the clips with decorative shapes, engraving on the clips, printing on the clips, and/or attachment of decorative items to the clips.
Really? Crossbreed is suing because it has a patent on putting designs on belt clips that attach to holsters? That is right up there with Amazon’s patent on 1-click shopping and Microsoft’s patent on double-clicking.
Hopefully this patent gets shot down in the courts and Crossbreed is made to pay all of Alien Gear’s legal fees. Trying to take out competitors using the state’s intellectual property apparatus is low. It’s even more low when your patent is one something so glaringly stupid.
It appears that there’s no suit–Crossbreed has responded that their lawyer said they have to send these letters out to protect their patent. As I understand, that applies to trademark and not patents. I also can’t understand what Crossbreed claims is infringing. The patent I saw was for decorated belt clips, and I haven’t seen any sign of that from Alien Gear. I’ve got a couple of Crossbreed holsters from when Mark the founder was alive. As I understand the timeline, first there was the Tucker Answer, the Crossbreed was a simplified and cheaper version–the Kydex wasn’t lined and the leather was just stamped out and not double layered or stitched. If anyone has a claim, it would be Tucker.