Escort Radar Files Suit Against Cobra
Today Escort Radar filed a federal complaint against Cobra Electronics in the US District Court, Western Ohio Division, case number 1:11 CV 797 for patent infringement.
Escort’s lawsuit asserts that Cobra’s iRadar detector and their iRadar community service infringes on two of their patents.
This will be the second time that Escort has pursued litigation against Cobra for patent infringement.
John Larson, the CEO and President of ESCORT relates. “Our inventions and patents cover not only the identification and marking of false alerts, but also, the sharing of radar alert information between detectors, an idea we brought to the market with the ESCORT Live™ social network. ESCORT and Cobra have peacefully coexisted since 2008, but with the iRadar, Cobra has overstepped its bounds, into infringement of our patents, and is capitalizing on our research and our ideas, including ESCORT’s multi-decade effort to build a network that permits radar detectors to share information in a network that benefits the driving community as a whole. ESCORT was left with no choice but to respond.”
The first lawsuit was settled in 2008 in Escort’s favor.
Here is my take – I think that Cobra should had been called to task long ago for the way they have continued to market their radar detectors as 6, 8, 10, 12…. band radar detectors.
Hell we all know that there are only three radar bands (X, K and Ka) and one laser band in the USA!
But this lawsuit has nothing to do with their marketing, which I feel is misleading, but the hijacking of another’s intellectual property.
However, in my mind they have proven to me that they will do what ever it takes to market low performance radar detectors rather than focusing on quality as Escort, Beltronics, Valentine and Whistler has done.
What are your thoughts about Escort’s lawsuit?
7 Responses to “Escort Radar Files Suit Against Cobra”
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The crowdsourcing is likely covered by lack of novelty and prior art, if nothing else my post suggesting it on your forum with details of mu bluetooth interface (prior to 2008). You omitted the patent numbers to allow me to easily look them up.
The USPTO grants lots of stupid, obvious, or invalid patents.
Cobra might not be nice, or ethical, but that doesn’t mean they are guilty od the particulars.
Meanwhile, I should have my updated Valentine v1 back with features Escort can’t have for a bit of time yet.Isn’t it wonderful that no one else could have a bogey counter or directional arrows all these years?
I personally don’t think so.
But wouldn’t it be better to cooperate – where we would all see each other’s encounters in detail rather than everyone having to pick their own single vendor? And aggregate all the data?
It would be better to compete on merits and style and have 100% of the info on every detector instead of having different brands, each crippled and having only their patented specific killer feature and no others?
How is having to buy 3 or 4 detectors to get everything better than one?
Didn’t the iRadar come out before Escort Live?
Interesting, wonder how this will end up?
Hmm so I guess this is why RadarActive went dark. Probably a cease and desist order from Escort. I could care less about the gps stuff. Wish Signal Active would update it’s display to incorporate V1’s ESP protocol and do a frequency display.
Anything that has the potential to rid the market of at least one model of the rubbish made by cobra…I’m all for it. They should stick to radios and get out of the radar market.
My cobra is in the dumpster now that ive gotten 9500ix…
Good place for it