Little over a week ago, Strava filed a lawsuit against its long-running competitor Garmin over its patented segments and heatmaps features. Now, with Garmin still reeling from the legal trouble, Finnish brand Suunto is tagging in, suing the company alongside Strava.
Instead of just two patents, Suunto accuses Garmin of infringing five different patents. These patents are related to measuring a user’s respiratory rate, antenna design, watch casing, and automatic golf swing detection and tracking.
As per BikeRadar’s report, the lawsuit was filed in a Texas court on 22 September and alleges that many Garmin smartwatches incorporated the patented technologies without consent. The smartwatches include the Epix, Fenix, Forerunner, Instinct, Marq, and Venu.
Much like Strava, Suunto is requesting damages and possibly a permanent injunction to prevent future sales of the Garmin devices that make use of these features. Unfortunately, no representative from Suunto voiced the exact reason why the company is suing Garmin, unlike Strava’ Chief Product Officer Matt Salazar over on Reddit. Not yet, at least.
According to Canadian Running Magazine, Garmin stated that the company does not discuss pending litigations. The publication then added that this might be a strategic move to pressure the accused company into “dropping its data and advertising demands while shifting focus onto a longstanding patent dispute”.
Whether or not the claim by Canadian Running Magazine is true is quite difficult to tell at the current moment. Only time will tell if there really is more to this case, like the magazine theorised.
(Source: BikeRadar, Canadian Running Magazine)
