Get off our groove baby! - Bike Magic

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Get off our groove baby!

The kings of licensing and litigation, Specialized, have done it again by forcing other saddle manufacturers into licensing agreements over their “Body Geometry” saddle.
Koski, Selle Italia, Velo Industries and WTB have all signed on the dotted line to either stop producing certain types of saddle or hand over sale royalties to Spesh and their team of ever eager lawyers.
We’re not sure of the actual patent they’ve collared them under but it’s presumably something to do with a central groove used to eliminate pressure on the perineum (the bony seating bit of your pelvis). Quite how Specialized have managed to bag this as their own considering Terry’s Liberator saddles had a central cut out feature running way back, but they reckon there just defending their research and marketing spend and that all important “intellectual property”. They also plan to licence their other “Body Geometry” technologies, so companies producing gloves with padding where it’s needed and shoes with comfortable shaped insoles had best start sandbagging.
This news comes after Spesh have already got Giant to agree to cough up cash so they can run their XTC and XCX series bikes in the states. They had been stopped from selling them previously on account of the Horst Link chainstay pivot – another ‘not our original idea, but we’ve bought it so now you have to pay’ feature.
All we’re waiting for now is for them to go for the really big writ and licence the idea of taking a US mountain bike design and getting it made in the far east. At least it really would have been their idea this time!

 

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