Strava Sues Garmin In Bizarre Patent Infringement Lawsuit

Fitness tech appears to beryllium having a unusual spat. Earlier this week, Strava revenge a suit alleging that Garmin infringed connected its patents for 2 features related to search workout routes: segments and heatmaps. It's besides claiming that Garmin violated a Master Cooperation Agreement by processing its ain power representation feature. The complaint (via The Verge) is seeking a imperishable injunction to extremity Garmin from trading immoderate items pinch segments aliases a power representation features, which would magnitude to a mostly of Garmin's hardware products arsenic good arsenic its Connect search program.

The suit connected its ain is simply a surprise. Strava and Garmin are 2 awesome players successful fittingness tech that person worked together for astir a decade, nan brace person a number of integrations betwixt their platforms. It besides seems improbable that Strava will make overmuch headway pinch nan case. DC Rainmaker, which first picked up connected nan lawsuit, has a thorough timeline of nan companies' patent filings that powerfully suggests nan arguments won't clasp h2o successful court. It's besides unusual that these alleged infringements, by Strava's ain assertions, began a agelong clip agone and yet nan institution is only taking rumor pinch them now.

But nan business sewage moreover alien erstwhile Strava Chief Product Officer Matt Salazar took to Reddit coming to springiness immoderate penetration into why nan institution is taking specified fierce action against a predominant partner. According to Salazar's post, Strava is invoking nan lawyers because Garmin is adopting caller developer guidelines for API partners "that required nan Garmin logo to beryllium coming connected each azygous activity post, screen, graph, image, sharing paper etc." Although he frames it arsenic a move to protect users' data, nan statement sounds much for illustration a petty title that Garmin is putting its marque connected nan information its products are utilized to collect.

It's a weird lawsuit, and hopefully 1 that won't origin immoderate disruptions for either company's customers.