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Valaska, You totally and completely missed the point on Smart Parts business practices. It isn't that the came up with a great idea and patented it to protect it and are using that patent to drive companies out. Smart Parts bought a marker design that even a judge said they had no claim to being designers of, and then they revised the patent making it more broad than is reasonable.
Think about it like this, some of the claims in the patent are so ridiculously broad that there is no way that any reasonable person could say that the patent should protect them. The facts are that solenoid valves hooked to a electronic control board letting co2 pass through it for a set amount of time have existed since the 70's and is in every mcdonalds. I don't see where when this is applied to paintball, all manufactures have to pay to use this already proven concept. If Smart Parts wants to patent the Shocker, then fine, but otherwise I don't see where they have a valid claim on any of the other technologies that they are claiming.
Note, Smart Parts gets all fussy when people use electronics, but then design the Impulse clearly using the same operational mechanism as the Angel, and laid out almost the exact same as the Bushmaster 2000. Then they try to step all over Dye's patents and then attempt to patent gas through the grip of a paintball marker 8 years after the ICE Epic and several years after the Mini did it. This is not fair competition, it is lying, cheating, and stealing and then using intellectual property to protect themselves, when they don't have rightful claims to start with.
And no, I don't support PTP, or DYE either, due to their patents being used as a club when neither of them really deserve some of their patents either. (there is prior art in both cases)
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