It is hard to believe it has been over two years since I reported on any patent litigation concerning golf GPS rangefinders. Well, this week the makers of SkyCaddie®, the self-proclaimed “#1 Rangefinder in Golf,” filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the makers of the GolfBuddy. The lawsuit, SkyHawke Technologies, LLC v. Deca International Corp., was filed on December 6th in the Southern District of Mississippi (the complete complaint is HERE) concerning USPN 6,456,938 titled “Personal dGPS Golf Course Cartographer, Navigator and Internet Web Site with Map Exchange and Tutor.” The patent, which is pretty interesting reading (click HERE), describes the invention as:

A personal owned palm-held device consisting of software executed on a palm-held personal computer (PC) saddled into and connected directly to a dGPS receiver such that an individual golf player may map a golf course by traversing its attributes, displaying said map and collecting golf play data for any golf course. In addition, the ability to upload and download golf course maps to an Internet web site shall reduce the need for subsequent users to repeat the effort of mapping the same course more than once. Also, downloadable courses will facilitate the use of the palm-held PC by users that do not have a dGPS attachment. When used without a dGPS attachment, ball locations will be determined manually by estimating the ball location with reference to visual salient course attributes.

There is no doubt that the GPS rangefinder industry is not one to get into unless you are pretty knowledgeable in the field of IP! It should be interesting to see how this lawsuit plays out.

David Dawsey   – Keeping an Eye on Golf GPS Patent Infringement

PS – If you can’t get enough GPS patent litigation information then click HERE for a post that leads to numerous other posts about the industry.