Catch Co. Responds To False Accusations
Today (1/1/2020) we, along with the Googan Squad, were accused of “knocking off” another bait company by a popular YouTuber. We wanted to address these claims directly:
1. We never intentionally “knock off” anyone else’s unique or protected designs or intellectual property. We always want to come up with products that look unique for us and that we want to fish. Any 3rd party patents we have used to date have been licensed by us for use. We also always search publicly available intellectual property before we design a new product to make sure we are not infringing on anything.
2. Factories often re-use components from other products they have designed or that are on the market. So it's possible for brands to have two similar aspects without one intentionally copying the other, especially if it is inside the bait and is much harder to compare to the market. Companies can patent any unique innovations that truly change the function of their product to protect it from being re-used and to make it easy for other companies to know what is original to someone else.
3. All lure companies are trying to make baits that look like specific things (baitfish, crawfish, etc) so many are going to have similarities no matter what.
4. The baits we were accused of “knocking off” are based on common body shapes that have been on the market for a long time and have been used by a number of companies. These designs were not created by the other company in question. Some of the body shapes we are being accused of copying are widely available on the market. Here are two examples (but there are a lot more):
5. The video that was made ignored the many differences between our baits and other company’s baits. For example, our lipless shape is very different and there are many other brands out there that look closer to the company we are accused of copying than the Googan Squad lure does. Similarly, the flat sided crank bait has a very different belly shape. There are a number of other differences that were glossed over, here are just a few:
6. People have a financial interest in creating drama around the Googans to get more views and sell their own products. Other companies also feel threatened by their success and more they can drag them down, the less of a threat they think there is.
7. Even though we felt that we did nothing wrong and no IP was violated, we did ask the other company to send us a specific list of the things they felt they created that were unique that we may have inadvertently copied if our factory used them in some way without our knowledge, but the company did not do so and instead demanded a large payment and ongoing royalties as well as threatened to take it public, which they are using their influencers to do now. At that point, we felt that this was less about IP that they felt was copied and more about piggybacking on the Googan’s success or retaliating for some past negative interactions.
It is our goal to partner with awesome creators to help them bring great products to market. We have done this with Mike Bucca, Chris Grout, the Googans, and a number of others. We have no reason or incentive to knowingly copy other products. We have a talented design team and amazing manufacturing partners. Our engineers are trying to create innovative products that combine new ideas with tried and true features to create the best lures on the market. We have designed many original products from scratch (including brands like BioSpawn and 10,000 Fish) and we have a lot of innovation in store for 2020.
As always, we thank all of our fans for their continued support! Now let’s all get back to fishing…
Tight lines,
– Team Catch Co.
