So many of you remember the whole “thermalfake” saga whereby TT launched some cases that are extremely extremely similar to CaseLabs designs. Now TT are sending around an “apology” letter signed by CaseLabs (shown below).
TT never officially commented at the time – which is usually code for “we are having our lawyers threaten something and so we aren’t going to talk about it right now”.
So does this mean that the apology means that CL was actually wrong in what they said? Absolutely not! Take a look at the wording – it’s designed purely to avoid a lawsuit. Anyone who’s even been on the receiving end of a defamation suit knew that a company would threaten to sue for defamation over the kind of statements CL made. Of course whether or not TT could have won the suit didn’t really matter.
Everyone at the time knew that CL could never afford to win such an argument in court. Note the attention that one complaint was that CL had claimed it could not win a legal case because of funding but that really it was because of a lack of patents. TT knew ahead of time therefore that CL didn’t have patents. In other words, it sounds like after being heavily inspired they checked that they couldn’t be sued for copying the design before launching it. So it’s no surprise that CL have put out such an apology as it is most likely required to avoid a defamation suit.
Does this change what actually happened? No. We all know what happened – there’s a grey area between inspiration and lazy design/copying. Don’t confuse justice with willingness to fight a lawsuit. There is a clear pattern of ThermalTake’s behavior (beyond just CaseLabs) and it its beyond mere inspiration. As a review site while we believe fair competition is healthy we do not believe ThermalTake’s behavior is healthy for the industry and by proxy you the reader. As always we suggest you vote with your wallet. For this reason though we are continuing in our stance to not support ThermalTake with any exposure or reviews.
