Was this ad the undoing of the GSG-5?
Advocate posted this comment on my blog post about the H&K / ATI lawsuit ...
I really think its important to remember that they sued over trademark and trade dress infringement ... not patent infringement. Very different things.
Add to that the fact that ATI openly claimed it to be a MP5 lookalike:
Add to that the fact that HK can absolutely smother them in legal fees and you have a no win situation for ATI.
Love them or hate them i feel HK had the legal right to pursue this course.
... i’m just glad i got my gsg-5 long ago
I had forgotten about that advertisement.
Thank goodness the poster had an attractive woman with her bewbies out holding guns.
As an intelligent, cultured man of the 21st century, I make all of my firearm buying decisions based on the amount of cleavage in the ad.
But with ATI no longer selling them, how long will I have to wait before I can buy an expensive, overly heavy and not very practical .22lr pistol?
SpudGun, off topic. This is about the H&K lawsuit.
I did not mean to single Spud out. Everybody please stay on topic.
I think his comment was on topic, to a degree – you were discussing the ad specifially and he made a side comment about it.
Speaking of which, I’m sure the wachowski brothers might have some disagreements with the blatant matrix ripoff.
If it were simply for putting the name on a poster, then they should be suing countless video game makers and stuff as well. I doubt every game that has a gun named an MP5 in it is giving them money.
I can only imagine what GSG’s (the company that actually makes the gun, ATI just markets it in the US) reaction was when they saw this ad (I doubt ATI actually submitted it to GSG for approval before publishing it)
Germany has very strict regulations on advertisement (and, well, most everything else), with comparative advertisement in particular being a big no-no.
So this probably means the death of the GSG-5 not only in the US, but worldwide, and all because ATI thought their customers too stupid to figure out that IF “GSG-5 = MP5″ THEN “GSG-5PK = MP-5K” and instead needed to spell it out?
I’d like to keep the subject on topic, but I can’t move my eyes away from the fun bags long enough to read the bit you’ve circled in red.
Well it is a trade suit from what I understand. Basically they are suing GSG-5 for looking like MP-5. If that is the case HK should file more suits on the HK clones.
With that said Colt did the same thing to Bushmaster M4 and they lost.
As a Graphic Designer… I truly wonder about whoever art directed this ad. How did they even have the job in the first place? Kind of sucks, because from what I heard GSG offerings were somewhat decent.
I just bought a GSG-5 SD and was looking around the web and saw this. I’m not a gun expert, but almost all the reviews I’ve seen say the GSG-5 is a quality product. Based on that analysis and the impending rarity of the weapon, I expect its value to rise. I will be visiting my dealer again on Monday. He has not heard of the lawsuit yet and I want to buy the other one he has in stock as an investment. Any comments?
this case only effects the usa gsg are free to sale to europe and elesware
GSG5-PK
PK stands for Pistole Kompakt (Pistol Compact).
It is hard to copyright the fact that it is a compact machine pistol, and oh by the way HK’s patent expired how many years ago (The MP5 came out in 1966).