Strava has sued Garmin, an act that I very much did not have on my bingo card for 2025. In doing so, they are demanding that Garmin cease selling effectively all of their fitness/outdoor watches, as well as cycling computers. Additionally, they’re asking for a bunch of feature removals on Garmin Connect.
Strava is claiming that Garmin is infringing on two patents, one around segments, and the other around heatmaps. Strava is further claiming that Garmin broke a Master Cooperation Agreement between the two companies from 2015, in order to develop their Garmin Segments functionality.
Which, about now, you’re probably thinking: Wait, Garmin has its own Segments?
Yes, they do. Garmin rolled them out waaaaay back in early 2014 on select Garmin Connect and select devices (the Edge 1000 was first), before Garmin and Strava rolled out Strava Live Segments in 2015 on more devices. And yes, we’re talking about something from 11 years ago that Strava is now really upset about. The same Garmin feature that literally nobody talks about.
He analyzes the case and is very critical of it. He says the suit regarding heatmaps is a joke. Strava, who got a patent for them, didn't invent them and put them out after Garmin and many others. They never should have gotten a patent in the first place.
Can I ask an embarassingly low tech question? My kids use strava, but strava doesn't sell watches yes? So is this like a software designer demanding that all hardware cease to exist? Poking their eye out to spite their face? Don't you kind of need a fitness watch to use the strava and "make it work"? Im not sure what the share is of Garmin vs Apple/Coros, but shouldnt strava want the millions of people using garmin to be able to use strava? 90% of my kids use Garmin. A few Apples, no Coros.
Strava "explaining" that the lawsuit is revenge for an unrelated action by Garmin is, umm, an interesting move. Not a good one though.
It makes them vulnerable to a counterclaim for malicious prosecution, which isn't all that far fetched considering how weak this case is. I'm really surprised that Strava got a real law firm to take it.
bigmig19 wrote:
Can I ask an embarassingly low tech question? My kids use strava, but strava doesn't sell watches yes? So is this like a software designer demanding that all hardware cease to exist? Poking their eye out to spite their face? Don't you kind of need a fitness watch to use the strava and "make it work"? Im not sure what the share is of Garmin vs Apple/Coros, but shouldnt strava want the millions of people using garmin to be able to use strava? 90% of my kids use Garmin. A few Apples, no Coros.
Strava doesn't want Garmin to stop selling watches. The point of getting this kind of an injunction is to get leverage. If Strava were to get a court order saying, "stop selling sports tech," Strava would (theoretically) be able to negotiate an extremely favorable deal with Garmin in exchange for not enforcing the injunction.
This is actually pretty typical in IP litigation. The theory is that the offending party would have had to license the tech, and the IP owner would have been free to simply reject any terms it didn't like. If the court were to just gives the IP owner damages for the infringement, then the court has to speculate about what kind of agreement would have been reached with normal bargaining. That's impossible to know. An injunction, theoretically, restores the situation to what it should have been in the first place, with the IP owner holding all the cards.
The counter to this argument is that it actually gives the IP owner more leverage than they would have had ex ante because now the offending party has all of these sunk costs. If the parties had failed to come to an agreement at the outset, then the defendant would probably have developed its own technology down a different path that didn't require the IP at issue. Now it's too late, and the defendant is over a barrel. That's particularly true when you're talking about complicated, integrated products that incorporate tons of IP and may only have a single offending patent. (Like when Apple was briefly enjoined from selling some watches because they infringed patents for the heart rate monitor.)
(Of course, this is assuming a patent infringement case that isn't legally frivolous, which this one appears to be.)
Casio watch user wrote: wrote:
I just like to point out that Strava's latest company valuation is $2.2 billion. Garmin's is $50 billion. The do a lot more aviation equipment and some marine equipment as well. Tracking runners is one of there easier problems.
I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but people often have this notion that the size of a company determines who is likely to win in litigation. It actually has very little impact. What matters the most is the strength of the claims, which is as it should be. Even very small companies find ways to fund litigation when the case is strong and worth a lot of money, and even the wealthiest litigants don't like to throw money at weak cases.
Strava "explaining" that the lawsuit is revenge for an unrelated action by Garmin is, umm, an interesting move. Not a good one though.
It makes them vulnerable to a counterclaim for malicious prosecution, which isn't all that far fetched considering how weak this case is. I'm really surprised that Strava got a real law firm to take it.
bigmig19 wrote:
Can I ask an embarassingly low tech question? My kids use strava, but strava doesn't sell watches yes? So is this like a software designer demanding that all hardware cease to exist? Poking their eye out to spite their face? Don't you kind of need a fitness watch to use the strava and "make it work"? Im not sure what the share is of Garmin vs Apple/Coros, but shouldnt strava want the millions of people using garmin to be able to use strava? 90% of my kids use Garmin. A few Apples, no Coros.
Strava doesn't want Garmin to stop selling watches. The point of getting this kind of an injunction is to get leverage. If Strava were to get a court order saying, "stop selling sports tech," Strava would (theoretically) be able to negotiate an extremely favorable deal with Garmin in exchange for not enforcing the injunction.
This is actually pretty typical in IP litigation. The theory is that the offending party would have had to license the tech, and the IP owner would have been free to simply reject any terms it didn't like. If the court were to just gives the IP owner damages for the infringement, then the court has to speculate about what kind of agreement would have been reached with normal bargaining. That's impossible to know. An injunction, theoretically, restores the situation to what it should have been in the first place, with the IP owner holding all the cards.
The counter to this argument is that it actually gives the IP owner more leverage than they would have had ex ante because now the offending party has all of these sunk costs. If the parties had failed to come to an agreement at the outset, then the defendant would probably have developed its own technology down a different path that didn't require the IP at issue. Now it's too late, and the defendant is over a barrel. That's particularly true when you're talking about complicated, integrated products that incorporate tons of IP and may only have a single offending patent. (Like when Apple was briefly enjoined from selling some watches because they infringed patents for the heart rate monitor.)
(Of course, this is assuming a patent infringement case that isn't legally frivolous, which this one appears to be.)
Casio watch user wrote: wrote:
I just like to point out that Strava's latest company valuation is $2.2 billion. Garmin's is $50 billion. The do a lot more aviation equipment and some marine equipment as well. Tracking runners is one of there easier problems.
I'm not sure if this is what you're getting at, but people often have this notion that the size of a company determines who is likely to win in litigation. It actually has very little impact. What matters the most is the strength of the claims, which is as it should be. Even very small companies find ways to fund litigation when the case is strong and worth a lot of money, and even the wealthiest litigants don't like to throw money at weak cases.
So i think you are saying strava goes full nuclear burn everything to the ground so they can work backward to making a settlement palatable by comparison? What a weird world.
I would not call this a patent troll, but it is in the neighborhood. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic & Policy Research has written extensively about how patents are nothing more than monopolies that harm competition. Worth looking up his stuff for a read.
I have been involved in a few IP cases over the years. Patent law commodifies innovations. That generally means the person with the biggest bag of money gets to control those innovations. The people who come up with the innovations only have value to the extent they are able to form their own company and capture the innovation with a patent. If they are working for a big company, they are bound by their employment agreement and trade secret law to keep the innovation in house and are dependent on their employer to be fairly compensated for their innovation.
Back in the days when the light bulb was invented, most Scandinavian countries had no intellectual property laws. The result was that innovations were freely shared, copied and improved upon. The value was then placed in the innovators, being first to market and having the superior version of the innovation and most cost competitive.
Don't you kind of need a fitness watch to use the strava and "make it work"?
You need a device to record the data, yes. That can be a watch or a cycling computer, etc., or the app can record an activity using your phone's GPS/location stack (still not their data).
It's obviously related to their pending IPO, either to satisfy potential investors, or drive publicity or whatever. I also wonder if this isn't a foreshadowing of Strava planning to enter into the hardware market?
Regarding the heat map aspect. Neither Strava nor Garmin invented that idea. It's a standard, long-standing GIS visualization technique. They just applied it to a specific set of data.
This whole thing reinforces my opinion that the Strava leadership is misguided, and they continue to squander their position via poor decisions and lack of creativity.
So its sounds like strava would nuts to have garmin stop selling watches. I believe I read there are 5 x the market share of Garmin trackers to Apple. And who wants to run with a phone? A lot of people I know, but it sucks.
Been souring on Strava for the past few years. This is pathetic though.
Garmin's Connect app is meh. Some cool stuff, but it's sloppy and has bad overall UX. But for not that much money and time, they could easily make it better than anything Strava offers sans the whole social media aspect.
I think that Garmin will just take a controlling stake in Strava during the IPO and end this silliness. It would make sense for them to own the training brand Runna (owned by Strava), the social platform (Strava), and the watchmaking business and use them to promote products and create a subscription service that adds more value than Garmin Connect+.
Supposedly 70% of the uploads to strava are from the strava phone app so it isn't obvious that losing garmin would absolutely destroy strava (although it would definitely hurt). I don't really believe that number, or it could be that most of those uploads are from free accounts and a much higher fraction of the paid account uploads are from garmin.
I'm pretty sure most people who use Strava use their cellphones to track activities. However, I would guess that most of those people are not logging more than three 30+ minute activities per week. Probably just a handful per month.
The people more serious about running or cycling generally have gps watches or gps cycling computers, but that is a small percentage of the population.
It would be much more interesting to look at the statistics for paying Strava customers or for Strava users (including free accounts) that log over three 30+ minute activities.
I hate Garmin's web app, but I'll 100% go back to it if Strava cuts ties with Garmin functionality, or makes me have to manually upload every file. I only use Strava for it's ease of use so any inconvenience will move me away.
Strava has sued Garmin, an act that I very much did not have on my bingo card for 2025. In doing so, they are demanding that Garmin cease selling effectively all of their fitness/outdoor watches, as well as cycling computers. Additionally, they’re asking for a bunch of feature removals on Garmin Connect.
Strava is claiming that Garmin is infringing on two patents, one around segments, and the other around heatmaps. Strava is further claiming that Garmin broke a Master Cooperation Agreement between the two companies from 2015, in order to develop their Garmin Segments functionality.
Which, about now, you’re probably thinking: Wait, Garmin has its own Segments?
Yes, they do. Garmin rolled them out waaaaay back in early 2014 on select Garmin Connect and select devices (the Edge 1000 was first), before Garmin and Strava rolled out Strava Live Segments in 2015 on more devices. And yes, we’re talking about something from 11 years ago that Strava is now really upset about. The same Garmin feature that literally nobody talks about.
He analyzes the case and is very critical of it. He says the suit regarding heatmaps is a joke. Strava, who got a patent for them, didn't invent them and put them out after Garmin and many others. They never should have gotten a patent in the first place.
DC Rainmaker should have left the patent analysis out of his article: it makes some pretty significant mistakes regarding the legal issues that he intends to analyze, which arguably makes his analysis either completely wrong or (at best) not very accurate. Probably ought to stick to the angle of, "two big people slug it out, and it's a terrible idea for one of them."
This will not end well for stava if the try to fight Garmin. As others have noted, they require Garmin, but Garmin is so diversified they do not require strava. Social media is so fluid with those coming and going strava could go the way of myspace with some other entity rising from the ashes for people to publish and display to the world their workouts
