The Legal Clash Continues Between Two Corporations, Equipt4 LLC VS. Pick Punch LLC

Custom guitar pick maker; seems reasonably benign until you understand there are 10’s of thousands of devices sold each year all around the world. Competition for those sales is ferocious. Musical instruments generally and guitar accessories in particular, are huge categories on Amazon, for example. With the recent rapid expansion of online buying, the sky is the limit for even small niche markets like guitar pick makers.
Until fairly recently, the overwhelming majority of those thousands of units were being sold by one distributor, Pick Punch LLC. Their product is the Pick Punch. That generic label was given to a device used to punch guitar picks from any thin pieces of plastic such as credit cards, gift cards, hotel room key cards, driver’s licenses, etc. Basically this is a novelty product because, let’s face it, guitar picks can be purchased by the bag full at any music store or on the internet. Novelty or not, people love to give these pick makers as gifts to guitar players for any occasion, including Christmas, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and of course birthdays. Pick Punch had this market “cornered” for about 5 years or so and was generating quite a bit of revenue by serving this reasonably limited yet lucrative niche.
Enter Equipt4 LLC and the Pick-a-Palooza. Equipt4 LLC brought the Pick-a-Palooza to market in May of 2013, seeing the opportunity to get in to what it viewed as an underserved area of online sales. The Pick-a-Palooza comes with 4 plastic strips with designs and a guitar pick holder for added value. Equipt4 LLC also developed a satellite product called the Pick-a-Palooza Pick Pack, a pack of 20 plastic strips crafted especially for guitar pick makers. Equipt4 LLC branded their device and set out to promote their new product and customer support.
After selling for approximately 1 month, Equipt4 LLC was contacted by Pick Punch LLC and threatened with legal action for infringing on a patent for the pick punch device. Equipt4 LLC conducted due diligence and decided there were no grounds for this action. According to a spokesperson for Equipt4 LLC, the patent referred to was a “Method Patent”, not a patent on the device itself. The method patent covered the method of punching guitar picks from plastic I.D. cards and even that was dubious. Equipt4 LLC consulted an attorney and continued to sell. The Pick-a-Paloozas sales gained momentum throughout the summer. In August, Pick Punch LLC delivered documents to Equipt4 LLC stating intent to proceed with legal action. Communications were ongoing for several weeks between both sides but were not fruitful. As a result, Equipt4 LLC chose to proceed with legal action of its own, asserting Pick Punch LLC had no intellectual property rights regarding this guitar pick making device and no trademark rights to the words “pick punch” as they are actually descriptive of the action of making a guitar pick from thin plastic. This may be a bunch of legal mumbo jumbo nevertheless it is interesting to note how competition can touch off a legal battle. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Equipt4 LLC explained, “Sadly this all might have been avoided because there honestly is no case here. The Pick-a-Palooza will be around for a long time. We had no choice but to fight back and our actions were necessary to eliminate the cloud from our company as well as product”.
The legal system being what it is and as the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow, this litigation will most likely go on for several months if not years. Meanwhile the selling of guitar pick makers continues to increase with each passing week. Recently there has been a flood of competitors into the market, making for a challenging sales and marketing environment. Pick-a-Palooza and Pick Punch have what may be considered a leg up on the competition just because they have been selling longer and have a “footprint” on the internet, but according to Equipt4 LLC, “the rear view mirror is looking pretty full these days”.