Looks like hummingbirds new coastal Florida trip just stole all the tracks from fmt.
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FMT recently sent out a newsletter announcing they were pursuing a lawsuit. The examples included in the email appeared to be blatant ripoffs of FMTās routes.
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Hope he destroys them in court.
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Absolutely! I found the email. The top of the picture is FMT and the bottom is Hummingbird. With the exception of changing the color of the line, itās identical.
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court hell they need their as whupped
Did they take every route and copy it over? Even one route is to many especially knowing the amount of work isla mapping has done in the water running routes.
Quite bold of them
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Just playing devilās advocate here. If an area has only one recommended route based on charting data, and they both buy the same agrigate data wouldnāt they arrive at the same best route suggestions?
I mean didnāt FMT just repackage raw data with an algorithm for suggested routes?
No. Glen personally ran all of those routes in his Egret, sometimes staying in one area though multiple tides to make sure he put down the best track.
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I recall seeing that email update. Itās a damn shame for a bigger company to steal a product and hope to sweep it under the rug through a settlement or litigation. Hummingbird is much larger of course, so I am sure they have a strategy to lawyer up all day long and wear out Isla Marine. Thatās a shame. Hummingbird wonāt be getting a single penny from me.
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Iām sorry, itās just not adding up to me. There is another side to the story. Why would a company like Hummingbird/Minkota, that has reps and sponsored Capts all over the state, copy a proprietary system and risk litigation when they can duplicate the maps pretty easily.
Looking at the comparison the hummingbird maps have additional details too. How did they get the accuracy if they didnāt run and map the same routes?
I donāt have a dog in the fight, but I hate when people jump to a conclusion based on very limited facts.
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Iāll wait for more info but seems pretty suspect, FMT has what they have due to running all those routes as everyone knows. You wouldnāt come to the same conclusions just going off the available data most charts use for courses. Thatās the difference with FMT, its actual run routes not aggregated data.
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I totally agree with not jumping to conclusions. This is, in fact, going on right now. I have pasted the info from the newsletter from FMT below.
ISLA Mapping Files a Lawsuit vs. Johnson Outdoors for Copyright Infringement
A few weeks ago in March, an FMT user called us about a new premium chart product from Johnson Outdoors (Humminbird units). He advised he had seen it and it appeared that Humminbird had copied the Florida Tracksāor words to that effect. There was some surprise, curiosity, and/or dismay about it, as the impression was Humminbird had copied the FMT Tracks and called them āboat lanes.ā Another customer reported he had seen an āFMT knockoffā at Sodium in Ocala, where one of the Johnson reps was at a Captains Meeting showing and touting the new boat lanes feature in person as a Johnson Outdoors original creation.
The Johnson Outdoors new chart is also being noted in some blogs, such as this comment we pulled from a blog this week: āItās a blend of Florida marine tracks and the multibeam offshore maps.ā
We were aware of this apparent infringement on our work in February, having seen this new Humminbird chart product for ourselves at the Miami Boat Show while looking at all of the new products. We were quite taken aback by what we saw and believe it is blatant plagiarism of all of our Florida track data.
We challenged the rep at the show and asked him where the tracks on their chart came from. The rep advised they had hired dozens of captains to run 18,000+ miles of tracks over a 24-month period. We challenged that, commenting that their tracks looked just like the FMT tracks, and asked some pointed questions about the source of the data, including who ran them in various locations. He could not name even one captain. With further questioning, he asked if we were āFMT.ā When we advised āyes,ā and that it appeared Johnson Outdoors had copied our data, he immediately stopped talking, turned 180 degrees, and walked away.
For those that may not know, Johnson Outdoors is a publicly traded company based in the Midwest USA. They make outdoor gear including Minn Kota trolling motors, Talon boat anchors, Humminbird GPS units, and Scuba Pro diving equipment. Their stock ticker is JOUT, and their stock has declined from a high of about $140 in 2021 to about $23 today in consistent annual declines. In 2024, their reported total company revenue was $592.8 million, with a total operating loss of $43.5 millionāthough with zero debt.
The ISLA Charts were originally copyrighted about 10 years ago, with the copyright registration updated this year. The placement, design, and style choices we make in drawing tracks and the way we compose and present our imagery is something that can be copyrighted. Johnson Outdoors did not ask us for permission, and we did not grant permission or license to copy or use any of our tracks or other chart data.
Based on the new Humminbird chart we analyzed, it appears they copied our tracks from a version of an FMT chart that was out about 12ā24 months ago and put them on top of their own imagery. From our analysis, it was obvious someone at Johnson used our chart as a detailed guide and hand-drew most of them, copying as precisely as possible. Given the amount of fine detail, we estimate they were working on redrawing the data for at least a year.
We have hundreds of side-by-side screenshots showing identicalāor nearly identicalārepresentations of tracks covering extensive mileage all over Florida. This is not just about lines traversing primary marked channels like the ICW or narrow, well-traveled passages where a track can only be in one place. We are talking about virtually everywhere else, including the angles of joined track lines, the arbitrary shapes created by the lines, and nearly identical coordinates where tracks join together. They even copied a track we created for ingress/egress into a remote private residence. Johnson also copied FMT tracks in highly remote areas where there are countless possible track choices.
We are totally confident that any reasonable person looking at the two charts side by side would immediately conclude that the Humminbird āboat lanesā feature was created nearly 100% by copying ISLA tracks.
We will hold Johnson Outdoors fully accountable for willful copyright infringement. The blatant and willful nature of the obvious infringement of the hallmark feature of our product leaves us no choice.
To this end, ISLAās intellectual property attorneys, who filed all of the copyrights for the ISLA charts, filed a federal lawsuit in Florida in early April against Johnson Outdoors alleging:
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Willful Copyright Infringement
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Unfair Competition
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Common Law Unfair Competition
A jury trial was requested, and ISLA is seeking injunctive relief and substantive monetary damagesāincluding punitive damagesāalong with attorney fees.
The complaint has already been picked up and summarized by five different legal monitoring websites, so you may see it mentioned in the weeks ahead in newspapers, publications, or online blogs.
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Sue their butts off. And I didnāt know Johnson owned Scuba Pro - Iāll be boycotting that brand as well.
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Big companies steal from smaller companies knowing they can out-lawyer them and run them broke. They know the fall back is to settle for way less than a full blown law suit. These suits take years, several if not more to settle.
China is notorious for not honoring patents and copyrights. RTIC stole blatantly from Yeti and was sued. There is no waiting when it is blatant - Iāve never bought a RTIC product because of that. Itās sleezey.
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They got the data by copying fmt tracks directly and adding some other information. Why would they do it, well larger businesses often walk all over smaller businesses. They have much deeper pockets for lawsuits and smaller businesses know that.
You are 100% correct. It happens every day.
Donāt think those decision makers wont do most anything to keep their revenues up, and stay in that high paying position. As they would say ā its a business decisionā. If there is, or they can create enough gray area, thats where the lawyers come in. ā Its worth the risk, we can beat you with our lawyersāā¦.. or money. Cisco is notorious for doing it in the network market. Your naive if you dont think it goes on.
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I hope Glen collects big time
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All too often civil suits sink into a mire of delays, obstruction, and simply monies where a big player can just about bankrupt a smaller outfit seeking justice in our courtsā¦ Tru ādat, from what little i picked up around the edges of this or that civil suit over many years in law enforcement. Iāll be watching this and hoping to see justice prevail. By the way, on the criminal side of thingsā¦ I only saw what I considered to be ājusticeā once or twice in twenty two years in and out of courtā¦ Mostly it was about winning or losing -and always - who benefits one way or the otherā¦ Glad Iām long out of that world.
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Thatās saying a mouthful right there. Couldnāt agree more.
A quick addendum to my last post.. I was very lucky to get an early retirement from the agency I worked for back in 1995 (the city was in bad financial shape, needing to lay off a half dozen badges- when a very smart bean counter pointed out that paying the 15 or 16 most senior officers, sergeants, and lieutenants to retire - then only hiring a half dozen new officers at entry level pay.. would save the city a million dollars that first yearā¦ and they did just thatā¦). Most immediately went out and hired on with some other agency and started grabbing two paychecks each monthā¦ Only two of us got out of police work immediately - and I signed up with Sea School to get my captainās license - the rest is history.
It only took three years away from police work or so before I finally learned that everyone wasnāt lying to me (old habits die hard) - and to this day Iāll never be allowed to sit on any juryā¦. and so it goes. Best move I ever made coming back to fishing full timeā¦.
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