About Cupcake

I don’t have a beer gut, I’ve developed a liquid grain storage facility.

29 Replies to “I’m sick of all this Specialized hate”

  1. Reap what you sow…don’t want to be called a dick…don’t go out of your way to be one at every turn.

  2. I’m sick of it because people have a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation. S are required to enforce their trademarks if they want to have any chance of keeping them, and in an industry with so little differentiation between products, this really isn’t a choice at all.

    Get out their and ride your bike; don’t get duped by publicity stunts.

  3. Re-evaluation.

    The villain in this story is not Specialized. It’s the Canadian gubment. Why did they allow a company to trademark a town name in France that’s been around for like a billion years ????

    The Canucks need to pull their dicks out what ever Moose they be humping and re-evaluate their trademark laws.

  4. After watching that video, i DEMAND hydraulic disc brakes on my road bike. AND THEY BETTER NOT SQUEAL or imma pitch a fit.

  5. I think the hate should go on for a long, long time. Long enough to effect Specialized’s bottom line and make them regret what they’ve done. They need to be reminded that their core customers are cult-ish, intelligent, informed, and that biking as a whole will not tolerate corporate bullying now or in the future.

    We need to make them remember their mistake here. We need to make them feel enough pain in the bottom line so that actions like these never happen again. If we don’t, we are allowing the sport, the community, and the future of biking as a whole to be monopolized by corporate greed and fine print.

  6. Looks like Mike Sinyard is backing off. or maybe not.
    http://bicycleretailer.com/north-america/2013/12/10/cafe-roubaix-owner-says-sinyard-called-all-fine

    Doesn’t matter. I’ve slowly divested everything I owned made by those soulless corporate bullies except for a cheap pair of MTB shoes from 14 years ago. What should I do?

    1)Organize a Burn Your Specialized Shit event sorta like Burning Man. Imagine a bunch of hippies, anarchists, local bike shop owners who’ve been stiffed by the Big S and just everyday beerdrinking riders dancing around a huge bonfire of roasting Special Ed stuff.

    2)Fill the shoes full of concrete. When it hardens, drive by Specialized Headquarters in Morgan Hill, CA and pitch ’em through the front window.

    3) Fill the shoes full of dogshit, shrinkwrap ’em and mail them to Sinyard.

  7. Okay, that link that Mr. neutral posted has me giggling like a school girl. You can’t make this shit up. I’m not gonna buy a Fuji bike, but I think I’ll wander down to Performance Bike and buy some inner tubes and CO2 cartridges and shit, just to show solidarity. Stick it to The Man!

  8. I used to work for TIME bikes in the US and at InterBike in 2006 my boss sat down with people from QuickStep and Specialized to agree the terms of the contract buy-out. (Specialized buying out the remaining year of TIME’s sponsorship) It was agreed that Specialized would absolutely NOT use the QuickStep team, riders or logo in it’s advertising until January 1st. InterBike, as most of you know, is held in September and the meeting was held on the 1st Wednesday morning in Las Vegas. The next morning Specialized was running print and TV ads using Bettini and Boonen. Ads that must have already been made and scheduled when Sinyard was in that meeting.
    Months later, Patrick Lefévère called the owner of TIME at home in France asking to buy a lot of TIME forks to use on the Specialized bikes as a few of the Specialized ones had broken in training. Bummer

  9. It is not like this anything new…remember the Mountain Cycles
    Stumptown? That company went bankrupt trying to fight Specialized’s
    legal team.

  10. Not sick of it; fuck Specialized.

    Oh, and TripleT: the Canucks are likely just getting drunk and smoking crack. Moose are too tall.

  11. Stop with the trademarking of stupid-ass generalized shit. Just stop it already. Enough. To go around trying to trademark everything is absolutely ridiculous. They bring it upon themselves. Fak ’em. Cheers

  12. Big S was “protecting” a trademark that wasn’t theirs to protect, bottom line. Secondary aspect, how can you trademark a place name unless you have a product from that place? Anybody remember the Campy Daytona Gruppo? One year only as the Daytona Motor Speedway which is actually located in Daytona Beach FL sued for trademark violation. Campy renamed the gruppo Centaur but the original name lives on in some of the part numbers with the DAY prefix, or did for several years after the introduction as a 9-speed Gruppo. I think the entire line was changed to the CEN prefix after the change to a 10-speed configuration. I just happen to know this because I bought a Centaur 3*10 set for a show bike back in 2004 (Won my class in the car show).

  13. Um, why can the big S trademark a town? They are using the TM in relation to a bicycle. That doesn’t mean Roubaix is off limits to say somebody that wants to open a coffee shop incorporating the name….just not in relation to bicycles. Following the logic that you can’t trademark a town, why can’t the big S make a bicycle named Fuji then? How can Fuji Bicycles trademark a mountain? As long as two products with the same name cannot be confused with each other, then everything is kosher.

    If Specialized wanted to create a bicycle named “Preperation H”, then as long as the bike includes a seat, there should not be any confusion with the product found in a drugstore and they are good to go.

  14. Spesh should at least be punished for putting proprietary 1-3/8″ head tubes on their cx forks. ‘cuz there’s totally gonna be decent headsets for that in a few years…

  15. Specialized back down on legal action

    Specialized founder and owner Mike Sinyard has apologised in person to the owner of the Café Roubaix bike shop in Cochrane, Alberta after resolving a trademark violation concerning the shop’s name.

    Specialized withdrew its action against the war veteran after its provoked a PR disaster leading to Advanced Sports International, who own the Fuji bicycles brand, stepping in claiming it owns the worldwide copyright on Roubaix.

    Following the criticism of pursuing the case, Sinyard sought to calm the storm. “I met with Dan (Richter), the owner, and things are resolved,” he told Cyclingnews.

  16. Looks like sinyard has called off the epix too, ck out the fb page linked above. In yard seems to be owning up ( or realizing what a fucking shitstorm the created) so we shall see what the future holds. He actually makes a good case for what is behind this. No big fan of S but can see how a bunch of lawyers could go off on this and with some fair rationale. Hopefully this teaches S and others a valuable lesson.
    And IPA is great on a cool AZ winter night!

  17. ^^Thats very cool. I really liked the vid he did with Cafe Roubaix guy. PR scheme or not I feel like his taking ownership of the situation was the proper thing to do-one that we don’t see that often these days.

  18. I don’t believe SpecialEd or Sinyard in the slightest. It was only after a weeks worth of terrible publicity and being called out by ASI before they bothered to get off their asses. They had no choice but jump in and apologize but it wasn’t for any reason other than to save, salvage, public image.

    Had Sinyard been concerned with it it never would have gone so far and it wouldn’t have been repeated so many times with so many companies. So Sinyard can take his insincere apology sit at a table and eat a bag o dicks.