Well, golf friends, it appears that the PXG and TaylorMade lawsuit has finally been settled.  If you didn’t know there was a lawsuit pending between these two, I’ll give you a little background.  In a nutshell, around Q3 of 2017, PXG started pursuing legal action against TaylorMade for what they claimed were eight patent infringements as a result of TaylorMade’s P790 irons.  Then TaylorMade counter-sued stating that PXG was infringing on seven of their patents.  THEN PXG shot back and added THREE MORE infringements onto their list bringing the total up to a whopping 11 infringements.  That’s 18 total patent infringements to debate.

I’m not a legal expert so I won’t try to get super technical around the PXG/TaylorMade legal jargon, but in general, the lawsuit was around TaylorMade’s use of “SpeedFoam” in a hollow iron.  PXG believed they were first to that party with their design and had many patents around it, while TaylorMade believed the PXG patents weren’t specific enough that they would incriminate TaylorMade’s design.  Again, this is a very simple high-level summary of the disagreement.

This was bound to get sticky with one of the most cavalier personalities in the equipment industry having everything to gain, and one of the biggest juggernauts of the industry having quite a bit to lose.  Well, once the back-and-forth dust settled, this lawsuit sort of just slipped to the background and the industry went on its merry way.

Then mid-last week, TaylorMade Golf officially issued the release below:

CARLSBAD, Calif. (January 30, 2019) – TaylorMade Golf Company and Parsons Xtreme Golf (PXG) jointly announced today that they have reached a settlement of the pending patent litigation and related patent disputes between the parties.

Under the terms of the agreement, each company will have specified rights to make club products under patent cross-licenses.

“I’m pleased that we were able to reach an acceptable and amicable resolution to put this case behind us so we can continue focusing on bringing industry leading equipment innovations to the golfer.”

“As a golf equipment innovator, PXG will continue to pursue research and development and obtain patents for our novel club designs in the iron technology space. We will not hesitate to assert those patents in the future.”

DETAILS OF THE SETTLEMENT ARE CONFIDENTIAL.

I figured given Parson’s bad-boy approach to everything, this was sure to draw out for awhile and get bloody for someone.  Either way, I’m very curious what the extent of the agreement is, but it looks like both parties are currently free to keep the machine moving.  Furthermore, I’m curious to see how much more of this we’ll see from PXG in the industry.

Additional note: PXG didn’t just pursue legal action against TaylorMade for patent infringement, they also pursued action against major retailers for selling the P790 iron and “doing irreparable harm to PXG’s business.”  Sorry, I have no idea what came of that pursuit at this point.  If I Google it and find out, I’ll be sure to update this post.