Strava has dropped its lawsuit against Garmin, telling a court in Colorado on Tuesday that it is “voluntarily” stepping away from the legal battle it launched 21 days ago alleging patent infringement.
In a filing in the U.S. District Court in Colorado, Strava noted that it “voluntarily dismisses the above-captioned action, without prejudice.” It puts an end to a brief dispute that saw Strava challenge a technology giant that it formally held a strong working relationship with ten years ago when the companies signed an agreement.
Last month the company launched a lawsuit against Garmin claiming that its patents related to heatmaps and segments were violated.
In a sign that Strava was wavering in its legal strategy against Garmin, the company told independent developers that utilize its underlying architecture to comply with Garmin’s new data attribution rules ahead of a November 1 deadline.
“Garmin’s new API Brand Guidelines now require even downstream developers that do not connect directly with Garmin to include brand attribution when data is sourced from a Garmin device,” Strava’s email to developers partly read.
Any developer unwilling to agree to Garmin’s guideline, which it issued in July, would likely be blocked from syncing Garmin-derived data. The rule change stated that Garmin’s logo must be displayed on platforms where Garmin data is synced via its watches and bike computers.
Still, Strava backing away from its lawsuit is a quick end to a legal saga that drew the attention of the running world to a pair of brands that millions of runners rely on to seamlessly collect, sync, analyze, store and display workout data regularly.
On September 30, Strava filed its lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Colorado with the patent claims and reaffirmed its stance on its issues with Garmin in a statement on October 14. Strava was also adamant about proceeding with widely rumored plans of seeking plans to take the company public as published reports noted that major United States-based financial institutions were being invited to potentially assist in the process.
At the time of the filing of its lawsuit, Strava said it “suffered damages, including lost revenue and business opportunities, erosion of competitive differentiation and network effects, harm to goodwill, and unjust gains to Garmin.”
The company applied for the heatmap-related patent on December 15th, 2014 and which was granted in 2016. Strava’s segments patent was filed on March 31st, 2011 but not issued until August 2015 while the feature had been part of its platform since 2009.
Garmin has had similar features for years and in 2015 the companies signed a “Master Cooperation Agreement,” that defined a working relationship to help develop Garmin’s segment feature. Part of the working agreement meant that Garmin would use Strava’s segments on its devices and platforms that same year.
Part of the agreement noted that Garmin would not be allowed to show Strava segments and Garmin segments at the same time on its platform. Strava apparently believed that Garmin would stop developing the segments feature.
Garmin has not publicly commented on the withdrawal of the lawsuit but will turn its attention to another legal matter as Suunto filed its own suit against Garmin that alleged infringement on five patents.
Strava will likely continue reinforcing its IPO efforts in a busy year that included the acquisition of popular running training app Runna and cycling platform The Breakaway after topping a reported $2 billion in valuaton.
