With the ongoing attempts of French and European airsoft players for Cybergun to withdraw "abusive trademarks", we asked our Japanese airsoft industry sources what they think about this practice of Cybergun acquiring trademarks the Japanese airsoft company names, airsoft functions, and technologies they developed. In a reply from one source, it has only been recently that they found about this.

What they admit is that they have been looking too much inward to the Japanese airsoft market, and forgetting to trademark or patent the designs and technologies in other countries. Another reason is since they realised that there are growth opportunities for their products outside of Japan, they lacked awareness of the need to acquire trademarks overseas and will be correcting this weakness.

Their reaction to how the airsoft players are affected is that they think Cybergun's actions are excessive and they "prevent a healthy market from growing with using trademark registrations" to prevent competitors using airsoft functions/parts that they have trademarked even if they didn't develop these and should be owned by the Japanese companies who developed these in the first place. Also, the source says that since these are already words that are in general use by the airsoft industry and community, they shouldn’t be trademarked in the first place.

As mentioned by the Online Petition, Cybergun SA is in possession of 176 trademark registrations, and what we posted yesterday is just a partial list of the trademarks they own. You can download the full list of trademarks, whether registered (R), ended (E), or Applied for (A), by clicking on the screenshot below:

The trademarks in contention are not brand names and model names that Cybergun have taken licensing contracts from their original owners which they have 21 of these. What the airsoft players, and airsoft manufacturers are concerned about are the general words/terms that used in airsoft that Cybergun have trademarked and used to prevent competitors from entering the markets where these trademarks are in effect. Since the words they trademarked are general and are in use by the airsoft products by competitors, it is easy for Cybergun to have a lock in these markets. At the end of the day, it's a matter of choice on what airsoft brands that customers would want to get, and a healthy market would allow for more choices and innovations from among the competitors

Our source further states that the Japanese airsoft industry have generally worked together to improve on products and build on innovations to evolve the airsoft market; and that they don't want this synergy to be interfered with. They will be looking into actions on how such issues affecting airsoft players and industry competition will be resolved and that they will be paying attention to any moves by Cybergun from now on.