Did I hear correctly that the US had to pay Mauser a royalty fee for using a bolt action in the manufacture of the 03 Springfield rifle that was similar to the Mauser? Or was it another military rifle?

Yes, that is correct. The design of the action was determined to be a patent infringement and a royalty payment was set up. IIRC, we paid out about $200K for use of the patents, which included the design of the clips, safety, extractor and a few other elements of the design.

Thanks Bigwagon.

Two minutes for an answer. Not bad SigForum.

In WWI we told the Germans to fuck off over the settlement.

quote:

Originally posted by Mars_Attacks:
In WWI we told the Germans to fuck off over the settlement.

No, these Mauser patent royalties were paid off years before WW1. The $200k owed to Mauser was settled in 1904 and was paid in full by 1909. WW1 started in 1914, and US involvement started in 1917.

You're thinking of the later, separate case involving patent infringement brought by another German weapons firm Deutsche Waffen Munitionsfabriken (DWM) over the spitzer bullet design used on the US's .30-06 cartridge. DWM's suit requested $250k in damages for patent infringement. That case was initiated in mid-1914, just before the outbreak of WW1, and dragged on unsettled due to the war. In 1917, the US government just seized the corresponding spitzer bullet patent as "enemy assets", since we were then formally at war with Germany at that point and DWM was a German company.

So in that manner, we tried to tell the Germans to fuck off over the DWM's spitzer bullet patent (not the Mauser rifle patent issue, which was long over with).

However, a renewed lawsuit was brought by DWM after the war in 1920 over the government's seizure of the assets as an attempt to eliminate the original patent issue, and when the dust finally settled in 1928 after a series of lost appeals by the US, the US fully lost the case. The US government ended up having to pay DWM damages, interest, and penalties amounting to $412k in total.

So that "attempted fuck off" to DWM (and 'ze Germans' by proxy) didn't stick, and ended up costing the US government almost twice as much in the long run. Actually probably more than twice as much, if you count lawyer fees and other associated costs for the US government to address these suits and appeals.