Saturday 14 June 2008

Intellectual Poperty Office-How they aided a crook. 4.

From now on the Cobra/Viper story is really two stories in one. There was the ongoing story of the business of making the Cobra/Vipers and there was the never ending saga of all the legal matters that would open out. Not just one legal story but one legal fight after another and all bar one involving the biggest bunch of incompetents going at the then Patent Office in Cardiff. I often wondered if the whole place was really staffed by Welsh sheep, but you can make your own mind up.
The very first legal battle of course, started, while I was finishing off the business in Germany, but as I have already said it got off to a very slow start. Kings presented direct to Chrysler evidence that Busbridge trading as Cobretti Engineering was or had been my agent until I sacked him at the end of 1991. We gave them copies of the agency agreement and letters that had been sent to Busbridge warning him that I was the legal owner of the Mark. Also evidence that I had been using the Mark since early 1986. I thought that it was simple, they would accept this evidence as it was on record in many places that I had been using the Mark as both Brightwheel and Brightwheel Replicas had been well known companies and the product had been well known and well advertised with records of articles in the National press and the two TV companies BBC and ITV.
I thought they would tell Busbridge to get lost and would sit down and talk with myself as to what we would do over them wanting to register my Mark, which even though it was not registered, i had Common Law on my side with indisputable proof of prior usage to them. But then I have always found the Yanks to be prime assholes, to use one of their terms, and didn't I know. Not only had I had to put up with two Yanks of dubious standards who were typical Yanky bullshit merchants, but I had also been to the States a good few times when we were trying to take on an agent to cover selling our kits throughout the States. Every Yank I ever dealt with and I had dealt with them in San Franscisco, Atlanta, Niagra Falls, and Buddy Holly country in the middle of Texas. Every damn one of them was nothing more than a lying scheming, bullshitter who would fuck you around with empty promises. I had got sick of them by 1990 and now I was having to deal with one of their biggest car makers who were to turn out not one jot better than all the cockroaches I had met before. Talk about duplicitous, I think they invented the word.
Well of course Chrysler did not accept my evidence and my not knowing exactly what Busbridge had said to them, did not help. It became evident fairly soon that Bob Busbridge at least was a Yank in disguise, as he was an arch liar and he had fed them with a story full of lies which the stupid bastards seemed to have believed.
At this point I should point out that I only seemed to hear tales as told by Bob Busbridge and no mention of Martin Busbridge. I was to find out over the years by little stories people who knew me and who heard it on the grapevines, and in snippets of evidence that Bob gave over the years. Whilst I did not get the full story until years later I may as well tell you it now and this way you can see up front what happened, why, and how and why Bob is what he is. Quite frankly I think he should have been certified years ago, as he is patently a serial liar or technically they call it being a pathological liar. What annoys me intensely is that throughout my story I never make statements I cannot back up with documentary evidence. I had given the Patent Office dozens and dozens of examples of his lying, which you would think would alert them to the fact that here they are dealing with someone who is at least economical with the truth to being an outright liar and his evidence therefore has to be viewed with the utmost suspicion and in many case be discounted completely. In all the years of dealing with these third raters, never once did they do this. It seemed to me that they believed every word he ever uttered even when I showed he had categorically lied.
You will see all this as I go through the whole story, but at the beginning his first lies in his fairy tale story he spun them was that he owned the Mark because he started using the Mark Viper in 1987 by selling kits. Of course he omitted to tell them that at that time I was using him as an agent for BRL and I had not taken him on until about February 1988. That this was the case until I then took him on again as my agent for my new business from September 1989, called Classic Replicas. He then said when my first trading company Bightwheel Replicas Ltd (BRL) had gone bankrupt I had run off with all the customers money to Switzerland and had abandoned the Cobra business in the UK. They then felt they could legitimately take it over which they did. So Chrysler there you have it, we are the legal owners now!! Do a deal with us and give us lots of lovely lolly!!
Now what had happened to Martin? When I had stayed with him in 1990 for a week, he owned a house with his wife and her parents not too far from Sutton in a nice area. Apparently Bob had persuaded him to take out a second mortgage on that house to give them some working capital either to see them through a difficult patch or even to save the business or even to pay for all the frantic copying of my products, that they were undergoing at that time. But of course whoever was running the business did not have a clue and they were heading for disaster. First they could no longer afford the expensive workshop and as I told you already they moved into a cheaper workshop which they shared with some reptile they had met who had some tenuous link with cars. I heard it was him that put all the ideas into their heads about what they could get out of Chrysler etc. Then when I started to threaten all sorts of legal action, this had been the last straw with Martin, and if the truth were known probably the tenuous state of their finances hadn't helped either.
Certainly by the end of 1992 he broke completely with Bob and he disappeared and had never been seen again, and to this day he has had no contact with his brother. A pretty extreme state of affairs, you may well say, and I would agree with you. What could have happened to make this drastic situation happen? I heard from a reliable source that because the bank called in its loans which could not be paid it had meant that Martin lost his house and that cost him his marriage. Naturally he would not feel kindly disposed to his brother and I feel that he probably blamed him both for dragging him and the business into legal fights that he did not want to be involved in, maybe he had never agreed to the stealing of my business, I do not know, but it is a possibility. Knowing just how useless Bob was at everything he did, no doubt he was mainly to blame for the finances.
Funnily enough I passed his house some years after in the late 90's and I saw his wife come out of the front door, so although he definitely was not around and was in the USA, and then later on in Spain, she was still there. So I can only surmise that if the story about the loan on the house was true, that maybe her parents bailed her out, but he went anyway. Whatever.

So we have this situation that Chrysler are believing his cock and bull story and I have to fight it every inch of the way and this fight took me no less than FIVE YEARS PLUS!!!! I am committed to do this because if I do not Chrysler will get registration, they may do some sort of deal with Busbridge, maybe he will get money for something I own, and I will end up with nothing, not even my own Trade Mark.

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