Since I like all things patents, let's dig a bit. Henry/Hank...

Since I like all things patents, let's dig a bit.

Henry/Hank Whetstone used to own Whetstone Candy Company, it is now called the Atlantic Candy Company.

Yowie boasts that they have exclusive rights to capsules in chocolate in the US through patents US5925391 and US6099872. Both of these patents are still in force and are owned by Henry Whetstone. Note that *872 is a child of *391 so they share the same priority date, and thus the same expiry date: 22/04/2018.

Whetstone has since lodged 3 more patent applications (US20110041706, US20110045114 and US20110045155) all of which have been abandoned due to the US Patent Office objecting to their patentability.

Whetstone tried to sue Kevin Gass from Candy Treasure for infringing his 2 patents, they ended up "settling out of court" in 2014. Candy Treasure then got their own patent US8859024 and started making and selling suprise eggs anyway. There were a few articles saying that Whetstone licensed to Candy Treasure too but the fact that they designed a new egg and patented it purposefully avoiding Whetstone's patents suggested Gass told Whetstone to get stuffed; who knows.

Yowie announced that at the end of 2015, they would stop paying licence fees to Whetstone. Any form of exclusivity that Whetstone had with Yowie is now gone and Whetstone can allow anyone he likes to use his patents to make surprise eggs. This includes licensing/selling to Ferrero if he really wanted to; as far as I can tell he is not making any money from his patents at the moment.

Yowie claims to have a "patent pending" for their "new capsule" at the Madeleine plant; I cannot find anything in my databases on this patent application. This means one of two things, 1) it is a very new application and is not open for public inspection yet or 2) it is very hard to find and I am not as good as I think I am!
If it is 1), it might be a while before it is even examined by a patent office so there is no way to tell if it's an enforceable patent worth the paper it's written on.

My analysis

Henry knows that he only has a couple of years left of this sweet ride of a 2 decade monopoly of surprise eggs. I can only assume he tried to license to Candy Treasures to get a few years revenue from them and got told to stick it; so much for being exclusive to Yowie. He probably got unreasonable with Yowie, maybe asking for more money, so they up and left him. He is now going down in a blaze of legal glory since he doesn't seem to have the knack of filing profitable patents anymore.

Happy to answer any questions anyone has.

Side note

Do you think Wayne Loxton and Neville Bassett will flip YOW into a medical marijuana company like they just did with GLN? Medicinal Yowies anyone?