Total non-equivalence with medical machinery. EHX does Research and Design in house for the products that they have manufactured for sale, as opposed to a medical device where a manufacturer (and then hospital) licenses a patent from a designer or someone else who bought that design.
Medical innovation will always occur because of precisely what you mentioned- it is a huge-money industry and highly-regulated (unlike much of the technology industry where cloning is rampant).
The issue with EHX is exactly the kind of thing that will stifle innovation in the MI industry, because R+D and innovation are some of the main things setting the name brands apart from the plethora of cheap Chinese cloners (“innovation”, or lack thereof, puts Fender and Gibson in a different class for the most part from a company like EHX). In EHX’s case, a company literally lifted the entire digital algorithm of one of their pedals to undersell them (with the EHX signature code still intact). If another company can get away with such blatant theft of hard work and design, what possible motivation could there be to invest in future R+D? Its not like EHX has gone after any of the hundreds of pedal makers building Muff derivatives or anything- they simply saw an opportunity to draw a line in the sand and try to set a new precedent at a time when digital code is becoming their bread and butter and is much easier to copy but also to compare quantitatively in court (at their own cost, because filing and arguing a lawsuit is not cheap).
