As a lawyer, you also know that in many situations a cease and desist can easily be challenged if it was a BS bully tactic by a company.
As someone who was blamed directly by CL in their BS and lies, I can tell you that Sneeky is telling you the truth.
I have not and will not go into all of the details, but let's just say this... I met the owners of CL at PDXLAN, and even thanked them for supporting a great community. I saw their product and told them"You guys make some great chassis, but be ready as we have our own modular chassis coming soon"... Far different than the story from father and son owners of CL, in which case I had asked them if I could take pictures to send to my design team so we can make it (Who the hell with any sense would actually do that?!?)
My only saving grace in the situation was the abundance of people (modders and attendees who observed the kind exchange) who backed what actually took place when this all came about while I was in TW for Computex.
The major issue came down to a lot of media taking CL at their word and publishing stories saying Tt copied a bunch of products including the Swiftech apogee. Which I personally found quite humorous, as I am good friends with Gabe the founder/owner of Swiftech, and even helped set up comms with Tt and Swiftech to license and have the block produced by Swiftech.
Long story short, I worked with the Thermaltake design team to revolutionize their case models, and many of the effects can be seen to this day in various capacities.
Do I think the Core W and Core X series was similar to the CL offerings? yea, probably, but then again, before raising the pitchforks, you should probably ask Ben from Mountain Mods, his feelings when CL essentially took his idea and made it their own... or Antec about Fractal... the list can go on forever.
Anyways, at least now you know the basics of the shit show that was CL trying to save face as their bad business decisions for their main company sunk the lot. (TL
R CL's parent company f****d up and leveraged themselves too far and when a major client defaulted they could not recover...hence CL dies with the main ALU/metal fab company)
Even if Tt had never made any of the core cases everyone claims was a ripoff of CL, the writing was on the wall, and when the client defaulted, they would have faltered.
Cheers,
Shannon (Formerly of Thermaltake)