They were at least one of the patent owners. One of many things that soured me on the company (the rest being a series of more mainstream keyboards which deteriorated to become unusable, the last one I broke to bits when I finally gave up on it). And yeah when I had my accident it was north of $500 for the half QWERTY model, which was more than my rent at the time. The rest of their keyboards were retailing around $150.