Commercially Successful Bicycle Rear Suspension Patents

I'm a mountain biking enthusiast and patent attorney.  If you visit on-line forums such as Mountain Bike Review you will come across posts directed to, or including opinions regarding one or more bicycle related patents.  Usually, there are a series of posts by various people condemning or supporting a patent owner with respect to allegations of patent infringement.  Additionally, there usually are posts incorrectly characterizing a patent and asserting that it should never have been issued.  In view of this, I thought it may be helpful (and hopefully interesting) to write about patent law, generally, and provide accurate summaries of several commercially successful bicycle rear suspension patents (e.g., Niner's CVA, Intense's and Santa Cruz's VPP, Specialized's FSR aka the "Horst link" after the inventor Horst Leitner, and Dave Weagle's "DW-link" used by Turner and Pivot, and Dave Weagle's "Split Pivot" used by Devinci).  Additionally, I may write about patent litigation concerning patents on bicycle suspensions and other bicycle-related products. (e.g., dw-link Incorporated v. Giant Bicycle Inc et. al.).