Segway files patent lawsuit against 'hoverboard' maker Inventist

Those two-wheeled "hoverboards" that you've been seeing under the feet of NBA players and various celebs may be grounded by legal trouble as Segway has filed a lawsuit against their manufacturer.

Segway, the company founded over a decade ago by Dean Kamen, which pioneered two-wheeled, self-balancing vehicles, launched the lawsuit against Inventist, the maker of the Hovertrax, the balance board some are referring to as a hoverboard.

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Revealed in a report by the Hollywood Reporter, the patent lawsuit, which was filed on Friday, also takes aim at Inventist's other self-balancing device, the one-wheeled Solowheel.

However, Investist apparently believes that it has every right to sell its device, since it reportedly filed its own lawsuit against Soibatian Corporation, the makers of the IO Hawk, a device that looks and works a lot like the Hovertrax.

But that's not the end of the story. One of the most popular so-called hoverboards on the market is the Phunkeeduck. Like the Hovertrax and the IO Hawk, the Phunkeeduck looks like a smaller version of the Segway, just with the handlebar removed.

Although these tiny, Segway-esque devices are gaining in popularity, as opposed to the less popular Segway itself, how Segway plans to defend itself from so many copycats (including some in China) remains to be seen.

In the meantime, you'll probably continue to see people riding their "hoverboards" in the nation's largest cities, lawsuit or not. The hot trend genie is out of the bottle: people love their hoverboards.