If they can find a way round any patents applying.... Patent offices have got terribly lax these days, you could probably patent the letter "e" in the USA if you wrapped the concept up in enough pseudotechnical language, so what usually happens is that the "following" manufacturers buy an example or two, pull it to bits then engineer some different mechanism which "appears" to do the same thing.

If the same effort and expertise was put into being genuinely creative, perhaps we'd get somewhere.