Could have sworn reading that the agreement was specifically for the DI-3 detector but okay.
Ah okay. I searched for Baker’s previous name as mentioned in that document & found this wiki page, which would mean that Baker (& thus possibly Pyrotronics too) goes back as far as 1925!
Wait…does that seriously mean that Cerberus might have had a deal with the company that would eventually become Baker Industries all the way back then, & that only in the early 80s did they finally object to such a deal for seemingly no reason?
It reads, “Defendant Cerberus owns certain patent rights relating to the manufacture of ionization smoke detectors. On April 1, 1973, Cerberus entered into an agreement with Baker under which Cerberus granted Baker an exclusive twenty-year license to make, use and sell detector devices using Cerberus’s patents in the United States, Canada and Mexico.” There is no reference to the DI-3 in particular, which I did not see any ads for until the early 1980s.
1982 was also when Gamewell started partnering with Cerberus to distribute the R-7, according to this ad. The DI-3 may have been intended for Gamewell to distribute as an ionization alternative to the R-7.
The footnote mentioned above claims there was an earlier agreement from 1951, but there could have been another 20 year agreement before that (around 1931). According to the wiki page you found, Pyrene acquired C-O-Two in 1933, which might mean 1951 was a typo that should read 1953 (20 years after a hypothetical agreement in 1933 and 20 years before the updated 1973 agreement).
It also seems that Baker owned the patents for the XL3 addressable protocol, despite Gamewell apparently using a similar protocol on the Flex 500. I think Baker may have licensed this protocol to Cerberus after Cerberus acquired Gamewell.
This increases the chances that Cerberus acquired the entirety of Baker, since the MXL had a loop card for XL3 devices, which could have been more complicated if Baker still held the patents as a separate company.