Hey all. I don’t have time right now to respond to everything but as far as the naming goes it doesn’t all make sense to me either. Some of these names and designs are “publicly available designs” meaning essentially they’re open source. Anyone can build a C8 and call it a C8 but some companies (like Convoy) do it better than others. In these publicly available designs they may be required to use the original name but I’m just guessing.
The BD series lights to the best of my knowledge were originally made and solder under the Dipper brand name but Convoy now manufactures most of them. I don’t know what the exact rules are but take the BD04 for example. It’s made by Convoy but it’s also sold by Thorfire under the same name and neither company is doing anything illegal in doing so. Convoy does use some of these public designs and does a very good job of them.
As The Miller correctly said earlier, the L2 and L6 are both original Convoy designs and can not legally be produced by anyone else. Hopefully we will never see clones of these lights but it’s quite hard to control in China. It wouldn’t be a very cost effective design to clone though. Simon isn’t making huge profits on these and it seems like a cheaply made clone would stick out like a sore thumb…