Comment by poulsbohemian
7 months ago
I think there are lots of people who would like to see this technology expanded. The issues going back more than a decade has been over the licensing of the patents. SawStop spent a lot of years aggressively suing over its IP and/or pushing for this legislation so that they could have regulatory capture. That's the problem, not the concept of safety. Maybe things have changed by now and we'll be able to see greater innovation in this space.
Sawstop already offered their key patent for free to get this technology adopted.
https://www.sawstop.com/news/sawstop-to-dedicate-key-u-s-pat...
They offered to relinquish one important patent, but they have a huge portfolio of patents covering blade breaks specifically applied to table saws. If you go look at the actual testimony instead of a summarized article, SawStop's representative very explicitly will not even discuss relinquishment of their other patents including their patent on "using electrical signals to detect contact with arbor mounted saws" which does not expire until 2037.
A large part of the testimony was companies such as Grizzly complaining that SawStop is unwilling to engage with them in good faith on licensing their technology. Given SawStop's history, I'm unfortunately inclined to believe them.
And this right here is the key bit. SawStop was started by patent attorney Steve Gass. He has spent years claiming that other vendors won't talk to him while leaving out the actual terms of his licensing (which, by some rumors, was somwhere around "extortionate"). Bosch released a saw with similar tech in the US and then SawStop sued the product off of the market.
Every step of the way Glass has not acted in good faith and instead acted like a patent attorney. We have little reason to believe that he has all of a sudden found goodwill toward man in his heart when there's a dollar somewhere he could instead put into his wallet.
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> their patent on "using electrical signals to detect contact with arbor mounted saws" which does not expire until 2037.
I'm curious about when that was filed and whether there's an Australian patent on "using electrical signals to detect close contact and then stop machine ripping through flesh" from ~1982 (ish) for a sheep shearing robot.
Tangential prior art exists (as is common with many patents) but it's always a long drawn out bunfight that largely only laywers win to engage in patent disputes.
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On the date this comes into affect, either because they know they'll have to or for the PR (or both, the PR of coming out with it first). Not goodness of heart. As GP says they've prevented wider industry adoption by aggressively defending their patents in the past, despite not distributing their saws in Europe or expanding the range into other tools.
> Sawstop already offered their key patent for free
They didn't offer the patent, the offered to offer. It's no different to when billionaires pledge to donate billions, yet year after year they're still on the Forbes top 100.
This is so naive to believe them.
Came here for this.
It's a cost thing that the craptastic, corporate inversion power tool megacorps and Hazard Fraught's have resisted.
Btw, here's the video I got gargling for "!yt ave table saw", which compares a "Rigid" HF house brand saw to a SawStop saw:
https://youtu.be/RFsuemFKYjM
PS: https://hfpricetracker.com which emphasizes the demand-side obsession of budget-priced gear. Perhaps a bigger issue is working people should be paid more (income equality) so they aren't pushed to buy or rent crappier, more dangerous tools.
According to a recent Stumpy Nubs video, Saw Stop isn't the villain they've been made out to be (or at least has changed their tune substantially).
TLDR; They've offered not to defend their patent (or whatever the patent mumbo jumbo is) if the legislation goes through.
Stumpy Nubs on the subject: https://youtu.be/nxKkuDduYLk?si=c0GchB2hc3g0OtG4
The recent CPSC hearing where many of the revelations came out: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyJGE2Vyid0&t=0s
Stumpy Nubs is a fine woodworker and a great YouTuber, but he, unlike the CEO of SawStop, is not a patent attorney. Over and over in his video he glosses over serious problems with the Saw Stop proposal and presumes goodwill on behalf of SawStop.
That goodwill is not warranted, nothing about Glass' or SawStop's behavior suggests that they're doing anything other than trying to force people to license their product by way of regulation. If they want to claim they are giving the license away, then do the whole patent portfolio (required for a functioning system), not just one of them.
They've already sued their competitors to keep similar products off of the market and there is zero reason for us, the regulators, or the competition to trust this organization.
>Stumpy Nubs is a fine woodworker and a great YouTuber, but he, unlike the CEO of SawStop, is not a patent attorney.
Gass also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product.
>If they want to claim they are giving the license away, then do the whole patent portfolio (required for a functioning system), not just one of them.
They want to stay in business. If they give away all of the intellectual property of their entire system, it's likely that they wouldn't be able to for very long.
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I think they sold out to a European firm a few years ago - I stopped paying attention to this space a few years ago, so like I said in my OP - could be the playing field has changed, and perhaps the current owner of this IP is in a different place.
> That's the problem, not the concept of safety.
Per the article, SawStop offered to 'open source' (as we'd say) the patent. Also, in TFA, end users objected to the regulation.
Weren’t the seatbelt and insulin famously given away? The people who own Sawstop IP are greedy people who have the blood, lost appendages, and deaths of a nearly countless number of people on their greedy shoulders. Absolutely shameless behavior.
I won’t sit here and say I have the solution; but this status quo is undeniably bad. Unchecked capitalism like this makes want me to vomit. Think of how many people would be living a better life if every table saw had this technology mandated by law for the past decade. Really think about it.
This is a bizarre take because if not for SawStop, many, many more people would have lost blood, appendages, and lives to conventional table saws. In fact, SawStop the company only exists because 20 years ago every table saw manufacturer refused to license the technology from the inventor. None of them wanted it at any price because it would increase the cost of their saws and reduce their profits.
> None of them wanted it at any price
Do we actually know this? Or could the license terms have just been too high?
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Many more people _who have the money to invest in a premium saw_ have saved their appendages. People who can’t afford the saw have continued to lose them. That’s part of the issue here.
SS was not the only company to come up with blade sensing technology...
It's certainly an interesting problem to examine... my understanding was always that patents were designed to foster innovation by giving an inventor a way to make money on their IP so long as they gave the idea to the world. Somewhere along the way that got weaponized. So is the solution that we need to reform patents, or do we need some other way to both allow innovators to make money but in a way that doesn't exploit other parties trying to expand the footprint of a good idea? It's complicated.
Many who argue for unchecked market systems also dispute the validity of IP, because it is viewed as a destructive intervention from the state rather than a market system.
https://www.stephankinsella.com/own-ideas/