Comment by davidee
7 months ago
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.
If they want to require this technology for every device on the market they need to allow other manufacturers to compete in producing it - there is likely a middle ground where only some of their patents would need to be relinquished for competitors to build a product that uses a different specific method but SawStop has an awful lot of patents and has been incredibly litigious in a bad faith manner before.
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>Gass also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product.
So what? That doesn't make him NOT an attorney. There's nothing that says a PhD and product inventor can't ALSO be a engaged in a scheme to have their own patent encumbered invention mandated by law.
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.