Comment by Junk_Collector
7 months ago
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.
He also has a PhD in physics and was the person who designed and engineered the product: https://www.machinepix.com/p/machinepix-weekly-30-dr-steve-g...
>Gass: I was out in my shop one day, and I looked over at my table saw, and the idea kind of came to me. I wondered if one could stop the blade fast enough if you ran your hand into it to prevent serious injury.
>I started puttering around on how to stop things quickly. The simplest would have been a solenoid, but that would have been too slow and weak. I had come from RC airplanes—so I used the nose landing gear torsion spring from an RC airplane for an early experiment, that spring provided the force and I held it back with a fuse wire, a maybe 10 thou diameter fuse wire. I set up some capacitors to discharge through the wire and melt it in a few milliseconds, and I was able to generate maybe 20 lbs of force against a blade.
So this isn't one of those cases of a patent attorney taking over an existing invention/company.
>Gass: Now that SawStop is established, any royalties Grizzly might pay would be less than what SawStop could earn by selling the same number of saws itself, and therefore, as I have explained, a license at the present time is far more challenging because of the risk it creates to SawStop’s business. This, of course, changes should the CPSC implement a requirement for table saws to include active injury mitigation systems. Should that happen, we have said we would offer non-discriminatory licenses to all manufacturers.
Insightful quote:
> The fundamental question came down to economics. Almost a societal economic structure question. The CPSC says table saws result in about $4B in damage annually. The market for table saws is about $200-400M. This is a product that does almost 10x in damage as the market size. There's a disconnect—these costs are borne by individuals, the medical system, workers comp—and not paid by the power tools company. Because of that, there’s not that much incentive to improve the safety of these tools. Societally if there was an opportunity to spend $5 to save $10, we’d want to do that. But in this chain there's a break in people that can make those changes and people that are affected, so it’s not done.
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Yes, he has a PhD in physics as well as being a practicing patent attorney, a skill he put to use over and over in the past 20 years. We don’t have to guess how this org will behave, we have plenty of history upon which to judge their sincerity.
If they want to give the patents (note the plural there) for the benefit of mankind, they can do so. They are not doing so.
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> So this isn't one of those cases of a patent attorney taking over an existing invention/company.
That's also not what the person you're responding to was arguing.
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The Bosch design wasn't just similar, it was much better, by being non-destructive. Bosch instantly retracts the blade into the table using a $5 gas cartridge. Replace that cartridge and get back to work. By contrast, SawStop destroys a $100+ brake module PLUS your $$ saw blade every time it triggers (including false positives due to damp wood). To this day, I wish I could buy the Bosch design in the US.
Nitpick: It doesn't destroy your blade. You just have to get it resharpened and possibly get some new teeth brazed on.
Otherwise, yeah i agree its annoying to pop the break on a wet piece of wood or a missed nail.
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Yeah but in 2017 TTS (the parent company of Festool) acquired SawStop.
https://www.sawstop.com/news/sawstop-to-be-acquired-by-tts-t...
TTS is a magnitude bigger than SawStop and they might have different ideas than a narrow minded patent attorney.
Sure, but who exactly did they send to congress to make the case? Our good friend, Steve Gass, Esq.
TTS owns the shop but Gass clearly still has influence here.
>a narrow minded patent attorney.
He's got a PhD in Physics, and invented the core Stop Saw product after dabbling in woodworking as a hobby for many years.
Call him anything, but narrow minded isn't one of the descriptors that applies.
> 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.
It'll be a terrible lawyer knight fight that bleeds money from everyone except the lawyers and the conclusion will some BS like "Sheep flesh != human flesh therefor the patent is not invalid."