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.
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.
>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.
> 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.
That's clearly a false analysis - the size of a commodity market is determined as much by the equilibrium cost of making the goods as it is by the demand side. The cost of banning an inexpensive but essential part of your car would be far greater than the total number of dollars changing hands every year to purchase them.
It's not false, it's just ignoring the additional dimensions. In the same way that the societal cost of banning cars would be much higher than the value of the car (because cars enable commuting, leisure, cargo transport etc), the societal value of table saws in creating furniture, houses, whatever is much higher than the retail price of the table saw.
> Federal government should start paying companies like this a hefty lump sum and take the patents by eminent domain
This means seizing the ruling class gets to seize anyone's inventions. Nobody writing these rules intends that. But while we can forgive the first dozen attempts out of naivety and, later, stupidity, I'm not sure how we similarly excuse modern performances.
Patent expiration into the public domain is already “the ruling class seizing inventions” in the same sense (in the sense that it isn’t — in both cases, the goal is to make nobody profit from the patent any longer; not to transfer the profits to the government.)
Patents only exist as a concept, as a way to construct an equitable compensation for invention, to incentivize invention, that allows the market to determine what the total compensation over the legal lifetime of the patent should be, by licensing it or refusing to at given prices.
Insofar as an equitable compensation / patent “value” can be determined analytically on a one-off basis, you don’t need the patent system; the government can just buy out at that price, and the same goal will have been achieved.
Theoretically I agree completely. However in practice, analytically figuring out a dollar amount that isn't over or under paying seems nearly impossible. I fear that the gov would be buying out a lot of useless patents. That would also create an even bigger incentive to get BS patents through, because you don't even have to prove the value in the market, you just gotta convince a bureaucrat that it could be beneficial to humanity.
Why do you expect this? This doesn't happen with existing uses of eminent domain — lobbyist landholders aren't going around convincing the government to buy out useless land to their profit.
Eminent domain on real estate is only used as a last resort — it's invoked to buy out real estate where the government has some pre-existing plan that requires the use of the land; and there's no reasonable alternative to using that specific land; but the owner of the land doesn't want to sell it to them on the open market for a reasonable price (i.e. the price that they'd charge an arbitrary private buyer.)
I would assume eminent domain on patents would be the same: it would only be used if the government has a top-down plan that works out to require licensing a specific patent; with no reasonable alternative; but the patent owner is being obstructionist to licensing the patent for a reasonable price.
> it would only be used if the government has a top-down plan that works out to require licensing a specific patent; with no reasonable alternative; but the patent owner is being obstructionist to licensing the patent for a reasonable price.
Then I fully agree. In your previous comment where you said "you don’t need the patent system;" that threw me off thinking you were basically talking about every patent. Where you said "insofar" at the beginning of the sentence, I interpreted that to mean essentialy "since" or "because" but I see what your original intent was now, and I think we are in complete agreement.
> Insofar as an equitable compensation / patent “value” can be determined analytically on a one-off basis, you don’t need the patent system; the government can just buy out at that price, and the same goal will have been achieved.
Exactly. Ideally we wouldn't have patents, but would have a "Star Trek" luxury space communism economy. Until then, if an invention proves to be highly beneficial to society after a few years, I would entirely support governments buying out patents early. In the end, information is a public good (non-rival, non-excludable), so let's start treating it that way.
The ruling class of the United States, by and large, isn't a part of government (elected or civil service) and seeks a government that is smaller, weaker, and more dysfunctional rather than the reverse.
Yes, there's an argument that society should be willing to pay up to the amount of the damage to prevent it. It's okay as far as it goes. However, that's equivalent to saying that if a safety improvement costs $1 to manufacture and saves $10 in damage, then the supplier should get the entire profit ($9). Although, he's just asking for $5. How generous!
This is a form of value-based pricing - figure out how much the customer values a thing and use that to persuade them to pay a higher price. Salespeople really like value-based pricing arguments.
Some safety measures are cheap, and suppliers can be bargained down. In the presence of robust competition, they could be bargained down to near the the cost of goods. But patents can result in a monopoly, along with monopoly pricing.
How much should you pay for tires? How about brakes? A vaccine?
In this case, I think he deserves to get rich from coming up with the idea, but there's still a lot of room for negotiation about how rich.
True, it's not apples to apples to extrapolate downstream costs of accidents while not doing the same for the benefits. All manner of housing and construction would be much more expensive and slow without ubiquitous affordable on-site powered saws - not just reducing everyone's spending power, but also median quality of life with everyone's daily spaces severely limited by design/build potential.
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.
Not the person you replied to, but reading the line below in the GP comment, I assumed the founder was exclusively a patent attorney with no product-relevant background. The GP certainly didn’t argue that, as you said, and perhaps I was alone in my confusion but characterizing someone as a “patent attorney” while leaving out relevant academic qualifications seems unclear, at best.
> SawStop was started by patent attorney Steve Gass
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.
When I ran a woodshop we would get our blades resharpened for about $30 and new teeth were a few dollars each. Its absolutely worth it when your blades are $100+
I wouldn't re-use a blade that SawStop triggered on. I assume the blade itself will go out of true based on the forces. It's a lot more damage than a few teeth.
Professional sharpeners have tools for testing blade conditions. We had a guy who would drop by the shop once every couple months and pickup all our used blades to service.
This is really standard fare with professional carpentry. I don't understand why so many people here are in shock at the concept of blade servicing.
> This is really standard fare with professional carpentry. I don't understand why so many people here are in shock at the concept of blade servicing.
For me, I'm just surprised that the economics of it can work. I'd imagine such a specialist is not going to charge less than a $100/hr so I wouldn't have expected the cost of repair to make sense. But interesting that it does!
I think they make their money in the scale. They have a pickup guy who drives all over Los Angeles to pick up blades from all their customers. We had him come in every 2 months. He would return a batch of sharpened blades and take whatever blades were dull.
Yes I have the industrial grade Sawstop. I ran a professional carpentry business for years using it as our main saw. I probably bought it around 2012 or 2013, I can't remember exactly.
I don't know what to tell you. I ran a professional shop, I'm not a hobbyist. I couldn't tell you how many feet of lumber I've shoved through my table saw. I've never personally had the Sawstop pop due to a safety issue, but every single time it happened in the shop I was able to remove the blade and get it serviced for around $30-40 depending on how many teeth were lost. Most of my saw blades are greater then $100 new so this cost is worth it.
The workshop I used had a dozen plus false pops due to people cutting wet wood or similar issues. None of the blades were worth saving due to significant warping or damage.
Ha. I've owned a SS for five years and used several of their high end cabinet saws in other shops. No one is going to bother brazing on new teeth on a saw blade. They'll just buy a new blade...
In these cases no. It was stupidity of a different kind on my part, but never where I was in danger. For example I added a flexible ruler to one of my jigs without thinking about the fact that it was metal. The ruler (which I happened to be touching at the other end) touched the blade, so in essence the saw thought I was touching the blade.
Prior to owning the SawStop though I have had some close calls that would have been much less painful and dangerous had I been using a SawStop.
> 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."
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.
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.
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.
This question itself has all the hallmarks of bad faith.
Maybe it's not, but it exhibits all the qualities, so...
You can't claim to desire safety for all while preventing anyone else from increasing safety.
The Bosch system was totally different, sounds superior on several fronts, and SS were only able to stop it by dint of technicalities and plain flaws in the US patent and legal system that allows frankly absurd arguments to win, and most pointedly, SS were willing to do exactly that. Not because Bosch stole anything from them, not because Bosch were sonehow harming users by doing the SS system but not as well as official SS, not because of any justifiable reason except that they physically could.
Arguing that your technology should be required by law, while offering a performative release of one patent (which is absolutely not enough to cover a working implementation), is the dictionary definition of bad faith. You don't have to go any further than the linked article for evidence of how this guy has acted throughout his entire career.
>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.
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.
The analysis I read listed various reasons why existing manufacturers wouldn’t adopt the technology (sorry, I can’t find the link). Increased cost per saw was one, but adopting the technology would also create two product lines: “safe” saws and “unsafe” saws. So any manufacturer who adopted the tech partially would have to argue that half of their product lines were unsafe. Even if the license costs were zero, these problems would exist.
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.
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.
