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Comment by syshum | Hacker News Reader

While impressive, I wish they would have done like other companies have done with their safety innovations (like Volvo for example with safety belts) and either given it away or at least charged a very nominal (small) licensing fee

The creator of the technology created saw stop because the saw manufacturers refused to pay his price for licensing, and has since been very aggressive in enforcement of patents around the technology preventing any competition in the safety space for saws

I can not get behind using IP laws to prevent companies from increasing the safety of their products, for example a few years ago Bosch attempted to bring similar saw stopping technology to market and was prevented do to a lawsuit from SawStop which resulted in a ban on the importation of the technology to the US

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But aren't the IP laws in this case evidence of motivation for the creative mind? An incentive of being rewarded and not ripped off? We've had power tools without this feature for 100 years. What's a few more years to give the inventor exclusivity and a chance to profit, and then it becomes public domain?

Volvo's donation of safety patents is nice, but it is a major manufacturer. The inventor of SawStop was not.

at a bear minimum we need something like FRAND for safety devices that require safety related patents to be licensed fairly, non-discriminatory and with reasonable fee's

SawStop’s creator seems to have offered reasonable fees.

Your definition of "reasonable" is clearly very different than mine as 8% of GROSS sales is not reasonable... maybe 8% of NET sales...

Gross vs. net sales just means a small percentage adjustment, unless the manufacturer makes a broken product. The other costs of making a table saw also make up a fixed percentage of gross sales, not net, but despite that, the product is still sellable.

> I can not get behind using IP laws to prevent companies from increasing the safety of their products, for example a few years ago Bosch attempted to bring similar saw stopping technology to market and was prevented do to a lawsuit from SawStop which resulted in a ban on the importation of the technology to the US

Bosch could have licensed the technology. This is actually IP that deserves to be enforced. Table saws have been around forever and none of the large manufacturers could be bothered to innovate until sawstop came along?

It's not like everyone can't buy sawstop tablesaws instead if they value the safety of it.

>>Bosch could have licensed the technology.

SawStop today refuses to license the tech as it is their only competitive advantage to sell their massively overpriced saws.

They could have 20 years ago when SawStop was trying to license the tech, however the industry (and I concur with them) belived their licensing terms were unacceptable.

I can't really get behind incumbent manufacturers failing to pay the inventor of a technology a significant portion of its value, which is, at minimum, the cost of hundreds of severely injured or completely severed fingers.

It isn't just that they wouldn't pay the license, it's also that they didn't develop the safety tech themselves in the first place. They presumably applied the Fight Club formula, to determine that the company's liability when people slice fingers off with one of their saws was not enough to justify the cost of actually doing anything about it (beyond writing into the operator's manual "let's don't cut any fingers off, mmmkay?").

If one of the incumbents had invented it, the others would have licensed or counter-patented incremental improvements and cross-licensed, recognizing it as a competitive threat.

But since an outsider patented it, that's a minor threat. What can a little guy do against a 100-year tool brand? And if he has to enforce, that means they're not playing by the rules, which are to pay the inventor's license, or wait until the patent expires.

Why are severed fingers part of anyone's business model?

In this analogy, one company has patented the seatbelt and demanded royalties on every car sold, while lobbying congress to make seat belts mandatory, and aggressively suing anyone else who implements the seatbelt.

And how much was the seat belt actually worth while it was patented? How much of that value should go to the inventor of the seat belt?

Is 10% reasonable? Too much or too little? How much value should be captured by the consumers that wear the belts? How much by the manufacturers that licensed them voluntarily? How much from compulsory installations? How much value should be captured by unlicensed installations?

Should the value of raised speed limits count, or just the direct impact of reduced collision injury severity?

Are we discounting the possibility that the patent licensing fee demanded by the saw-stopping inventor was actually reasonable in the US, thanks to hyperinflated medical costs, and the saw manufacturers were basing their decisions on international sales in countries with sane healthcare systems?

>>>Why are severed fingers part of anyone's business model?

it is, however Millions of people operate normal saws everyday with out cutting their figures off, and contrary to popular belief on here Safety does have a cost narrative to it. SawStop over values their tech for many people, which is why other saws continue to outsell their saw because people buying the saws value other things more than the safety enhancements the SawStop technology brings

It has nothing to do with being an "Outsider" and everything to do with SawStops inventor placing and outsized value on the technology.

The manufacturers respond to consumer demand, and many consumers would refuse to pay the extra money (for some saws it would have amounted to several hundred dollars more retail price) for the technology

In which case the inventor of the technology would be remunerated according to the consumers' choices, and not by the choices of a handful of manufacturer gatekeepers.

Perhaps at some point, shops that only use blade-stop safety saws would recoup that cost on lower employee health insurance premiums?

Licensing the technology does not mean it must be put into all models of saw! You don't have to buy the heated seats and built-in backseat entertainment center when you buy a car, either.

>>Licensing the technology does not mean it must be put into all models of saw!

Saw Stop is actively engaged, and has been for more than 10 years, in trying to get the government to mandate their technology to be in all models of saw

This lobbying occurring after licensing talks with the incumbent manufacturers had failed.

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