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Comment by Junk_Collector | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Ok but why would he just “give” them? Patents can cost like $20k a pop to prosecute.

Because he's pushing to have the technology covered by his remaining patents to be required by law. Do you think this is OK?

No, but I don’t think he should be forced to give them away for free either. That’s literally an unconstitutional “taking”

How, if he is the one pushing for them?

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.

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.

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.

The Federal government should start paying companies like this a hefty lump sum and take the patents by eminent domain. Same for drug patents.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

If we are only talking about patents for whom

> 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.

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.

Or yea know get rid of patents and how broken they are, especially while our enemies are ignoring them anyway.

That’s a terrible analysis.

I assume the “cost” were injuries added up through remaining lifespan through lost work, etc.

But you can’t do a cost-benefit analysis without counting benefits.

So let’s add up all the benefits and value created by table saws.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

> You just have to get it resharpened and possibly get some new teeth brazed on.

This looks quite destructive to the teeth that contact the stop:

https://youtu.be/Ibp2Gy2CFrY?si=Pa98Vey2oE0Atx1e&t=7

I can't imagine it will ever be cost-effective the labor of repairing a blade after that instead of just getting a new one.

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.

Definitely an old school style of business.

Have you had a SawStop? It really doesn’t seem like it, because if you did you wouldn’t be so stuck on this line of argument.

Just getting saw blade out of the stop is a major effort with a vice and engineers hammer. The way it brakes is an extremely violent process.

It definitely warps the blades in weird ways, and fixing them to actually be true is unlikely to be economic.

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.

I guess we’re just living in different worlds.

What brand of blades did you use? Most of mine were Forrest or Tenryu. The Forrest blades are very heavy.

This was a decade ago, and a workshop environment with a wide variety of blades.

So random folks, and random blades.

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...

I've done it plenty of times. New teeth cost a few bucks when you get your blade resharpened.

When you have blades high cost blades ($100+) its absolutely worth it to get them resharpened and teeth replaced.

I have wrecked blades on my SawStop and while they likely could have this done, the easiest path is buy a new blade.

It really depends on the cost of the blade.

Are you saying you've possibly saved multiple fingers or serious injuries then?

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."

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