Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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.

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.

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?

> 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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com