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.
luma|1 year ago
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.
meowface|1 year ago
>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.
diggernet|1 year ago
chx|1 year ago
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.
defrost|1 year ago
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.
Teever|1 year ago