> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's also not what the person you're responding to was arguing.
> SawStop was started by patent attorney Steve Gass
>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.