If the government does require SS, what makes you think there will be any negotiations? Gass wins, takes his marbles and everyone else goes home. He and his lobbyists have grins on their faces.
The telephone companies were/are regulated monopolies. Totally different animals.
So are newspaper publishers, record companies, and American car makers.
Hey! You go find your own criticisms instead of filching mine.
Make sense, please.
Due to VoIP, Skype, etc.. telephone companies aren't what they used to be. They have been impacted by a host of other factors which make them a poor example of a regulated monopoly to use as a reference point.
[Television is] the triumph of machine over people. -- Fred Allen
This scares the hell out of me. When that was written fine. Now all I can say is follow the money. If I tried to explain who controls the money I would affend to many people. I'll just say look at the global banking system and who runs it.
Mike M
We have as a precedent that the Congress can tax you however much it wants to if you do not buy a product that it thinks you should buy, and the IRS can require proof that you have bought it.
So Congress can then tax you into poverty if you refuse to buy a patented product.
Sooner or later it will happen.
Damn Obama and damn the Supreme Court for letting him get away with it.
"Mike Marlow" wrote in news:7a9f$4ffeb008$4b75eb81$ snipped-for-privacy@ALLTEL.NET:
That's the "crux" of the situation. Gass is an excellent patent attorney, and he has seized a problem and technology (flesh in proximity to a spinning metal blade) and provided a solution to greatly reduce the inherent dangers. He has done this rather thoroughly, so that it is nigh impossible for competing technologies to bypass his patents. After he approached TS manufacturers to sell them his technologies, they all said he was making a solution for a non-existing problem, and refused his offers (probably in part because they were afraid they'd price themselves out of the market, offering a technology nobody was going to buy). Then Gass (brilliantly, actually) went on a 3-prong attack. He started producing some excellent tablesaws incorporating his technologies, he lawyer-like started lobbying the safety agencies, and he helped start a lawsuit to further the safety angle of his premises. (I don't know whether he had any hand in the Ryobi suit, but it wouldn't surprise me).
The Consumer Product Safety Commission ... "is charged with protecting the public from unreasonable risks of injury or death from thousands of types of consumer products under the agency's jurisdiction." So the question now is whether table saws fall in that category, and likely they (being bureaucrats sensing a big job at hand - pun intended) will take that challenge.
As I said IF and WHEN the CPSC gets a rule effective, TS manufacturers might have to get patent licenses. This is a reference to one answer to the question that then arises (How can I determine the right licensing fees for our product? What is the formula??): or
One rough answer is this: There is a 25% rule that people use to "ballpark" royalties. The rule suggests that the licensee should pay 25% of profits resulting from the license to the licensor.
And so on and so forth.
That however suggested telephone companies as a "success story", regarding the issues here, should seek a better example.
Please replace the below listed words/phrases with the following, more realistic descriptions, in order of appearance: "greedy"; "greedily"; "greedily"; "greedily"; "game the legal system"; "lining his pockets"; "sure thing"
excellent thoroughly brilliantly lawyer-like lawsuit safety angle surprise
Thanks ... ;)
First answer is a whole lot more sensible: 3-10% for 1-3 years.
My favorite is a minimal licensing fee and set small amount per unit. For tablesaurs, I'd think $10k for licensing and a buck or two per saw would double his (and his fellow conspirees') millionaire status in a few years.
That's likely an answer given by someone with a patent who wants as much as they can rape ya for. Maybe someone with a recent metric shitload of "skin sensing technology" patents for a tablesaur. It's outrageously high.
-- [Television is] the triumph of machine over people. -- Fred Allen
Yes, he was a witness against Ryobi in the lawsuit, Han. Page 3 of the appeal decision (another bad judgment, IMO)
Precisely.
When Gass had a chance to be a hero (AND make millions off it), he will be remembered only as a @#$%^&* lawyer by future generations. Typical and very sad. I can only hope that review by an appeals judge brings out the probable vengeance angle by him against Ryobi after they failed to complete the licensing agreement.
-- [Television is] the triumph of machine over people. -- Fred Allen
Gosh, considering the large size of and the relatively small number of the players in the saw making game, that doesn't seem fair to Gass. -- and I'm far from being a Gass-fan!
Obviously that is subject to a lot of interpretation, definition and negotiation, as it is doubtful whoever had the patent on the intermittent windshield wiper was paid 25% of the profit on a car.
That said, if there is one thing generally accepted in business these days it is that our patent system is broken and has been subverted by none other than lawyers like Gass, particularly regarding technology/software patents.
It is to the point of absurdity, at unbelievable cost to the consumer and innovation ... for the past decade or so the patent office, underfunded and grossly inept in the usual bureaucratic manner, has been operating under the concept that they will patent anything presented to them, and let anyone affected by their ineptness fight it out in the courts, benefiting no one but guess who? ... asshat lawyers, like Gass.
A pox on the greedy bastards ...
Er, no, not to my knowledge.
It would be impossible, under law, to make a specific product mandatory. What an entity COULD do is mandate a device (or formula or whatever) that had specific "charateristics" with clever wording such that only one product in the world would match the specifications. Actually, this is fairly common.
In the case of the proposed California law, intelligent people can come up with circumventions. For example, assume the retail price of an economy table saw without "SawStop" is $150 and with "SawStop" is $650. The saw manufacturer could pack the saw with the SawStop uninstalled, just like the splitter or stand.
What the buyer of the saw does then is to "sell" the separately-packaged SawStop back to the saw manufacturer for $500. If that's too obvious, the buyer could sell the thing to an "independent" third company. What the third company does with the gizmo is kept a complete mystery (wink-wink).
With annual sales at 800,000, that's $800k-$1.6 million, or up to $16M a decade. PLUS licensing fees to hundreds of companies. Not fair? Plus he'd have had global love and respect v. the global contempt he has now. It's a no-brainer to anyone but a lawyer.
-- [Television is] the triumph of machine over people. -- Fred Allen
Swingman wrote in news:aYmdnT-EL99SW2PSnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@giganews.com:
That too, but I do admire his ingenuity and his execution. That doesn't make him less of a greedy bastard, right?
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