This was a tort of negligence, ie the court decided that Ryobi did not take reasonable measures in their duty of care towards users of their power tools, who could foreseeably be injured if the technology was not used.Come on, that's ridiculous hair splitting. Making any company that sells these things liable for any injuries if they don't license the patent is effectively the same thing as making these devices illegal if they don't license the patent.
It has nothing to do with making it illegal not to use the technology. Companies can still sell tools without the fancy new gizmo. This just makes it very financially risky to do so.
"A heavy-duty aluminum brake stops the blade.$69 dollars? And I'm sure as sensitive of an instrument as it is it knows to keep sawing bugs and plant material and other types of stuff that floats around a typical small construction site rather than mistake them for human flesh and cost $69 in the process.
The blade stops within milliseconds of detecting contact, quicker than a car airbag deploys.
During this time three things happen:
* An aluminum brake springs into the spinning blade, to stop the blade.
* The blade’s angular momentum drives the blade beneath the table, removing the risk of subsequent contact.
* Power to the motor is shut off.
Resetting the saw is easy. It takes about five minutes to replace the $69 single-use brake cartridge and blade."
Companies will not invest in uncertainty. The power of the patent gives small entrepreneurs and large companies alike the certainty that they require to invest their time and money. This creates jobs and frequently a better way of achieving the same result or a better result. Sometimes the better way is the thing itself.
“Hopefully, this means the industry is finally going to recognize that catastrophic injuries could be averted and they need to make this technology standard so people don’t have these senseless injuries,’’ said Richard J. Sullivan, one of the lawyers representing Osori.Hooray for the heroic personal injury lawyer, making us all safer.
Then Dan Lanier, national coordinating counsel for Black & Decker, steppped to the podium. His top:"Evidentiary Issues Relating to SawStop Technology for Power Saws." Lanier spent the next 30 minutes discussing a hypothetical lawsuit- in which a plaintiff suing a power-saw manufacturer contends the saw was defective because it did not incorporate SawStop's technology- and suggesting ways defense counsel might respond. Lanier recalls it as a rather dry exploration of legal issues. Gass heard something different. To his ears, Lanier's message was this: If we all stick together and don't license this product the industry can argue that everybody rejected it so it obviously wasn't viable thereby limiting any legal liability the industry might face as a result of the new technology. (Lanier denies this was his point.)posted by caddis at 8:56 AM on March 18, 2010 [1 favorite]
Skeptic: "The big cost in drugs isn't that of the research to find potentially therapeutic substances, but the Phase I, II, and III clinical tests afterwards. I've heard the Phase III tests for a single drug candidate usually cost upwards of a billion dollars. I've also read that the ratio of interesting substances to approved drugs after all three phases is about 200:1. So, when you buy a patented medicine, you aren't just paying for its R&D, but also for that of the other 199 substances."Wait, so every approved drug cost $200 billion dollars to test?
The handrails have been dubbed the “ginsu guardrails,’’ after the knives advertised on TV, by some police officers called to the grisly crashes.posted by Kirth Gerson at 3:42 PM on March 18, 2010
Osorio is from Colombia, has a degree in computer science and was installing flooring as he learned English. At the time of the accident, he was trying to make a rip cut on a 2'-long, 2-1/2"-wide by 3/4"-thick piece of oak flooring, according to court records. He was attempting to cut the board “freehand” without the rip fence, according to the documents. Osorio intended to make a cut in a straight line all the way through the board. He had cut only a small portion of the workpiece when it got stuck at the blade. Osorio immediately experienced chattering and felt vibration in the workpiece. He stopped cutting and cleaned the tabletop. He then attempted to make the same cut again but the chattering continued, and he decided to push the board harder. His left hand then slipped into the spinning saw blade, according to court documents.posted by zamboni at 8:12 AM on March 26, 2010
The saw blade height above the tabletop was set to approximately 3" – at or near the maximum elevation, and the guarding system was not installed on the saw during the operation, documents state. "
The Carlos Osorio vs. One World Technologies Inc. et. al. lawsuit centers on whether the table saw being used when Osorio's accident occurred was defective. Osorio’s team claims the Ryobi BTS 15 was defective because there was no independent riving knife, no “user-friendly” guarding system and the saw did not incorporate SawStop technology or a similar technology that detects contact between a person and the spinning blade of a table saw, according to court records. The latter was the focus of the proceedings.posted by zamboni at 1:05 PM on March 31, 2010
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Sure, there will be folks who get annoyed with it and disable it, and saws will cost more. Other companies have fought hard to keep this out, though, and that is a real crime.
Once you are missing fingers it changes your whole life (ask my uncle who lost his to an airplane hangar door chain)
posted by poe at 12:44 AM on March 18, 2010