On Jun 5, 11:41 pm, Mike Berger wrote:
They filed a petition. Do you really think it rationalizes
your original comment as quoted below? Do you have inside
information on how much was being asked for royalties?
....

It's pretty clear from the sequence of events and from interviews that
the original business plan did not include manufacturing saws but
licensing the technology and that the prime inventor and his investors
envisioned a much more receptive audience from the major manufacturers
than they received.

That the petition was filed at the time it was and would have had the
effect if enacted upon of legislating the requirement to use their
device (as there was/is no other that would meet the criterion laid
out in the petititon) would have certainly provided them w/
significant leverage to obtain the licensing agreements they hadn't
been able to achieve otherwise.

One does, of course, have to impugn motives, but it's relatively easy
to understand how the conclusions are reached. Whether they're truly
accurate or not isn't so easy. "Greed" perhaps has a stronger
connotation than the true motive force, but it certainly isn't
difficult to conclude that there was a strong interest in gaining a
return on the significant investment which had been made in the
product and the (what must have been almost overwhelming)
disappointment and undoubtedly some anger over not having it accepted
widely.

One has to presume that if the licensing fees were sufficiently low
one of the manufacturers might have bought it simply as a competitive
edge whether they actually chose to incorporate it in a product or
not. That, of course, wouldn't be in the best interest of the
inventor/investors, so one again has to assume the fees were high
enough to at least be part of the decision process in deciding to
reject the technology in toto. Of course, it's likely that the
licensing costs were only a small part of the overall decision -- I
personally expect that the consideration of potential liability issues
was more than likely the overriding factor that ended up being a "deal
breaker" but I'm also sure you'll never get a manufacturer to agree to
that.

So, my take is that "greed" is perhaps too simplistic a total
characterization but I'm almost equally upset of the technique of
trying to use legislation/regulation to force the acceptance of a
product as the poster to whom you're responding. I'm for the
marketplace settling such competitive issues, not the regulators. Now
that they have entered the market on their own I've begun to mellow a
little, but I still fret over what CPSC may eventually do w/ the
petition...

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