Copying tools

[shed9]

Just noticed that WoodRiver appear to have a new spokeshave;

https://www.woodcraft.com/products/wood ... 3baa000a33

and it looks curiously similar to the Veritas low angle shave;

http://www.leevalley.com/us/wood/page.a ... 1182,44834


I appreciate the whole LN, Quangsheng / Qiangsheng / Luban and WoodRiver aspect of copying old tools out of patent, but is this a little close to the bone or is it just me?

 

[thetyreman]

they are virtually identical, I think veritas would have a strong case against them

 

[D_W]

Woodcraft and jww are generally very very high on price, and sometimes very low on ethics.

 

[patrickjchase]

Veritas' patent on that design has likely expired.

The Veritas low-angle shave is closely related to their previous "3-in-1 shave", which in turn dates back to 2000 or so. US design patents have a term of 15 years, so that design would be in the public domain by now over here. EU patents have 20 year terms IIRC, but LV may lack the resources to file in all jurisdictions in which they sell.

I doubt that they hold any invention patents (which have 20 year terms in both US and EU) relevant to that design, but that's just a guess on my part.

 

[patrickjchase]

Woodcraft and jww are generally very very high on price, and sometimes very low on ethics.

While I generally agree, I don't think there's an ethical problem here. As I pointed out in another post that design is very likely out of patent. The entire point of the patent system is to encourage makers to disclose their designs (by providing a term of initial government-enforced exclusivity), so that others may freely use them once the patent term has run out. That appears to be exactly what WC has done here.

 

[Derek Cohen (Perth Oz)]

Except, Patrick, that WR began making that shave several years ago. It is not a new addition to their collection.

Regards from Perth

Derek

 

[undergroundhunter]

Looks to me like the veritas is copied but with a few additions.

http://www.rapierplanes.com/rapier-all- ... pokeshave/

Matt

 

[swagman]

There are no clean skins when it comes to copying hand tool design. Here is another spokeshave example;

http://www.leevalley.com/us/images/item ... 1701s1.jpg

 

[shed9]

There are no clean skins when it comes to copying hand tool design. Here is another spokeshave example;

http://www.leevalley.com/us/images/item ... 1701s1.jpg

But Lee Valley give a very well documented nod to the original designer of this tool;

http://www.leevalley.com/us/wood/page.a ... at=1,50230

 

[bugbear]

Woodcraft and jww

Who are JWW?

BugBear

 

[nabs]

spokeshaves/planes with vertically adjustable soles were actually patented by the prolific inventor JA Traut (Stanley) - see below.

Apparently Stanley made a prototype: http://eaiainfo.org/2018/01/06/trauts-m ... es-part-1/

... so as patrickjchase says the only protection that LV could have sought would be for the ornamental design - and assuming they could get a grant - the maximum they could get a patent for would be 15 years, subject to them renewing the fees.

besides, it is hard to believe that Quansheng would deliberately infringe one of LV's patents - not least because there are dozens of unprotected designs they could choose instead, including the Preston copy that LV make - but also since they are dependent on US importers to do business.

PS a particularly groovy of a similar concept is here: https://virginiatoolworks.com/2015/04/1 ... pokeshave/

 

[shed9]

spokeshaves/planes with vertically adjustable soles were actually patented by the prolific inventor JA Traut (Stanley) - see below.

Apparently Stanley made a prototype: http://eaiainfo.org/2018/01/06/trauts-m ... es-part-1/

... so as patrickjchase says the only protection that LV could have sought would be for the ornamental design -

The Traut site looks interesting, will have a read through that, thanks.

I suspect you and patrickjchase may be right, I can't actually find Lee Valley's submission for any patents for low angle shaves. That said, there must be some courtesy in blatantly copying style and design IMO.

 

[shed9]

To add as a side note, I actually have the LV low angle shave and whilst it's a lovely tool to use it took me a while to get to grips with it.

 

[nabs]

opinions on when copying is 'fair' (as opposed to legal) vary - needless to say all modern manufacturers of hand tools are copying elements of designs invented elsewhere.

The vast majority of innovations in hand tools were already old by the middle of the 20th century, so it is impressive that Veritas do seem able to still come up with new and useful inventions. E.g the adjuster they use on their other spoke shaves https://patents.google.com/patent/US7216435B2.

They get - and are entitled to - a 20 year monopoly for putting the initial investment into their idea, after which it is fair game for others to copy it.

 

[D_W]

Woodcraft and jww are generally very very high on price, and sometimes very low on ethics.

While I generally agree, I don't think there's an ethical problem here. As I pointed out in another post that design is very likely out of patent. The entire point of the patent system is to encourage makers to disclose their designs (by providing a term of initial government-enforced exclusivity), so that others may freely use them once the patent term has run out. That appears to be exactly what WC has done here.

I'm not talking about what's legal, I'm talking about what's ethical. Of course, legal is a more firm definition, but I tend to avoid unethical retailers. I got to know the CEO of woodcraft a few years ago over email (presuming the CEO is still the same) and I found him to be quite a favorable guy, but I don't like the claw hold they have on pfeil distribution (and the extremely high prices they have to go with it), nor do I like the way they operate JWW, which is just a continuation of the JWW that was. Here's an example:
* Hideshi Ogata makes a whole bunch of planes over his lifetime. At some point, they become popular with k-zerou guys.
* A few years ago, I run across a swedish blade and cap iron from alex gilmore, probably paid something like $260 for them. I think it's common for the makers to make a lot more irons than they can sell, especially if they've got a relatively modern process for a lot of the work (dies, etc, to get everything to initial shape, and then grinding jigs)
* recently, I saw JWW claim that they had bought all of the remaining stock of ogata irons and you'd not be able to get any ogata planes from anywhere else. Of course, they priced them highway robbery style ($800, which they never sold for when they were in circulation)

At the same time, you can still find ogata planes all over the place. Tomohito iida sells excess stock on ebay, and he usually gets somewhere between $100 and $200 for an ogata plane when he sells them at auction.

tomohito is not innocent in this, either, though. For a long time, he sold Ogata and Nakano planes for about $450. Somewhere around that level is where you get into BS if the price is more (the planes are no better), and nakano made a big deal of wanting his planes to be affordable for the average craftsman. I don't know what triggered it, but iida just redid his webpage, and now he thinks $800 is a fair price for ogata and nagano. Maybe he saw JWW selling them for that. They'll be a slow sale at that price, except in the case of an uniformed buyer.

At any rate, WC, perhaps can't come to an agreement with veritas to sell their tools (I thought they did at some time, and it went south when they started trying to sell quangsheng knock-offs next to the veritas tools), so they could either sell a copy of a vintage tool or come up with their own. If were sort of a chop-shop copy seller (low price, knock offs, etc), that'd be fine, but they are the highest price (often selling things for higher than the SRP) seller, even when they sell something quangsheng-y.

I did buy a new nakano plane (white #1) from iida off of ebay, but it sold there (with a nimura dai - I like nimura) for $260 - a straight up auction. I pity the person who buys any of that stuff at full price, and while I'm not surprised at JWW (who prints absurd things like "matsumura's wife swiinging the hammer when they're busy" - come on), I'm really disappointed with tomohito iida - he was already at the top of the market price-wise.

I get that woodcraft has a lot of overhead (franchisees with fees to pay, brick and mortar commercial location rent costs, etc), but I'd be better off as a woodworker if they'd disappear, because it would spring pfeil free from the absurd exclusive distribution rights. the few times I've stepped into a woodcraft store, I've struggled to buy anything, though I'll admit my orders through their corporate site have always been smooth and fast (they're not far from me geographically), except when they get stingy and use "smart post", which takes about 5 days to get here from 3 hours' drive away.

 

[D_W]

opinions on when copying is 'fair' (as opposed to legal) vary - needless to say all modern manufacturers of hand tools are copying elements of designs invented elsewhere.

The vast majority of innovations in hand tools were already old by the middle of the 20th century, so it is impressive that Veritas do seem able to still come up with new and useful inventions. E.g the adjuster they use on their other spoke shaves https://patents.google.com/patent/US7216435B2.

They get - and are entitled to - a 20 year monopoly for putting the initial investment into their idea, after which it is fair game for others to copy it.

Here's a situation where I'd not be as short with WC on the veritas shave copy:
* it doesn't look exactly the same all the way down to the colors on the casting and the screws
* they mention that it's their version of the well known veritas shave

And, yes, most of the modern stuff is slightly altered (usually just looks like it's been done by CNC instead of whatever would've been used 125 years ago) versions of the old stuff, and not all of the improvements are improvements. The depth knob on LN planes comes to mind. It looks like something from an industrial supply company. Their planes are, however, wonderful pieces of gear. that just stands out to me as something that could've been done better. Common Stanley planes had a hollow knob with nice segmented knurling on them.

I think the water gets a little bit more muddy in the US when it comes to the issue of trade dress, but the trade dress fight is subjective and very expensive. Gibson comes to mind, as they made waves a little more than a decade ago threatening every maker of banjos in the US who had any element from a Gibson banjo, all the way down to the bell shaped truss rod cover. They tried the fight with any single cutaway electric guitar, too, including one by paul reed smith that wasn't remotely similar looking to a gibson les paul, and eventually lost, but the small makers gave up at the first threat because they couldn't afford to fight. In this case, LV is on the other side of the table - I guess they didn't want to pay the costs of enforcing (which is important in the case of trade dress - if you let some people copy, then you set a precedent that it's OK and can't enforce later. This is probably what would keep stanley from ever having any footing on bailey style planes that are outright copies - they've gone far too long allowing it).

 

[nabs]

although I agree that it would have been courteous of whoever commissioned the spokeshave to give a nod to Veritas, I don't see it as an ethical issue that they choose not to.

I'd go as far as arguing that they are abiding with the spirt of the IP laws in places like the US and the UK, the intent of which is to balance the needs of the innovators (who naturally prefer to have a monopoly) with the needs of the public (who generally benefit from competition in a market).

The result is a laws that set the boundaries (copyright, trademarks and rules about passing yourself off as someone else's brand etc) on what manufactures can and can't copy. There could be faults with these laws, but the fact that they allow copying of unprotected design is not one of them (it is intentional).

 

[JohnPW]

In overall appearance and style, the Veritas is almost the same as the Rapier mentioned upthread. The manufacturer of the Woodriver version could just say they copied the Rapier, or another earlier tool.

The Veritas seems to have flat handles whereas the Woodriver has thumb "depressions".

Sure, the look of a company's products, if they came up with it and is it what they are known for, should be protected. But that doesn't include generic things like guitar cutaways, rectangular phones with rounded corners!

 

[D_W]

The extrapolation of that is that while there are patents, they don't cover every aspect of a tool. That becomes a trade dress issue, which is a lot less clear.

I agree on the legality issue. I'm not even interested in hoping someone could legally shut down WC and quangsheng when they copy something (but quangsheng and WC - not certain that those are the two parties, but guessing - came out with the V3 planes when the relationship with LN was severed. I understood that from forum comments, the V3 planes were changed to be more like vintage bedrocks and less like dead copies of LN planes. As far as I know, LN has no patents on their planes, but there was enough traction there to get WC to change design aspects. that's hearsay, because I didn't have that discussion with the WC CEO.

All that said, while it's nice to be the nice guy in woodworking or anything, often the nice guys go out of business. If I could get Ogata's irons for $250 a pair after Alex Gilmore bought them and marked them up, I'm sure JWW did not pay much for the extra stock of a retired maker. Dai cost isn't much, so each one of those planes that they sell for a mint makes a whole lot of money (which I'm sure they need to keep sending me catalogs of their overpriced tools and kitchen knives when it's extremely uncommon for me to order anything from them). Same with Iida. There used to be a thing among japanese enthusiasts that you were paying for service and the fact that Iida didn't do something like mixing a generic cap iron with an expensive iron - you just had to pay service+ for the price. Now it's more of an "up yours" (my opinion) pricing strategy. the temptation to make a giant margin on uneducated consumers must be way too large. but they'll stay in business doing that, while Takeshi Kuroda may not when he sells planes for (speculating) a hundred bucks more than it costs him to get them, and will do things like go directly to nimura and get a custom dai (at a higher pitch) for little or no charge.

So, these are things that ideally I look for as a consumer, but recognize that the standard for other consumers is legal, and not what I consider to be my ethical standards.

Isn't there a big thing in the world of makers about this? Didn't Maloof get upset when someone reverse-engineered his chairs and then offered plans? By that time, he'd already been more or less the sole maker of that type of chair. Same with Wegner's chair. I understand they don't love to see people making copies of it, but in my opinion, as long as they've had it out, they ought to get over that. I've talked to a lot of furniture makers who don't agree, and who think that any other maker should be stopped regardless of the legality. I'm not a consumer for either type - I don't buy overpriced original designs (that's for suckers) and I won't buy from someone who dead copied someone else's design. No interest in trying to have anyone else be forced by to do what I think is correct, though.

 

[D_W]

In overall appearance and style, the Veritas is almost the same as the Rapier mentioned upthread. The manufacturer of the Woodriver version could just say they copied the Rapier, or another earlier tool.

The Veritas seems to have flat handles whereas the Woodriver has thumb "depressions".

Sure, the look of a company's products, if they came up with it and is it what they are known for, should be protected. But that doesn't include generic things like guitar cutaways, rectangular phones with rounded corners!

That's correct, legally, it's probably gray. On a best estimate of how QS tool came up with that make (if it was QS tool), a practical person would suspect that they just dead copied a veritas tool except perhaps for some aspects that they found it easier and cheaper to do a different way.

IF veritas had a leg to stand on with trade dress (and I'm not a lawyer, so I don't know if they do), it would still be very expensive to protect something like that unless a threat letter worked on the first try. I'll bet Gibson spent many millions of dollars screwing around with trade dress, all the while, people were making dead copies of fender guitars and maybe fender didn't like it, but i never saw them protect anything but the peghead shape.