How much would you pay to make sure you never sawed off a finger?

There are various table-saw safety guards available, made out of metal and plastic. But only one company, SawStop, sells a consumer table saw that can stop and retract the blade in milliseconds once it detects the small electrical signal from a finger.

SawStop holds more than 100 patents, many directly related to the safety mechanism. Its table saws cost several hundred dollars more than the most popular competing models, and sometimes more than $US1000 extra.

Few consumers choose to pay the price. In 2016, the most recent year with available sales data, less than 2 per cent of the 675,000 table saws sold in the United States were SawStop saws.

Now the US safety commission is considering mandating that the finger-detection system be included in every new table saw. SawStop currently produces the only consumer table saws that could be sold under the proposed rule.

At a testy agency hearing in February, Richard Trumka jnr, a Democratic commissioner with the Consumer Product Safety Commission, accused large power tool companies of not caring about the safety of their consumers and held up photos of people who had amputations after table saw injuries.

Peter Feldman, the lone Republican commissioner, chastised SawStop’s chief executive for not agreeing to license the technology. “Rather than seeking to compete fairly,” Feldman told him, “I see what you’re doing as rent-seeking behaviour, pure and simple.”

SawStop was founded by a patent attorney in 2000 and at first did attempt to license its finger-detection technology to other companies. After that failed, SawStop petitioned the safety commission in 2003 to require finger-detection systems on all table saws – the type of rule the commission may soon approve.

And once it started selling its own saws, SawStop developed a reputation for litigiousness: in 2015 it sued Bosch to stop it from selling a table saw that had a similar safety feature, citing patent infringement.

The safety commission generally doesn’t concern itself with the potential for patent litigation or effective monopoly.

“The CPSC doesn’t deal with competition implications; it deals with problems of safety,” said Herbert Hovenkamp, an antitrust expert at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.

The agency estimated that new bench table saws would cost $US338 to $US1210 more with the finger-detection system.

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The commissioners’ vote is likely to fall along partisan lines: three of the four current commissioners are Democrats, and the rule will probably pass.

It would go into effect after three years. SawStop chief executive Matt Howard has pledged to open one of the company’s key patents to competitors when that happens.

He said it would be “incomprehensible” if other companies did not have their own offerings in three years, and blamed them for failing to invest in research and development.

But the Power Tools Institute, an industry group, has said rival companies won’t be able to start development before SawStop releases the patent, because SawStop could sue the companies for using the patent in prototypes.

Bosch, which settled with SawStop over its competing product, said it would take six years to bring it back to market. Shabir Balolia, the chief operating officer of Grizzly Industrial, another competitor, said it would probably take four years to develop a new saw after the patent was released.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.