- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
This is about a bad patent that is preventing slicers from making brick-layer prints that would increase strength enormously, despite the fact that there is clear prior art that has expired for nearly a decade. The patent is full of bad references to the prior art and clearly shouldn’t have been approved - even if the person saying it isn’t a lawyer, it’s obvious.
The new bad patent from 2020 would keep the invention away for another 20 years, and do real harm to the development of 3d printing.
The creator asked viewers to share this with people in the FOSS slicer community. I don’t know if that’s anyone here, but lemmy is pretty FOSS-happy. Also the FOSS communities here might be interested to hear about how this patent is hamstringing development of FOSS features. I don’t have the time right now to search through the communities so any crossposts would be welcome.
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Let’s host the soft in the EU or somewhere without these ridiculous laws.
Interesting. If they weren’t patent trolls before, they certainly are now!
I wonder if this is all that’s stopping this technique though? IANAL, but it sure seems like a slicer could release this and if stratasys tried to sue them, they might have a hard time given all these patent errors.
Unfortunately, the way patent suits work it could be enormously expensive to defend something like this, even when the patent is clearly bad.
You’d be arguing that the patent is invalid to start with, but the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all), and grant an injunction to prevent further harm (“stop giving people the software until we can work out if there is any merit to your claim that you aren’t infringing”). You then need to put together a case to show the prior art, and you can bet that they’d contest every single point. This whole process could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that you won’t get back even if you win - there isn’t really a provision to recover costs in patent cases because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith
the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all)…because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith
In other words, one big aspect of patent reform needs to be fixing the patent office itself so that it hires patent examiners who are actually competent to evaluate the applications for prior art.
That’s probably an impossible task - getting enough people who are experts in every possible field enough to judge novelty and innovativeness wouldn’t be feasible.
An alternative is the way the Dutch assess patents - they don’t, and grant them automatically on filing, but that means you remove the assumption that they are valid on their face if they get challenged
Probably better to make those submitting false patents pay a large fine.
If I remember correctly the entire home 3D printing industry was held back by patents for decades. It was technically possible and feasible for much longer than we have commercially available 3D printers, but one or two businesses held all the patents and made it impossible to sell them cheap.
I’m starting to learn that patent trolling is a much bigger problem than we give it attention for.
The worst example I’ve heard so far is a US patent on fungi or mycelium as a plastic and styrofoam alternative. Think biking helmets or packaging material. That’s almost like granting a patent for wood as a construction material. It’s outrageous and seriously damaging progress across the globe because no one gets funding for something you can’t sell in the US.
Being in this community has taught me that patents are stupid as fuck. Any time someone tries to bring up the topic, defending patents, I bring up how 3d printers could have been a thing when they were a kid. We were held back for 3 decades of progress because of a patent. Because of that we are essentially 3d printing like it’s 1995 right now.
Without these patent trolls I truly believe we would all be able to be SLS sintering our own metal car parts at home. But instead we’re still printing plastic toys
It’s not Stratasys. They did the original patented work in 1996.
This is someone who in 2020, copied the Stratasys patent, submitted it as their own new work, and were granted it!
Yeah, it seems like it’s the fear of legal action that’s stopping them, but this information might change that.
Also, I mean “bad patent” according to the standards of patents themselves. I don’t actually think patents are good for anything.
aren’t patents supposed to be “non obvious”?
If you’re saying this one is obvious, there is maths and research involved, not just "hey lay it down like this.
The basic concept is easy, the implementation details are not.
The basic concept is easy, the implementation details are not.
Coding a slicer to stagger layer lines is definitely tedious, and frustrating. But in that case, the patent doesn’t patent brick-layering techniques. It patents a specific technique of achieving that.
But when they’re supposed to judge “non-obviousness” it’s a bit more than just “is it simple”. the question is, would somebody else see it as obvious (if they had never looked at your work,). staggered layers are obvious. Anyone with any amount of experience in structural engineering would be like “Well, yeah”.
Now this is where the non-obvious gets fun. If any one whose reasonably knowledgeable in the system would follow the same technique you used. there has to be something “special” about it. And since the patent itself is based on significant past work; the argument could be made that anyone following that past work would arrive at the same techniques should be okay. (Except they’re patent trolls and patent law lobbyists for said trolls have fucked everything over.)
there’s a second caveat here that’s worth mentioning. you can lose your patents if you don’t exploit them. as far as I know there’s no slicer- paid or otherwise- using their patent.
„A specific technique on how to achieve it“, it usually a process patent. This can be circumvented and erases the protection. If the defined process is A>B>C>D and your process is A>E>C>D, then this does not touch the patent as it’s a different process.
The point being made in the video is that the second patent doesn’t correctly reference the prior art - the numbers are wrong - and it is not substantially different. The patent office didn’t do their due diligence.
As for the first, it’s not just code or the staggered idea. There is quantitative research that determines a specific and non-obvious methodology. (Edit: that’s my opinion, but it would be subject to interpretation whether something is obvious - I could easily be wrong)
The video critcises that patent for being overly broad, but there’s no need to attack it because it’s expired anyway. If you want to, here’s the specific link: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5653925A/en
My broader critique of patents isn’t that they fail to stand up to their own rules - although they frequently do - but that the law itself runs counter to innovation.
Also I second your comments that patents often block innovation if not used or licensed too expensive, imI would like to share a different perspective on this.
In pharmacy, the research, development and testing of new medication takes years and costs tons of money. If a drug is out of patent, generic drugs made in India for a fraction of the costs in developed countries. Typically the original producer stops the production as they can’t succeed the race down.
If there won’t be patents that protect inventions, there won’t be medical research in developed countries. Antibiotics is one example where the broken incentive for medical industry to invent already became obvious. There are no new antibiotics anymore. Since years.
Imho, it’s not this good/bad thing with patents. It’s rather a „how you use it“
Doesn’t a lot of the money for the research come from tax payers? And a lot of effort put into tweaking formulas with no real impact just so they can extend the patents? And then they jack up the prices to insane levels so that those tax payers cannot even afford the results anyway… The system is broken and massively abused. It needs to be changed. We might need something to help foster innovation but the current system just stifles it far more then it helps.
More or less what I was going to say. The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.
Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn’t manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.
These companies were funded to do it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have worked on the vaccine. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they’re forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn’t need patents for it, just the will.
Patents do provide some value. If there were no patents than companies would make their technological development a a secret and not share the work with the world.
The patent systems exchanges knowledge and technology development for a temporary monopoly on the technology. It means a company can publish the ingredients to medicines, methods of manufacturing etc. if they didn’t have the patent system they would keep these secret and if a business folded this knowledge would be lost.
And we would be free to reverse engineer and lift their stuff without people defending their right restrict us because otherwise they wouldn’t make it.
The vast majority of serious innovation - not just incremental improvements like this patent represents - is done on public resources, not private. The patent system allows corporations to swoop in, monopolise the patents and keep us from free access to knowledge.
The patent system explicitly provides free access to knowledge. The patent is the knowledge that would be kept secret otherwise.
You would still have monopolies, except things like the ingredients to medicines would be unknown.
I don’t see it that way. The systems we have in place now are the alternative to just sharing. The secret-keeping monopolistic behaviour of capitalists is preserved by things like the patent system, because they lend the appearance of legitimacy to an illegitimate system.
If you want to see the horror of the patent system, you juat have to look at the millions it killed in the pandemic.
The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.
Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn’t manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.
These companies were funded to do it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have worked on the vaccine otherwise. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they’re forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn’t need patents for it, just the will.
Is this really a good faith argument you are making? If I could figure out how someone did something I am not allowed to do it for 30 years. They are not hiding this technology, it has been independently invented by multiple people. It is not unique enough to be able to ‘hide’ from society.
The second somebody makes a product available it can be reverse engineered. There are no secrets with mechanical objects or, in this case, an intuitice slicing method
Not all patents are good. But a patent system is good. It could be better but the general concept is not flawed like the person I was responding to suggests.
The physical object isn’t what is patented in this case. It is the method to create the object that has a patent. One that can’t be reversed engineered as it isn’t part of the final product. You could only reverse engineer it if the process was not novel or not obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the field. If both of these conditions are true then the patent should not have been granted.
Patents are not inherently bad. This is a bad patent. Patent laws don’t have to be changed, because this patent shouldn’t have been granted. The issue is ineffective patent reviews, not patents. Getting rid of patents is not a good idea. If you think it is you probably don’t have a good enough grasp on what a patent is.
You can make something if you figure out how they did it because it was obvious. In this case the patent isn’t valid. If you have to develop a solution then the patent is probably valid. The patent is a reward for developing and sharing the solution publically.
If you still don’t grasp why patents are useful. It may be helpful to think of it like open source software. The patent is the code base that is freely accessible to everyone. This preserves the knowledge and lets others build on it. However, to incentivise people to make their code open source you provide protections that stop others from selling the same code you developed.
The incentive mechanism is why far more businesses produce patents than produce open source code.
If you remove patents businesses stop funding internal r and d overnight. It increase the risk and reduces the reward.
You’re just repeating the justification for patents with zero skepticism and apparently no awareness of how they actually get used.
Hell, I said the following to you a day before you made this comment, and you haven’t replied. Are you happy to just ignore the counter arguments then?
Edit: the fact both this comment and the other one just got downvoted with no reply would indicate they are in fact not interested.
I don’t see it that way. The systems we have in place now are the alternative to just sharing. The secret-keeping monopolistic behaviour of capitalists is preserved by things like the patent system, because they lend the appearance of legitimacy to an illegitimate system.
If you want to see the horror of the patent system, you juat have to look at the millions it killed in the pandemic.
The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.
Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn’t manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.
These companies were funded to do it. There’s no way they wouldn’t have worked on the vaccine otherwise. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they’re forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn’t need patents for it, just the will.
Could it be developed as an add on to the main slicer software, and developed on the down low, with a big disclaimer saying it’s “just for educational purposes”.
