- 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.
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.
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.
Fuck patents. All information should be free.
FOSS or die