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.
Let’s host the soft in the EU or somewhere without these ridiculous laws.
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”.
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.
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
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
Also, I mean “bad patent” according to the standards of patents themselves. I don’t actually think patents are good for anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
