- cross-posted to:
- technology
- cross-posted to:
- technology
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.
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.