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The fact that the 3D printing community, and even some of the companies that currently operate in that niece, share more openly with each other is great. But sh

by mreome 6y ago

The fact that the 3D printing community, and even some of the companies that currently operate in that niece, share more openly with each other is great. But should 3D printing ever get wide-scale traction (think home appliance), then that free sharing of information means any random mega-corporation looking for a new profit-center can step in, take all that knowledge, and simple stomp out all the small players who invested time and energy into their products. The same goes for any product developed as open-hardware, if it gets wide-scale traction, any mega-corp can trivially reimplement it and remove the smaller players from the board. Neither group has any protections without patents and copyrights. I would also argue that those two areas have a relatively low-cost of entry like software development, but only have such due to the huge amount of investment previously put into those fields, and existing industries around them. High-power and low-cost microchips, high efficiency stepper motors, etc, were developed due to decades of constant industry investment, and the open-hardware community isn’t going to be mass producing stepper-motors, microprocessors, or FPGAs anytime soon. To be clear, these are both communities I think are great, and consider myself part of, but you can’t ignore the reality of the industrial and business world around them because it’s inconvenient. In an ideal world, everything would work like those communities, but our world is far, far, from ideal. As for case examples for my arguments. For small player protection -- just look at how lack of patent enforcement causes so many small companies to fail due to lower-cost knockoffs produced in china being released before their brand gains traction. For the need for a return on investment -- that’s just how industry at large works. No company will invest significant funds developing something if there isn’t a reasonable chance of making a return on that investment. If all your competitors can immediately copy and undercut you, the ROI drops to zero. I can actually provide some specific examples from the company I work for / industry I work in, but I'd prefer to move the conversation offline if you'd like to discuses that.

Kliment 6y ago
3D printing was sat at an impasse for two decades because several companies independently came up with related processes for it, then fought a massive patent war, and each of them walked away with exclusivity to one particular process (EOS with sintering, Statasys with FDM and 3D Systems with SLA). For two decades progress just didn't happen because the patents prevented it. There was a world market of about 5000 3D printers. The market was saturated entirely. As soon as the patents started expiring, it took less than a decade for the market size to grow by four orders of magnitude, part quality improved by an order of magnitude, part cost and machine cost dropped by three orders of magnitude. Everyone, including the fuckers that kept the market locked up, are benefiting massively from this. The innovations that enabled the dramatic development of the field over the past decade were primarily driven by a loose community of individual contributors and companies of all sizes, and there seems to be enough of a market for all those entities to exist simultaneously. You have mega-corps trivially reimplementing open innovation, and then failing commercially because everyone hates them and doesn't trust them enough to work with them. Patents are actively harmful to this industry. As for open hardware producing capital investment intensive products, just have a look at what's happening in the RISC-V community. You can ensure return on investment by collaboration from the start - investing in an ecosystem rather than a particular product. It's much easier for smaller players to survive as part of an interwoven ecosystem than on their own with litigation as their only weapon. If the only way to get people to work with you is to threaten to sue them, you're going to be destroyed as soon as someone comes along with a bigger gun. The very concept of "protecting your investment" and treating everyone else as a competitor and a threat is a mindset that ends up self-fulfilling. I would argue that many more companies get killed by hostile patent enforcement than by lack of patent enforcement.
- mreome 6y ago
  Again, you're still limiting your perspective to some very specific, niche, and frankly unusual industries, and looking at them in isolation. Most industries don’t and can’t have a "loose community of individual contributors and companies of all sizes." The 3D printing industry is unusual in that it has a very low cost of entry, and many of the primary consumers have the skills to directly contribute to the further development of the technology, and an intellectual interest in doing so. You’re also still ignoring that 3D printing and Open Hardware would not exist without the trillions of dollars in capital investment made in all the underlying technologies. Investments that would have been an insanely risky propositions without IP protections. Can you explain how the multi-billion/trillion-dollar research and development in jet engine design, commercial refrigeration, medical devices, drugs, microcircuit manufacturing, industrial mechatronics, etc, can be accomplished by the private sector, without legal protection to allow for a ROI? Can you find an example of someone developing Open Hardware who is making large enough profits to build their own semiconductor R&D labs and foundries? And again, I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of problems with patents. I fully agree there are. As you said, “hostile patent enforcement” (meaning forcing a company to defend itself against vague and often entirely invalid patents), is a serious problem. But that’s an argument for patent reform, not abolishment. Unless you can come up with an alternative way to protect the huge-to-astronomical R&D investments many industries require. Also, to be blunt, thinking that “mega-corps trivially reimplementing open innovation, and then failing commercially because everyone hates them and doesn't trust them enough to work with them” applies to anything outside tiny niche and industry-internal markets is frankly silly. The general public will buy the next shiny new toy from whichever mega-corp has the best marketing. Serious industrial operations always prefer to buy from bigger companies as it reduces various sources of complexity and risk (this is an area I know firsthand and can go into detail on). It’s very rare that anyone cares who originally invented the technology. And regarding your last point -- without patent enforcement, no small company developing a functionally better technology would even exist to be attacked. Nobody would invest in starting a company if there was no way to stop the incumbent from reverse-engineering the improved tech before the start-up gained any market traction, adding it to their products, and crushing competition through price, marketing, and existing consumer network (again something I can talk about firsthand if you'd like to continue this off HN).

by mreome 6y ago

Kliment 6y ago

3D printing was sat at an impasse for two decades because several companies independently came up with related processes for it, then fought a massive patent war, and each of them walked away with exclusivity to one particular process (EOS with sintering, Statasys with FDM and 3D Systems with SLA). For two decades progress just didn't happen because the patents prevented it. There was a world market of about 5000 3D printers. The market was saturated entirely. As soon as the patents started expiring, it took less than a decade for the market size to grow by four orders of magnitude, part quality improved by an order of magnitude, part cost and machine cost dropped by three orders of magnitude. Everyone, including the fuckers that kept the market locked up, are benefiting massively from this. The innovations that enabled the dramatic development of the field over the past decade were primarily driven by a loose community of individual contributors and companies of all sizes, and there seems to be enough of a market for all those entities to exist simultaneously. You have mega-corps trivially reimplementing open innovation, and then failing commercially because everyone hates them and doesn't trust them enough to work with them. Patents are actively harmful to this industry. As for open hardware producing capital investment intensive products, just have a look at what's happening in the RISC-V community. You can ensure return on investment by collaboration from the start - investing in an ecosystem rather than a particular product. It's much easier for smaller players to survive as part of an interwoven ecosystem than on their own with litigation as their only weapon. If the only way to get people to work with you is to threaten to sue them, you're going to be destroyed as soon as someone comes along with a bigger gun. The very concept of "protecting your investment" and treating everyone else as a competitor and a threat is a mindset that ends up self-fulfilling. I would argue that many more companies get killed by hostile patent enforcement than by lack of patent enforcement.

mreome 6y ago
Again, you're still limiting your perspective to some very specific, niche, and frankly unusual industries, and looking at them in isolation. Most industries don’t and can’t have a "loose community of individual contributors and companies of all sizes." The 3D printing industry is unusual in that it has a very low cost of entry, and many of the primary consumers have the skills to directly contribute to the further development of the technology, and an intellectual interest in doing so. You’re also still ignoring that 3D printing and Open Hardware would not exist without the trillions of dollars in capital investment made in all the underlying technologies. Investments that would have been an insanely risky propositions without IP protections. Can you explain how the multi-billion/trillion-dollar research and development in jet engine design, commercial refrigeration, medical devices, drugs, microcircuit manufacturing, industrial mechatronics, etc, can be accomplished by the private sector, without legal protection to allow for a ROI? Can you find an example of someone developing Open Hardware who is making large enough profits to build their own semiconductor R&D labs and foundries? And again, I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of problems with patents. I fully agree there are. As you said, “hostile patent enforcement” (meaning forcing a company to defend itself against vague and often entirely invalid patents), is a serious problem. But that’s an argument for patent reform, not abolishment. Unless you can come up with an alternative way to protect the huge-to-astronomical R&D investments many industries require. Also, to be blunt, thinking that “mega-corps trivially reimplementing open innovation, and then failing commercially because everyone hates them and doesn't trust them enough to work with them” applies to anything outside tiny niche and industry-internal markets is frankly silly. The general public will buy the next shiny new toy from whichever mega-corp has the best marketing. Serious industrial operations always prefer to buy from bigger companies as it reduces various sources of complexity and risk (this is an area I know firsthand and can go into detail on). It’s very rare that anyone cares who originally invented the technology. And regarding your last point -- without patent enforcement, no small company developing a functionally better technology would even exist to be attacked. Nobody would invest in starting a company if there was no way to stop the incumbent from reverse-engineering the improved tech before the start-up gained any market traction, adding it to their products, and crushing competition through price, marketing, and existing consumer network (again something I can talk about firsthand if you'd like to continue this off HN).