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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 wa

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).
- Kliment 6y ago
  Yeah no. The 3D printing industry is a side effect of existing stuff developed for entirely unrelated purposes. There's nothing exciting there technically. The only reason it didn't go mainstream decades ago is patents. There was never any heavy capital investment in the underlying technologies - it's just yet another application of motion control, material handling, and CNC technology, which was never developed specifically for that, but taken into use after it was already widely adopted in other industries. Claiming it would never have existed without heavy capital investment is true, but misleading. It's like saying flexible PCBs and space blankets would never have existed without the moon landing. It's true, but now that the technology exists it's possible to use it without starting your own space program. There's plenty of money to be made and new stuff to be developed by standing on the shoulders of out-of-patent giants. 3D printing has a low cost of entry now - it didn't before. The cost of entry advantage came due to community/ecosystem based development, after the patents expired. Prior to that, it was much more expensive. This can definitely be replicated to other industries (and we're seeing it right now with computer peripherals for example). There's an enormous number of industries with an ecosystem of specialized suppliers, some of which are tiny. The automotive industry is a prime example, where the big brands rely on thousands of tiny specialized vendors, many with single digit number of employees, for parts. The electronics industry is even more extremely so, with thousands of fabless semiconductor outfits with double digit employees, hundreds of packaging and testing companies serving those, thousands of distribution, assembly, and logistics companies on top of those, many one person or one family operations. The big foundries are what everyone knows, but none of them would exist without this. And the industry giants don't rely on patents because patents are not really safe to rely on - they mostly use trade secrets - both in the automotive and the electronics industries. You also see trade secrets as the core investment protection mechanism in aerospace, heavy industry (metallurgy, polymers, large-scale manufacturing processes) and related areas. Almost all heavily centralized industries except pharma/biotech rely on trade secrets rather than patents. Industry-internal markets are where the bulk of the market for technology is. And reputation is critically important there. You definitely see large companies attempt to break into these ecosystem based markets and fail commercially because they don't give a shit about their customers, and smaller outfits do. And there's certainly aversion to dealing with litigation-trigger-happy outfits. I see a whole lot of migration away from products after Oracle acquisitions for example. And fuck the idea that no innovative companies would exist without patents. There's endless companies that don't have patents, and exist, and take investment. And there's countless instances of companies that do have patents being attacked by megacorps who want to take their stuff, and of course the megacorp almost always gets away with it because they have the bigger guns, and can spend years in litigation until the victim folds and they can buy their assets at pennies to the dollar. Patents have never been adequate protection for a small company. They mostly exist to justify investment, rather than to reduce risk. I don't see a way to reform patents that makes them a net gain to humanity. I see them doing a whole lot of damage now. I don't see a moral justification for this to go on.

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).

Kliment 6y ago
Yeah no. The 3D printing industry is a side effect of existing stuff developed for entirely unrelated purposes. There's nothing exciting there technically. The only reason it didn't go mainstream decades ago is patents. There was never any heavy capital investment in the underlying technologies - it's just yet another application of motion control, material handling, and CNC technology, which was never developed specifically for that, but taken into use after it was already widely adopted in other industries. Claiming it would never have existed without heavy capital investment is true, but misleading. It's like saying flexible PCBs and space blankets would never have existed without the moon landing. It's true, but now that the technology exists it's possible to use it without starting your own space program. There's plenty of money to be made and new stuff to be developed by standing on the shoulders of out-of-patent giants. 3D printing has a low cost of entry now - it didn't before. The cost of entry advantage came due to community/ecosystem based development, after the patents expired. Prior to that, it was much more expensive. This can definitely be replicated to other industries (and we're seeing it right now with computer peripherals for example). There's an enormous number of industries with an ecosystem of specialized suppliers, some of which are tiny. The automotive industry is a prime example, where the big brands rely on thousands of tiny specialized vendors, many with single digit number of employees, for parts. The electronics industry is even more extremely so, with thousands of fabless semiconductor outfits with double digit employees, hundreds of packaging and testing companies serving those, thousands of distribution, assembly, and logistics companies on top of those, many one person or one family operations. The big foundries are what everyone knows, but none of them would exist without this. And the industry giants don't rely on patents because patents are not really safe to rely on - they mostly use trade secrets - both in the automotive and the electronics industries. You also see trade secrets as the core investment protection mechanism in aerospace, heavy industry (metallurgy, polymers, large-scale manufacturing processes) and related areas. Almost all heavily centralized industries except pharma/biotech rely on trade secrets rather than patents. Industry-internal markets are where the bulk of the market for technology is. And reputation is critically important there. You definitely see large companies attempt to break into these ecosystem based markets and fail commercially because they don't give a shit about their customers, and smaller outfits do. And there's certainly aversion to dealing with litigation-trigger-happy outfits. I see a whole lot of migration away from products after Oracle acquisitions for example. And fuck the idea that no innovative companies would exist without patents. There's endless companies that don't have patents, and exist, and take investment. And there's countless instances of companies that do have patents being attacked by megacorps who want to take their stuff, and of course the megacorp almost always gets away with it because they have the bigger guns, and can spend years in litigation until the victim folds and they can buy their assets at pennies to the dollar. Patents have never been adequate protection for a small company. They mostly exist to justify investment, rather than to reduce risk. I don't see a way to reform patents that makes them a net gain to humanity. I see them doing a whole lot of damage now. I don't see a moral justification for this to go on.