11 ms·
Gov’t Contractor Copies Open Source 3D Printing Concept and Patents It
- polotics 4y agoDo the actual inventors have to go through the parent litigation process, why not report it as theft to the local authorities, and use that theft report as a pass to keep working. Why is it for patents that the burden of proof is inverted?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy123 4y agoLook up the difference between criminal and civil law.
- encryptluks2 4y agoCivil crimes are for the rich and criminal are reserved for the poor.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- xyzzy123 4y agoThat is in a sense true. If you don't have any money to begin with, you don't have much to lose by getting sued and there is not much incentive for anyone to bother. Personally I think it's better for everyone that the police are not usually involved in the enforcement of IP law. A lot of corporations would love the state (aka taxpayers) to pick up more of the tab for keeping mickey mouse out of the hands of the public. The flip side of what the parent is asking for (the police treat "theft of ideas" like criminal theft, without even any registration of the IP!) would very likely result in clogged courts and mass incarceration of downloaders. (Admittedly this ridiculous hypothetical would also require that police have time and resource to treat theft of property seriously, which is not true in many places and considered no big deal given that you would most likely not be compensated for your losses except by insurance in any case).
- bborud 4y agoWhy have a patent system when it doesn't even take any responsibility for ensuring the patent is valid? Whether or not this patent is allowed to remain depends entirely on how much money the open source guys would be able to put up to take it to court.
- encryptluks2 4y agoUltimately because we have a system in place that doesn't care if people get exploited. Our American bureaucracy is designed to exploit, lie and cheat. Governments protect wealth not people.
- qikInNdOutReply 4y agoAnd the wealth does not want new, does not want change, does not want disruptions. Patents are not there to protect innovation capability, they are there to discourage innovation and "chill" creators.
- wly_cdgr 4y agoVery simple solution, just ignore the patent and set anyone who tries to enforce it on fire
- snsr 4y agoThat sounds facetious. I would try reaching out to the thieves themselves to discuss the prior art, or possibly the EFF: https://torbjornludvigsen.com/blog/hangprinter-is-prior-art/ https://torbjornludvigsen.com/blog/hangprinter-is-prior-art/ https://www.eff.org/issues/patent-busting-project https://www.eff.org/issues/patent-busting-project lindrf@ornl.gov postbk@ornl.gov lovelj@ornl.gov chesserpc@ornl.gov roschliac@ornl.gov
- wly_cdgr 4y agoNext thing you'll tell me to vote in November. Thanks but I like my plan better
- y4mi 4y agoPlease don't advocate for violence, even if it's only in jest.
- alangibson 4y agoWhy not? If you want someone to (not) do something, you need to provide a compelling rationale. Otherwise you're trying to compel some based on your personal preference. Personally I think wild hyperbole is funny and effective at making a point, so my preference is that the poster continue.
- humanistbot 4y ago> If you want someone to (not) do something, you need to provide a compelling rationale. OK. Advocating violence is a crime. And text-based communication is notoriously difficult medium to express sarcasm and irony. Crimes are bad, mmmmkay?
- iovrthoughtthis 4y agohow can you patent something with prior, public art?
- mch82 4y agoOne possible explanation… Patents go to the first to file. The prior art search focuses on prior patents. Patent examiners can’t consider something prior art until they know about it. It is possible to invalidate a patent after the fact in situations like this, but that’s expensive (as the article describes). Info on first to file: > The first inventor to file (FITF) provision of the America Invents Act transitions the U.S. to a first-inventor-to-file system from a first-to-invent system and became effective on March 16, 2013. The provision introduced changes to 35 U.S.C. § 102 that impact patent prosecution directly. https://www.uspto.gov/patents/first-inventor-file-fitf-resources https://www.uspto.gov/patents/first-inventor-file-fitf-resou... I didn’t click through to look at the actual patent, but it’s also possible the patent was narrowly written to focus on an industry specific application.
- alangibson 4y agoThis is only partially true. When you file a patent, you have a 'duty of candor.' The filer _must_ disclose all prior art they know of. If they don't, it's straightforward though time consuming to invalidate the patent.
- Mountain_Skies 4y agoWe need something similar to the EFF but for invalidating patents and other IP protections given to those who got them through the design of the lawfare system. It's too expensive for most small to medium size companies to take on a multinational that has fooled the government into granting them an exclusive license over some part of innovation that they didn't actually innovate.
- mch82 4y agoEFF is actually one of the orgs doing some work in this space. Another great reason to be a donor! https://www.eff.org/pages/defend-innovation https://www.eff.org/pages/defend-innovation
- bsenftner 4y agoIn another HN article today, there's a Harper's Magazine article about the gullibility of people and online scams. Having written and acquired a global patent, to significant personal and financial expense, and as a result have been exposed to the industry of scans surrounding patents and patent law, I now feel the entire patents enterprise is a giant multi-industry scam, institutionalized by major corporations in concert with their governments because that scam works for them very, very well. It is institutionalized now, and no longer called a scam officially, because it is an official conduit for stealing valuable working ideas from the non-1%.
- DarkmSparks 4y agoJust thinking outside the box for a second, but shouldnt it be possible to sue the patent office for copyright infringement in this case? As in, they published someone elses copyrighted design without giving appropriate credit. Are they given special exemptions from copyright law? DMCA takedown notice almost seems appropriate.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoMost likely you can't because of "qualified immunity" wherein government officials can violate rights of people and face no consequences.
- roflyear 4y agoOften bc the alternative is nothing ever can get done. Which maybe if you think there should be no systems at all you'll think is a good thing, but the majority of people enjoy some things the government provides.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoThe alternative is that officials face consequences for violating peoples rights. This would actually make things work better because rights would be enforced. Officials who violate them would be fired and/or fined and/or imprisoned (depending the situation), because what they did was illegal.
- roflyear 4y agoYou can't have judges potentially getting punished for making mistakes. There are a lot of examples. No one would take those jobs in your world.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 4y agoPeople get punished for making mistakes in every other type of job and people still take them, so why should judges get a free pass?
- core-utility 4y agoWhat proof do they have that it was copied, other than "it looks similar to ours?" Multiple discovery happens all the time, and the patent process - for better or worse - is an effort for an inventor to officially put their "I made this" stamp on.
- qwery 4y agoI'm not sure if you're (just) playing devil's advocate, but the blog post[0] linked in the article covers quite a lot of instances of prior art[a] / multiple discovery / coincidences, going back years before the patent application was filed. Whether this is proof that the design was copied -- I can't say. [0] https://torbjornludvigsen.com/blog/hangprinter-is-prior-art/ https://torbjornludvigsen.com/blog/hangprinter-is-prior-art/ [a] what I would call "prior art", anyway. IMHO, IANAL (AFAIK)
- MereInterest 4y agoProving that it was copied is only necessary to show copyright infringement. For example, if you independently write a Book A1 that happens to be very similar to an existing Book B, it is not copyright infringement. If you write Book A2 by taking an existing Book B and changing the name of each character, then it would be copyright infringement. Even if A1 and A2 end up having the exact same words as each other, the origin of those words matters. For a patent to be granted, the implied argument is entirely different. For a patent to be granted, it must be both novel and non-obvious to somebody in the field. If a patent is granted that exactly describes something that already exists, then one of two things must be the case. If the patent description was derived from the existing work, it wasn't novel. If the patent description was derived independently, then it was the obvious solution to a problem. In either case, it fails at least one of the requirements for a patent. Unfortunately, the patent office has frequently interpreted "novel" as "not covered by a previous patent", with the implication that every invention must have been patented at some point. The courts can go back and invalidate a patent, but that would be a defense against an actual lawsuit, and would carry significant risk to initiate.
- tartoran 4y agoPatent trolling is the worst kind of parasitism. Patent laws must be changed to penalize harshly this kind of behavior (after due process) to disincentivise people who choose this path.
- mensetmanusman 4y agoThis is the claim they were granted: “A cable-driven additive manufacturing system comprising: an end effector configured for linear translation within a three-dimensional workspace along an x-axis, a y-axis, and a z-axis; an aerial hoist suspending the end effector within the three-dimensional workspace by at least one suspension cable, the aerial hoist having a static position within the three-dimensional workspace whereby the aerial hoist is not translated along the x-axis with the end effector and the aerial hoist is not translated along the y-axis with the end effector; an aerial cable winder configured to control linear translation of the end effector along the z-axis; a plurality of motion-control base stations disposed below the aerial hoist and configured to control linear translation of the end effector in an x-y plane defined by the x-axis and the y-axis, each motion-control base station comprising a base station cable winder; a plurality of motion-control cables, at least one of the plurality of motion-control cables running from each of the base station cable winders to the end effector; at least one tension-control base station; and at least one tension-control cable running from the tension-control base station to the end effector.” Considering all the requirements, it is quite narrow. This means if a particular implementation doesn’t have all of these things it is not covered by this patent.
- dgfitz 4y agoDon’t let logic get in the way of anger, that’s not how the internet works these days.
- bfgoodrich 4y ago
- fluidcruft 4y agoIt's not about the number of requirements. What you quoted is actually a general description of the device. What it says is you have an effector (effector is a generic word that means something that does something) suspended in space. A rigid hoist provides a fixed position above the work area to suspend the effector. The effector hangs from the hoist by at least one cable. That cable is used to control the z postion of the effector. There are also at least two other controllers used to control the x and y position. Each controller is connected by at least one cable which is used to control position in x and y. In fact this patent was probably granted because that clause is not specific to 3D printing. The "effector" could be something else. Like a lathe or drill or camera or lightbulb or anything that does anything.
- alangibson 4y agoIANAL, but in this case there is so much prior art that I would just ignore the patent. If someone comes trolling, then that would be the time to challenge the patent. You might even be able to so it on the cheap with an ex parte reexamination.
- dogma1138 4y agoSure if you have 7 figures to spend on it in court, and the patent troll might still be able to get injections especially if the printers or parts that “violated” the patent in question are imported.
- alangibson 4y agoEx parte rexamination should be far cheaper than that. The success rate is lower than other avenues, but could work due to the mountain of evidence.
- dogma1138 4y agoLooks like the “company” that filed for the patent is basically the corporate research arm of UT. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UT–Battelle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UT–Battelle This makes the situation even shittier but also makes it more likely that the people who were issued the patent had little choice in the matter as it’s quite common for universities to basically patent every crap that a group of grads and their advising prof. produce on campus.
- sitkack 4y agoWhile most of the conversations below talk about specifics of the claims ... I think there are much larger issues at play of which this is a prime example. Innovation is a series of steps. The major problem is that you can Open Source a bunch of majorly innovative things, to only have some very smart people that have studied in the domain write down the logical next steps and have your entire area of amateur research now blocked by patents. They are free to acknowledge your work but now say, "xyz is new innovation in this direction". There is no LGPL/GPL for patents. Unless you are constantly trying to predict the next step, capital (and in this case government, see below) will be there to take innovation private. I see this as a massive theft vector of the commons. It allows private capital to front run public Open Source innovation. Yoink. There are two other perverse aspects to this. In academia amateur research isn't really citeable in the same way, to the point where it isn't even acknowledged unless the work is so profound. The third one, that most likely applies here, is the Bayh-Dole Act [1] that allows government money to make for profit patents on research. *edit, 4th one. The patent office is a profit center. And sorting out the legitimacy of patents is left to the courts. Patents aren't tools of innovation, but legal instruments that protect corporate oligarchies. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayh%E2%80%93Dole_Act
- dreamcompiler 4y agoI can't speak to the issue of whether this particular patent is valid, nor whether UT-Battelle plans to enforce it or how vigorously (some patents invented by DOE contractors are licensed quite reasonably. I know this because I was an inventor on a few of them). If the patent turns out to be invalid one could file a protest with the Department of Energy. Further, it looks like this contract will be re-bid in 2024 [0]. So if one felt strongly that UT-Battelle's behavior here was improper one could protest to DOE any extension of the contract to UT-Battelle. I rather doubt that a single bad patent would make much difference in DOE's decision, but you never know. [0] https://primecontract.ornl.gov/ https://primecontract.ornl.gov/
- not2b 4y agoThe EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) might be able to help. They regularly take on and challenge bad patents.