A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
theconversation.com
A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
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Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#2I don't love the language. It was patented. It could have been licensed no? The patent holder refused licensing at any price?
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#3Same story as with fractal compression algorithms. Patents shouldn't last that long.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#4There was no reason solar cell makers couldn't license the patent from the owner.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#5There was no reason solar cell makers couldn't license the patent from the owner.
It seems a bit presumptuous that in an industry with many, many actors, that it seems that the vast majority did not license the patent?
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#6I don't love the language. It was patented. It could have been licensed no? The patent holder refused licensing at any price?
Perhaps one manufacturer had obtained an exclusive license, preventing the rest of the industry from using this technology?
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#7I don't love the language. It was patented. It could have been licensed no? The patent holder refused licensing at any price?
It was a completely obvious idea that, when the patent expired, was immediately widely adopted. It's clear in this case that the patent retarded progress rather than promoting it.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#8There was no reason solar cell makers couldn't license the patent from the owner.
Such a claim is naive. While I know nothing about this specific patent of the Japanese company Shin-Etsu, when a patent is owned by a very large manufacturer like this, they very seldom want to make money by licensing the patent but they use it to exclude any competitors.
This is done by either refusing to license the patent, or more likely by requesting royalties so large that the products made by any other company could not be cheaper than their own.
There are many examples of patents which had never been implemented in any product before the day when they expired.
In this case, Shin-Etsu would have probably been willing to supply Ga-doped silicon wafers to PV cell manufacturers, but only at prices too high in comparison with the current prices of the PV panels, so such wafers have never seen any significant use.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#9I don't love the language. It was patented. It could have been licensed no? The patent holder refused licensing at any price?
It was a completely obvious idea that, when the patent expired, was immediately widely adopted. It's clear in this case that the patent retarded progress rather than promoting it.
I'm not a lawyer, but have been involved in IP issues. What I've learned is that obviousness is phenomenally difficult to prove.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#10I don't love the language. It was patented. It could have been licensed no? The patent holder refused licensing at any price?
It was a completely obvious idea that, when the patent expired, was immediately widely adopted. It's clear in this case that the patent retarded progress rather than promoting it.
Everything is obvious once you know the secret. This went under patent protection in 2000, which is decades into the hunt for PV improvements and decades into gallium doping silicon substrate (which started in the 50s at the dawn of transistors.) Papers from the early 2000s talk about this improvement and about open questions regarding the cell lifetime and mixing gallium and germanium ratios, so it does not appear to be as obvious as you suggest.