Supposedly it's been licensed (2019)
https://www.jasolar.com.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=sho...
A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
31–40 of 86 posts
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I guess if you patent something and then never use and/or sell it, it will just sit there, protected by law, like a valuable piece of land full of weeds and shrubs in the middle of a city.
Land titles and patents both have similar characteristics and both could be taxed by value to discourage idle use. The key for both is that the government is providing exclusive security of tenure over some natural opportunity in order to facilitate production. But if people take the opportunity but don't do anything with it, whether for speculation or laziness, they are excluding others. That would only be acceptabl…
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Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#33Supposedly it's been licensed (2019) https://www.jasolar.com.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=sho...
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
Everything is obvious once you know the secret.
Man, I hate this argument. A secret is a secret because it's not obvious. If something is naturally likely to be invented by the first person who happens to encounter the problem it solves, it's not a "secret."
That seems to have been what happened here. Society does not benefit from granting a government-enforced 20-year monopoly on things like this. In fact, the cost in terms of wasted energy is incalculable. Patents wall off entire areas of R&D in many instances; we literally don't know what they cost us to grant.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#35I don't love the language. It was patented. It could have been licensed no? The patent holder refused licensing at any price?
The patent holder, Shin-Etsu Chemical, did license the technology. They licensed it to to JA Solar, Longi and Trina Solar, all large solar panel makers in China. JA Solar panels have had gallium doping since Q3 2020.[1] The article somehow doesn't mention that. JA mentions gallium, but they seem to consider the weather-tightness of the surface film to be a bigger factor in lifespan. [1] http://taiyangnews.info/techno…
2020Q3 is after the patent expired in May 2020.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#36PV = photovoltaic If the title read "silicon solar cells" it would be clearer to the layperson (like me). Many of us read the comments to decide if the article is worth reading, so it helps.
For a non native speaker it's hard to connect P with the F sound in photovoltaic, so this title was extra confusing for me.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 t…
But did the applicants of the patent show a working model? Or did they just patent a bunch of possible improvements in the hope that one of them would lead to a breakthrough?
Random thought to throw out. Value patents based on the amount of work required to come up with them. So patenting some random shower thought is worth what you put into it. And what you can recover in a lawsuit is also tied to that.
"Yeah we violated your 'something but on the internet patent' Here's a $50 Home Depot card."
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
The patent holder, Shin-Etsu Chemical, did license the technology. They licensed it to to JA Solar, Longi and Trina Solar, all large solar panel makers in China. JA Solar panels have had gallium doping since Q3 2020.[1] The article somehow doesn't mention that. JA mentions gallium, but they seem to consider the weather-tightness of the surface film to be a bigger factor in lifespan. [1] http://taiyangnews.info/techno…
2020Q3 is after the patent expired in May 2020.
Yeah real good argument for patents not impeding progress with no tangible societal benefit...
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not talking about proving it in court, I'm asking you to consider it in your own mind. When the problem with boron doping was realized, how long do you think it would have taken everyone to go down that column of the periodic table and use gallium instead? It's not like there was a huge selection of elements to chose from.
Maybe they were the first to discover the problem?
If you look at the references in the patent this doesn't appear to be the case.
Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years
#40Are there any groups attempting patent reform in an organized way?