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Same story as with fractal compression algorithms. Patents shouldn't last that long.
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I'm not a lawyer, but have been involved in IP issues. What I've learned is that obviousness is phenomenally difficult to prove.
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.
Just looking at the field of software process, there are things I've been doing for 20 years that sure seem obvious to me and that I thought would be obvious to everybody else in short order. But here we are and the dominant process approach has gone from "chaotic waterfall" to "chaotic waterfall with Scrum jargon and modestly shorter delivery cycles".
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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."
I 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.
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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.
Well in that case surely someone would have challenged the patent and got it invalidated.
Aren't patents, per the constitution, to promote the progress of science? How can they act to do the opposite?
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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…
Gallium (as GaAs) was being used in solar cells in the mid 60s. A quick search finds papers from the late 70s describing different effects of boron and gallium doping of silicon for solar cells to extend the life of satellites (the effect of the patent in question is to extend the working lifetime of panels so that solar radiation does not damage the panel.) So apparently this was so obvious that the first person who happened to encounter it missed it. It was then missed over and over and over again for at least 20 years and possibly 35.
Yeah, definitely something "likely to be invented by the first person who happens to encounter the problem it solves"...
There 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…
Same story as with fractal compression algorithms. Patents shouldn't last that long.
I think they should be more expensive too. The government shouldn't give a monopoly for cheap. Maybe $100k fee for first 5 years, with the ability to pay something like $1m to extend another 5 years would be long enough. Maybe $10M for another 5 years, and $100M for another 5 years.