A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years • Hacker News Board

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#61

Post by icebraining » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:33 PM UTC

lostapathy wrote: post #59

riskable wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small inventor already can't afford a patent. Let's say the small inventor spent the large amount of money for lawyers and patent searches and got a patent... How will they defend it when litigating a patent starts at around $1 million? What this means is that any practical implementation of an idea needs to be a multi-million dollar idea in order to be worth patenting. Otherwise you're just wasting money.

In some ways, I think we need a way to file a defensive patent, especially for a small player. So if you are a small firm, you can patent something and ensure that a big fish can’t also patent it and run you out of business, but without obligation (and maybe without rights to) enforce it if someone else uses your idea. I.e., a patent that protects you against a later filer, but that’s it.

In theory, just publishing the invention means it'll become prior art and prevent its patenting. Supposedly the US patent examiners will review places like https://www.priorartarchive.org/ before issuing a new patent.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#62

Post by new299 » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

riskable wrote: post #57

nextweek2 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting about the small inventor. If I'm sitting in my garage and come up with a cool idea that takes me 5 years of knocking on doors to get funded, then I'll get screwed by your approach.

Small inventor already can't afford a patent. Let's say the small inventor spent the large amount of money for lawyers and patent searches and got a patent... How will they defend it when litigating a patent starts at around $1 million? What this means is that any practical implementation of an idea needs to be a multi-million dollar idea in order to be worth patenting. Otherwise you're just wasting money.

Small inventors absolutely can afford to patent. A provisional patent for a small entity is $150. A full pro se application is something like $1500 IIRC.

The point is that with a patent, the small inventor can go on to raise further funds to exploit and defend the patent if necessary.

I’m not defending the patent system, but saying it’s too expensive doesn’t make much sense.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#63

Post by vbezhenar » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 10:39 PM UTC

nextweek2 wrote: post #51

mchusma wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're forgetting about the small inventor. If I'm sitting in my garage and come up with a cool idea that takes me 5 years of knocking on doors to get funded, then I'll get screwed by your approach.

Get a loan, patent and sell your idea, pay a loan. If you can't sell your idea, may be it should not be patented.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#64

Post by m4rtink » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #3

Same story as with fractal compression algorithms. Patents shouldn't last that long.

And with plastic melting (FDM) 3D printers - they really don't have anything novel, just a bunch of steppers + heating element, all controlled with a cheap 8 bit microcontroller.

Yet AFAIK due to some patent being held by Stratasis that made only professional level horrendously expensive and proprietary 3D printers that never got any wide adoption, the 3D printing revolution was held a decade+ until the damned patent finally expired. And the rest is history.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#65

Post by clairity » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 11:05 PM UTC

mchusma wrote: post #41

xvilka wrote: post #3

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.

with both copyrights and patents, fees should be just rise geometrically, yearly (but can be prepaid into the future). so for instance, the first year might be $1000, the second, $2000, and the 10th year, ~$1MM (a 2^n progression). by year 20, nearly every patent and copyright would be relinquished as the fee would be ~$1B. with those kinds of rates, even disney would have to innovate to stay large and relevant, rather than sitting on their laurels and collecting rents in perpetuity.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#66

Post by ReactiveJelly » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 11:10 PM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #3

Same story as with fractal compression algorithms. Patents shouldn't last that long.

Agreed that patents are too long, but wasn't fractal compression bunk?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fractal_compression

Slow to encode, and there's no reason it should perform better than DCTs or any other modern image codec that's built around being machine-friendly.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#67

Post by evgen » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

pfdietz wrote: post #12

analog31 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, since you obviously can't be bothered to do the research I will tell you. It didn't take them long at all. There were studies looking at the impact of boron-doping and gallium-doping back in the 70s. So why was a patent issued in 2000 that everyone has been waiting to expire? Why hadn't we moved from boron-doped PV substrate to gallium-doped substrate in the two decades between those points? Maybe that is the question you should have been asking.

Turns out that it is incredibly fucking hard to manufacture silicon ingots with the correct doping but without too much oxygen in them that make the gallium-doped wafers perform worse than boron-doped ones. Everyone knew gallium was a better target, no one had a fucking clue how to make them at scale or at an acceptable cost. Figuring this out is ENTIRELY what this patent is about.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#68

Post by m4rtink » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 11:20 PM UTC

adrian_b wrote: post #8

wbl wrote: post #4

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…

IMHO wacom did something similar for their EMR pen tablet technology - whole in this case indeed a clever idea (pen tabled needs no battery, possibly other benefits) they only choose to build super expensive pro level drawing tablets (especially the prices of their LCD drawing tablets used to be INSANE) and only licensed the technology for presumably lot of money for high end third party products.

End result - good chunk of a generation of aspiring digital artists lost due to unaffordable tools.

Now when their patents finally expired and they have actual competition (xp pen, huion and others) it turns out huge surprise they actually can produce good quality and achievable drawing tablets like the Wacom One.

Progress of arts and sciences indeed!

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#69

Post by evgen » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 11:28 PM UTC

wallacoloo wrote: post #25

petra wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe they were the first to discover the problem?

Possibly, but I’d like to pose a relevant question: had they discovered it and then chosen to keep quiet, how long would it have been before someone else discovered it independently? Answer: definitely less than 20 years. So why then should the first group to discover this be given 20 years of exclusivity? People claim that this promise of exclusivity drives the research. On the other hand, why pour money into resear…

> Possibly, but I’d like to pose a relevant question: had they discovered it and then chosen to keep quiet, how long would it have been before someone else discovered it independently?

>Answer: definitely less than 20 years. So why then should the first group to discover this be given 20 years of exclusivity?

What is absolutely hilarious about your musings here is that you are completely, 100% wrong. You make un-informed guesses and manage to get just about every aspect of the issue completely wrong. Well done.

Would you like to know when it was known that gallium-doped silicon substrate was going to perform well and possibly better than boron-doped substrate? At least the mid-70s. Would you like to know when this patent was issued? 2000. So for almost 25 years everyone KNEW gallium was better. It was literally sitting out there on every periodic table on the planet and for some reason no one produced gallium-doped PV cells at scale or cost. Why is that?

Maybe because the trick was not knowing that gallium is what you wanted to dope the silicon with, but in knowing HOW TO ACTUALLY PULL IT OFF. For more than two decades it was staring everyone in the face. For more than two decades everyone knew what the target was. For more than two decades NO ONE DID IT. That is why the first group to figure out how to manufacture gallium-doped silicon with the proper amount of other components were given exclusivity, because if they had not managed to do it then maybe we would all still be waiting for gallium-doped PV cells.

Re: A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20 years

#70

Post by philipkglass » Sat, Jul 24, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

petra wrote: post #13

Any ideas by how much does this increase cell lifetime?

Longi has a detailed comparison of boron doped and gallium doped cell characteristics here:

https://en.longi-solar.com/home/events/press_detail/id/228_G...

There are modest but real improvements in efficiency and resistance to multiple cell degradation mechanisms. Cell lifetime does not have a hard cutoff. Typically a panel's lifetime is limited by failed backsheets or wiring/soldering rather than by the more gradual optical-electronic degradation mechanisms that gallium doping helps prevent.