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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

#81

Post by kragen »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #66
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.

It's a really interesting question! It worked okay for Encarta, but the original fractal-compression algorithm was the "grad student algorithm", where a grad student sat in a room fiddling with parameters until she got an image that looked right, which got really astounding compression ratios, dramatically better than the ratios they were able to deliver for Encarta. Maybe modern ANNs and optimization algorithms like Adam could produce much better fractal compression than the algorithms that were practical to automate 30 years ago?

The reason fractal compression sometimes got much better compression ratios than DCTs is apparently that it did a better job of capturing the structure of the world (a prior probability distribution), more than anything about the quirks of visual perception. We know lots of basis functions that are a little better at giving us sparse bases than DCTs for low absolute error on real-world images, even before any kind of perceptual weighting. IFSs aren't quite linear basis functions (I mean they're normally "linear", but what's being transformed linearly is the (x, y) vector and not the (r,g,b) vector), and it wouldn't be terribly surprising if they could do better still. Particularly given past examples of them doing amazing.

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

#82

Post by kragen »

amelius wrote: post #58
folli wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How will you objectively measure "amount of work required to come up with them"? That sounds rather infeasible.

The same way the government funds any kind of project. Contractor says: we can do this for $X. Government says yes or no to the project. You do the same for patent applications. It's basically answering the question "how much is this technology worth to society?" If they don't pay for it, then the technology will end up as a trade secret.

This is actually already a part of the patent system, but not in the way you're thinking. If a contractor says publicly, "We can frotz quibbins with a turgut for $X," that counts as putting turgut-based quibbin-frotzing "on sale". This means that ⓐ nobody else can patent turgut-based quibbin-frotzing thereafter, and ⓑ the contractor themself only has a year to file a patent on turgut-based quibbin-frotzing from the date of that notice. This is called the "on-sale bar".

The idea is that patents are only supposed to be granted for novel, nonobvious things. If nobody had ever realized that turguts would be advantageous for frotzing quibbins, then you're an inventor if you figured out how to do it, and you can get a government-granted monopoly. But presumably if you're offering to sell someone a turgut-based quibbin-frotzing product, even if you haven't actually built it yet, you must be pretty sure it's workable and worthwhile. And now anybody else can go ahead and start frotzing the quibbins with a turgut now that you've pointed out how, and although the patent law gives you a bit of a grace period to patent it, it doesn't give you unlimited leeway.

If it turns out that the turgut has to be freebled first, then you (or anybody else) might be able to patent the freebling part at any later date, since that wasn't in the original offer to sell. But only if the need for freebling wouldn't be obvious to one skilled in the art.

So, basically, patents are intended for things that are not known to be possible until someone figures out how to do them. Lemelson got away with some pretty shameless exploitation of the loopholes in these criteria, a lot of which are now closed.

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

#83

Post by kragen »

riffraff wrote: post #36
fn-mote wrote: post #23

PV = 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.

Yeah, this is a stupid thing that stems from a sound shift in Ancient Greek about 2000 years ago, when Φ changed its pronunciation from [pʰ] to something like [f]. We have all kinds of evidence of more or less when and where this happened, but not why, although it's a thing that's happened in other languages too, where a phonetic distinction that's originally aspirated/unaspirated becomes a fricative/plosive distinction.

English has this stupid policy of keeping the original spelling of any loanword it picks up, gradually drifting closer and closer to being an ideographic script. In this case English got its Greek morphemes by way of Latin, where they'd mostly already acquired standard spellings based on the older pronunciation. In Spanish, which has a phonetic script, it's much saner: "panel fotovoltáico".

Maybe we should start calling them ΦV panels.

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

#84

Post by sheepdestroyer »

kragen wrote: post #83
riffraff wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, this is a stupid thing that stems from a sound shift in Ancient Greek about 2000 years ago, when Φ changed its pronunciation from [pʰ] to something like [f]. We have all kinds of evidence of more or less when and where this happened, but not why, although it's a thing that's happened in other languages too, where a phonetic distinction that's originally aspirated/unaspirated becomes a fricative/plosive distinct…

Preserving words history is far from stupid. Spellings of words bear meaning. Ethymology is extremely important to understand your own language, and how it relates to others. If we were to write every languages strictly phonetically, some would lose more than just etymology, but would even become a lot less understandable.

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

#85

Post by elcdodedocle »

new299 wrote: post #76
elcdodedocle wrote: post #28

You know why release a product to the market that lasts longer when you can just hold the patent and make shitty panels that have to be replaced every so often? Forget the competitors. Forgive the cynicism but this was clearly a 20 year long win-win for the industry. Long live the big wheel industrial complex. F the consumer. *and the environment.

When I see a broad statement like this, it seems interesting to dig a little further. The article itself doesn’t provide much detail to back up its claims. And specifically it would be interesting to understand the patent issue better. The patent they cite says claims “ A silicon single crystal produced according to Czochralski method using a melt in contact with a quartz crucible, to which Ga (gallium) is added as a…

Well I agree with you. And I also suspected those numbers, to be honest. A sudden increase to 80% of total production? 80% from what? Since when? But I did not do a lot of research: I tried to find sources as the article is not only vague on context but also on references, but the numbers I found were not clear either. They only showed that around 90% of the global production was from silicon crystal based panels already back in 2013, way before the patent expiration. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics citing https://www.webcitation.org/6SFRTUaBS and https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...). I found no breakdowns to compare boron vs. gallium doping over time. I do not know anything about foundries. Maybe replacing boron with gallium is not a trivial change in process. Maybe the patent and planned obsolescence are not the issues here and I was being pretty cynic on my comment without fact checking it anyway. But way too often they are. If that figure, 80%, is true, and the shift from boron to gallium happened over the last year like the article claims, it is very likely that 2 main factors, if not the main ones, were those.

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

#86

Post by kragen »

sheepdestroyer wrote: post #84
kragen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is a stupid thing that stems from a sound shift in Ancient Greek about 2000 years ago, when Φ changed its pronunciation from [pʰ] to something like [f]. We have all kinds of evidence of more or less when and where this happened, but not why, although it's a thing that's happened in other languages too, where a phonetic distinction that's originally aspirated/unaspirated becomes a fricative/plosive distinct…

Preserving words history is far from stupid. Spellings of words bear meaning. Ethymology is extremely important to understand your own language, and how it relates to others. If we were to write every languages strictly phonetically, some would lose more than just etymology, but would even become a lot less understandable.

While not, strictly speaking, incorrect (and I certainly do enjoy etymology) this reasoning disregards the tradeoffs; it leads to https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2473.
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