If the US cared about remaining competitive with China, the government would attack this. Example approaches:
a) Smallish hammer: disallow priority based on Chinese patents.
b) Big hammer: if anyone wants to manufacture anything in the US and sell to the US market, give an automatic patent workaround. For example, there could be compulsory licensing, at enforced and genuinely reasonable prices, for all patents, foreign and domestic. If someone wanted to build an SLS printer or an e-ink display here ten years ago, they should have been allowed to while paying a small amount (small enough that the whole enterprise remained profitable) to the respective patent holders. Submarine patents should be completely inapplicable: if I opt to buy compulsory licenses, there should be a limited period for any patent holders to announce themselves, and then the patent holders could fight over the (capped) royalties while I continue to manufacture and sell the product.
c) b, with the system built in a way that works for open source too. I should be able to publish open source things with zero risk regardless of patents. I should be able to sell them and other people should be able to deploy them on their own under terms like (b) that make it economical to do so.
That being said, I have doubts anything will change because I have a feeling that this system is continuing to "work as designed".
These failings are exploitable and since the US government is somewhat bought and paid for, this is how it works. The intent might be to keep it this way.
First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.
The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
I do think there needs to be reforms about non-practicing entities holding large patent portfolios. Maybe we should have some kind of FRAND (or FRAND-like) requirements for their portfolios.
The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. Open-source and community-led IP contributions are grossly under-protected because of this, and those with capital become unopposed predators. This is a special-case of the more general observation that the justice system is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. The answer is something you very rarely hear: the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions. Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room.
All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally.
It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.
The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law.
This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead.
Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
It's not a binary too string / too weak. It's that _copyright_:
- protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,
- is too long, yes
- DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties
- the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original.
As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate.
And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none.
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More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.
To be fair, in the States, you can own a small business, come up with a good idea, and someone can just copy it and compete against you regardless if it's copyright infringement or not. And that's in the context of a domestic legal issue.
You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point.
I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free.
Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them.
It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen.
Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood.
A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market.
No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.
The driver of cost isn't paper or physical presence -- I'd be willing to print a few pages and show up downtown in my city where the court is much more if not for the real costs. It often costs hundreds of dollars to file in court (even for small claims in some states), which is a problem because misconduct under a few hundrs dollars is common. It is also almost always useful and often requied (such as when an LLC is a party) to hire lawyers. The law is so complex, and the court procedures too, that we need highly trained professionals to effectively represent people.
The model of paying these professionals from the salary of the average person who themself probably makes way less or from a cash strapped startup doesn't add up. Therefore, to fix the issue we either need to pay lawyers less, pay them from some other source (I'd like to see that in a court case either party can spend any amount on representation, but they must pay into a common pot that's split in half for the opposing party to hire their own representation of a similiar quality), or make them less needed (i.e., simplify and document law and court procedures then legalize pro se representation in all cases including LLCs such that anyone can effectively argue in court).
But it would also make patent spamming much less valuable and arguably more expensive for the spammer. If you spam patents and get one issued for something that isn't novel and/or already has prior art, everyone can fight it and it quickly gets its metal tested in court.
I imagine a fine for egregious patents could also be implemented. If your patent is demonstrated in court to lack standing, the civil liability is on you, not the patent office.
The hard reality is that nobody actually knows a priori what innovation is. Or how much an innovation is actually worth. If you removed patents that would pretty easily and trivially stop the spam.
The first problem is that what's written in the law and what actually happens are pushed apart by the ridiculous costs of using courts. If fixing that such that courts are fully accessible to anyone without worrying about the cost doesn't produce the desired outcome, then one should look to legislate that outcome. Bad legislation is thus the second problem.
It would be good if the difficulty of getting patents would go up by a factor of 10. To get less of them in volume, and less bullshit ones. Should also throw out a bunch of the existing bad ones.
>the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions.
And why would those in power do that, when the justice system as it is exists to serve their interests?
Presence in the courtroom is kind of a red herring. It's uncommon for cases to get that far.
The real costs come from the US legal system being originally designed by and for agrarian villages of Saxons arguing with each other about who stole whose sheep, with the process handled in a more-or-less ad-hoc manner by village leaders for whom it's mostly a side responsibility, and the whole mess serving double duty as a source of community entertainment not unlike modern reality television.
A lot has changed over the past 1,000 years, but at it's core it's still a system that puts an incredible amount of focus on people arguing about Every. Single. Damned. Thing. No. Matter. How. Trivial. The really expensive parts of a lawsuit are the parts that create the most opportunity for this kind of bickering. Which is typically the parts that don't happen inside a courtroom. For example there's the discovery phase, which all by itself is so unusually complicated and expensive that it's spawned an entire multibillion dollar industry that basically only exists in English-speaking countries. And all the ancillary litigation over nitpicky procedural matters. And maybe other things, but those are the two that are the worst for being inherently expensive, easy to weaponize, and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon.
This would imply that civil law systems don't suffer from these problems, but they do. I don't think common law is to blame for the complexity of the justice system.
Actually AFIAK most of the US has moved to electronic filing, but that has actually made things more expensive. Typically courts hire out the electronic filing part. The hired companies typically collect money from both the state/county and the end user. Larger court systems like LA, NYC, and Cook are big enough to force concessions, or even fund new companies, but others have to buy into one system or another.
It would be great if a bunch of courts could band together to setup a shared open source solution, but courts at the state level are pretty fractious. And the legal system is both pretty slow and pretty reluctant to change.
>Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
You're leaving out the part that there are a limited number of judges, and to be a good judge requires a LOT of education, a LOT of experience, and a LOT of time (in other words it's expensive to become a good judge and they need to be compensated to reflect the cost of becoming one).
Computers and Zoom don't change the fact our options are either:
Put thousands of new unqualified people into positions of power (judges)
Or continue with the current system where getting into a court is slow and expensive.
Unless you're planning on building an entirely new court system removed from the current one specifically for IP. To which I say: good luck, because it'll be a massive expansion of government that doesn't include lining the pockets of our current little dictator or his supporters so we'll hear about how we need to shrink government and reduce the debt.
For what it's worth, I run a company in the space --
I 100% agree with you and luckily I think with AI this will rapidly change. The USPTO is bringing on as many AI tools as possible, as fast as they can. Similarly, we've built a product that can invalidate patents at scale, conduct prior art searches in 15 minutes what used to take weeks and thousands of dollars --
We and others in the space are rapidly gaining traction, so I suspect it's only a matter of time. I should also mention there are whole networks out there battling patent trolls (LOT Network) and others working on open source, etc.
Maybe the patent system isn’t “broken” - maybe it’s working exactly as intended: a modern master–slave dynamic where the rich can’t own people, so they own ideas and rent them back. Patents were sold as protection for inventors, but in practice they’re corporate minefields. Filing costs and enforcement make them useless to anyone without deep pockets, while big players hoard them to block competition, extract rent, and stall entire fields. With today’s tech, knowledge could be replicated and shared at near-zero cost, but the system manufactures artificial scarcity. A literal protection racket.
The fact that IP protection is expensive is essentially its defining feature. One way to think of "intellectual property" is precisely as a weird proof-of-work, since you are trying to simulate the features of physical property for abstract entities that by default behave in the exact opposite fashion.
This is the frustrating thing about getting into an argument about how "IP isn't real property" and then having the other side roll their eyes at you like you are some naive ideologue. They're missing the point of what it means for IP to not be "real property". The actual point is understanding that you are, and will be, swimming against the current of the fundamentals of these technologies forever. It is very very difficult to make a digital book or movie that can't be copied. So difficult in fact, that it we've had to keep pushing the problem lower and lower into the system, with DRM protections at the hardware level. This is essentially expensive, not just from a capital perspective, but from a "focus and complexity" burden perspective as well. Then realize that even after putting this entire system in place, an entire trade block could arbitrarily decide to stop enforcing copyright, AKA, stop fueling the expensive apparatus that is is holding up the "physical property" facade for "intellectual property". This was actually being floated as a retaliation tactic during the peak of the tariff dispute with Canada[1]. And in fact we don't even need to go that far, it has of course always been the case that patents vary in practical enforceability country to country, and copyrights (despite an attempt to unify the rules globally) are also different country to country (the earliest TinTin is public domain in the US but not in the EU).
Usually at this point someone says "It's expensive to defend physical property too! See what happens if another country takes your cruise liner". But that's precisely the point, the difficulty scales with the item. I don't regularly have my chairs sitting in Russia for them to be nationalized. The entities that have large physical footprints are also the ones most likely to have the resources defend that property. This is simply not the case with "intellectual property," which has zero natural friction in spreading across the world, and certainly doesn't correlate with the "owner's" ability to "defend" it. This is due to the fundamental contradiction that "intellectual property" tries to establish: it wants all the the zero unit-cost and distribution benefits of "ethereal goods," with all the asset-like benefits of physical goods. It wants it both ways.
Notice that all the details always get brushed away, we assume we have great patent clerks making sure only "novel inventions" get awarded patents. It assumes that patent clerks are even capable of understanding the patent in question (they're not, the vast majority are new grads [2]). We assume the copyright office is property staffed (it isn't [3]) We assume the intricacies of abstract items like "APIs" can be property understood by both judge and jury in order to reach the right verdict in the theoretically obvious cases (also turns out that most people are not familiar with these concepts).
How could this not be expensive? You essentially need to create "property lore" in every case that is tried. Any wish for the system to be faster would necessarily also mean less correct verdicts. There's no magic "intellectual property dude" that could resolve all this stuff. Copyright law says that math can't be copyrighted, yet we can copyright code. Patent law says life can't be patented, yet our system plainly allows copyrighting bacteria. Why? Because a lawyer held of a tube of clear liquid and said "does this seem like life to you?" The landmark Supreme Court case was decided 5-4 [4], and all of a sudden a thing that should obviously not be copyrightable by anyone that understands the science was decided it was. There's no "hidden true rules" that if just followed, would make this system efficient. It is, by design, a system that makes things up as it goes along.
As mentioned in other comments, at best you could just flip burden to the other party, which doesn't make the system less expensive, it just shifts the default party that has to initially burden the cost. Arguably this is basically what we have with patents. Patents are incredibly "inventor friendly". You can get your perpetual motion machine patented easy-peasy. In fact, there is so much "respect" for "ideas" as "real things", that you can patent things you never made and have no intention of making. You can then sue companies that actually make the thing you "described first". Every case is a new baby being presented to King Solomon to cut in half.
In other words, an inexpensive system would at minimum require universal understanding and agreement on supremely intricate technical details of every field it aims to serve, which isn't just implausible, it is arguably impossible by definition since the whole point of intellectual property is to cover the newest developments in the field.
While I don't entirely disagree with you. You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).
You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)
> In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years.
When did we start being a just society would you say? WWI? The Civil Rights Act? Unless you really stretch things, saying that justice declined in the last 50 years - even if true - means that justice "peaked" for a short period of maybe a generation. I suspect if you actually lived in that era[1] you wouldn't think that though so this whole framing is based on false nostalgia for a time you never experienced.
That’s an exaggeration. As a famous example, Musk believed that laws didn’t apply to him and he ended up having to buy Twitter anyway after he tried to back out.
Corporate law is a thing. There are huge, consequential lawsuits between giant corporations.
In the US, laws protect the franchise. The franchise may have wealth but at least at this point in history we have as a nation, extended it to everyone.
If the laws protect the wealthy then perhaps your cynical view misses the fact that there is more wealth held by the average US citizen than that of any other nation on earth. Are we trending the correct direction? No. But that’s not the result of injustice, it’s the result of an economic system that prioritizes wealth extraction.
"Democracy" boils down to choosing one point ("candidate") in a highly dimensional space to express your entire preference (actually a high dimensional vector). This is _obviously_ stupid.
You can see the effects in how people love simplifying things into the left/right spectrum, sometimes adding a second axis for conservative/liberal. Because if you do PCA, those are probably the most important factors for many people.
But they fail to generalize this realization to openly discuss the other "less critical" dimensions.
It's a failure of the education system and it perpetuates learned helplessness.
If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products.
I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned several Creality and Bambu Labs printers, because I could get the same utility at half the cost. The same goes for soldering irons, linear actuators, oscillscopes, etc. I still buy European hand tools (Knipex, Wera, etc) because I know they won't break in a year, so they are good value in the long run.
Often the choice is whether to buy a used, last generation tool of eBay, or a brand new next-gen tool from China. The choice depends on how flawed the Chinese implementation is and the gap in utility between the generations.
The main problem with Chinese products is the lack of accountability. The same product will be sold under multiple brands, or by dropshippers, and you have no idea who actually made it, there are some strong Chinese brands that buck this trend, i.e. Bambu Labs. When you buy western tools you are buying peace of mind, something I can't currently afford.
Prusa makes their products locally, the spare part situation is good, the company runs an open Makerspace in their basement, helps host conferences and has done a lot for Open Hardware in general. They also have offered consistent upgrade paths for old machines for a long time and the repairability in general is good. You can also talk to them. These things matter for purchase decisions. Same logic as per your Knipex and Wera example.
I actually have a Bambu Labs at home for occasional use but I would not consider anything but Prusas for a general-use desktop FDM printer in basically any more serious setting. This has been the situation for many years now (over the last 12 years or so, I've had to make a few purchase decisions for batches of 5-15 FDM printers as well as different single specialty ones).
I want so much to like Prusa ... but the Bambu printer at my local makerspace costs half as much and is better in every way than the MK3S+ sitting in my basement. I'm fully aware that this is the result of shrewdness on the part of the Chinese, plus incompetence in the West, and it's so frustrating.
Chinese stuff these days has pulled far ahead of the Harbor Freight reputation of my youth. I can't remember the last time I've seen a proper "Engrish" instruction manual, most of the things are well designed and well built. Meanwhile, the "good old American brands" seem to just be selling out for cheaper and better profit margin products, so you'll be ending up with Chinese stuff anyways, which is sometimes worse than the actual Chinese brands.
Forced I don't know... But of course the financial incentives are very strong, as in many categories the Chinese brands have remarkable and sometimes astonishing value-for-money.
But for a small business, the cost of these tools might be quite low relative to manpower anyway, so paying 2x might not be a big deal. We got 8 Prusa machines at our local hackerspace, and 10 at previous startup lab I was at.
I have Creality Ender3 v3 and Prusa mk4s and they are not the same, you can get them to produce same quality, but ender requires more tinkering and I have had more failed prints.
Creality software is awful, you get no firmware updates for a year and then you get 4 on same day, like do they even test before release?
Slicer is also buggy and default settings seem to be max everything, so its loud and fast and has print quality issues.
When I was building the prusa kit, I kept thinking that this is how you should make a product, the machine feels well thought out and documentation is great.
Of course prusa is 3x the cost of ender.
Hobbyists aren’t forced to buy anything.. I blame youtube for turning hobbies into an exercise at buying stuff. Affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money online and the reason why the majority of videos in the hobby space seem to be gear reviews. Yet as a hobbyist chances are you won’t practice enough to outgrow your tools anyway, and neither do you have the economic incentives of business owners.
Youtube may have exasperated the situation, but gear obsession in hobbies certainly predates even the internet, much less youtube. It seems kind of natural, mastering your tools takes time and maybe talent. Buying them just takes money.
I remember the original Dawn of the Dead poking fun at it when they raid the gun store in the mall:
Peter: Ain't it a crime.
Stephen: What?
Peter: The only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it.
This is a microcosm of what's happening all over the physical device world, and manufacturing: Everyone (Except Prusa; thank you for your service!) outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.
My Raise3D printer is high quality and reliable. It's a nice piece of hardware. The PCBs I order from JLC are high-quality, built-to-specs, and whenever there's an error, it's a design fault. They are cheap, and arrive in 10 days.
I don't like the idea of being this dependent on China, but it's where we are. Weaponizing patents a risk? Problem. Placing the knowledge of how to build civilization in a single country? Problem. At least someone is carrying the torch forward, so it could be worse.
> Everyone ... outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.
To me this is the fundamental problem with the notion of intellectual property and its protection: so much of it is trade secret and undocumented (let's be real, we disclose as little in patents as we can get away with). Companies come and go, and in the process, institutional knowledge of how to do things is lost because there is no incentive to make it public for others to replicate. This also means that once lost, it must be rediscovered later.
As a hardware guy, and someone who loves coming up with fun product ideas, China is the ASI LLM of the hardware world. Like don't even bother trying to compete, they are faster, cheaper, have better yield, and don't really need to be profitable.
Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.
That's the current reality of hardware in the western world. About 5 or 6 years ago I developed a product that cost me $75 in parts per unit (probably $60 if I could get to scale). The Chinese counterparts competing in the same category cost $70. I needed to sell at $200 to make a profit.
People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.
To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". IMO what the government is doing in that regard is more than misguided but other efforts exist. I'm optimistic about efforts like https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/. Permitting reform is a key piece which they work around, synergy from physical proximity is another. Both are addressed by the Solano Foundry project. One might see US labor cost as a disadvantage but with automation I don't think it matters that much. Jobs have been mostly lost to automation, rather than to China and that so only continue.
> To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back".
The reality is that you will also have to bring back less worker protection to make this competitive. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how good you are, if you have invest in R&D, China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? I am pretty sure they are working their damnest to copy semiconductor manufacturing and if they can fully scale that up I can safely say the West is screwed technologically.
I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.
Proprietary software has not been a business moat for decades. The moats are their complements: hardware, networks and protocols (including humans), data and formats.
That software reality you describe is not too far off. Not with LLMs alone, but definitely seen the software copy machines accelerate. Any novel idea launched on an app store that sees any traction or attention will be flooded with close imitations in weeks.
> It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.
That is already how I feel about LLMs being trained on my AGPL code to produce proprietary code and do so for money. And that's just today's shitty LLM. My condolences for you as a HW person who deals with an actually competent abuser of the system.
Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. This also has the downstream effect of no one young learning how to make stuff, which then leaves you as a society that is forced to buy everything from China, and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want.
I can tell your first hand, that the engineers in the hardware/physical product space probably have an average age of 58 years old. That's very bad.
> Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it.
Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.
I'm sorry, but isn't this a job for tariffs? Tariffs are how you impose an artificial cost on some exporter who is using an unfair subsidy, whether slave labor, bad environmental regulation, non-enforcement of the intellectual property system of the importing country, etc... all the way down to simple direct subsidy and willingness to take a loss in order to ruin the importing country's domestic industry.
The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets."
Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"
One must admire China’s pivot from 30 years of essentially ignoring IP and patent law to the detriment of Western companies, to now weaponizing IP and patent law against the rest of the world.
They even copied lawfare techniques from American corporations, lol.
It will be "interesting" where this takes us. If the American government decides to just ignore Chinese patents then we could see the Berne convention become a paper tiger (or even more of one than it already is)
Many Chinese CEO's are graduates of Western business schools. They learnt the Holy American Dao of weaponizing IP and patent law from established US business culture.
Capitalism, at least the American version of it, has a rich history of ignoring property rights, labor laws and ethics, regulations, etc. If anything, China has, and is, out-Westernizing the Western countries.
China, being a planned economy at heart, has a "VC" system that is essentially just the government deciding what needs to be developed, and then Chinese banks lending without any practical strings to those developers.
Profit and loss, ROI, business plan, aren't really factored in. China wants to develop AI? You have some experience and want to start an AI business? Great! Here is a few million go make AI.
This is the system that led to those infamous ghost cities and billion dollar high speed trains to nowhere. China puts the carts before the horse, and hopes at at least a few of them get to the destination. They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.
It also means that if you are competing against one of these chosen industries, you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money, whereas you need to make interest payments.
So how is this different from the US? It’s VC’s making the choices not the gov - seems little different. Maybe scale?
> They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.
The chinese economy seems like proof this is a valid strategy that pays off in aggregate. Yet when gov here attempts any kind of economic development policy it seems largely unpopular.
> you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money
There are some pretty big cracks underneath the surface. But yes they certainly have been successful at drawing in the manufacturing at the very least, even if it's ultimately not very sustainable.
I don't see how that could be considered a planned economy, you're describing individuals creating startups of their own free choice and the government backing them with no strings. Individual choices are driving economic progress.
A planned economy would be some government committee deciding what specific startups and how many of them should be started up in any give year, and no one else can create a startup.
> don't see how that could be considered a planned economy, you're describing individuals creating startups of their own free choice and the government backing them with no strings. Individual choices are driving economic progress.
You have it backwards, the government decides which startups (by industry) will be funded and the individuals get drawn to those industries. There is a private VC market in China, but it's a rounding error compared to state investment.
The AI boom in China is directly from Xi himself setting it as a national priority. That means you will keep getting money to develop AI and AI adjacent tech regardless of how inefficient you are. There are no investors nagging for a return or wanting a path to profit.
This is why there are solar panel factories in China pumping out panels without slowing down, even though the market is saturated and they are losing money on each panel. You don't stop or slow until the leader says to.
Money (subsidies) and laws are exactly how economies are planned. When you've got scale like China, USA, EU, you can throw money at things you want to exist and there will be citizens who will just do those things because of the incentive.
"A planned economy would be some government committee deciding what specific startups and how many of them should be started up in any give year, and no one else can create a startup."
no it would not be...where is this definition from?
Not IP related, but I built a Voron printer a while ago, which is sort of the last word in DIY printers. It's not so much a printer as a parts list and set of instructions, but something that's not lost on me is that most of the core components are Chinese parts.
I don't just mean screws and bearings (though they are too), you might install a board like this [0] which is a Chinese designed board I'd describe as open-ish. You get the firmware and schematics, but not a BOM or board layout. But that doesn't really matter, because nobody is going to make this board themselves anyways, you're going to buy it assembled, from China. There are other boards, but they are more expensive.
The majority of Voron builds use Chinese hotends. There are a lot of custom "for Voron" kits and components being made and sold there. Can you find a PEI-coated spring steel bed that isn't made in China? So while it's definitely more open than a Bambu printer, it's not really any less dependent on China.
I guess it would be technically possible to do a "no China" build, which would be an interesting (but expensive) project.
I bought my Voron Trident as a kit (from a Chinese company) and it is wonderful. As you say, there is an almost complete dependence on components made in China, but at least I can swap out / fix / upgrade parts as much as I like. I've also been able to make use of the schematics on the controller boards to troubleshoot issues myself and other people were having.
Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is "mine" and I don't need to worry about some company suddenly taking features and capabilities out from under my feet as Bambu has done. For anyone that feels strongly about this kind of thing, dive in and build a Voron.
Their business model might be dead, I don't know. But the latest Prusa printers are as far as I know not really open - I can't download the schematics for free and make a clone, can I? And also a truely open schematic that I could download that way wouldn't be affected by patents, as long as I'm not selling it. Granted, commercial development with open core might be in trouble.
But first, that is not a technical nor a business problem, that sounds like a political problem. Prusa is literally the leading european name in the 3D-printing industry. Surely they can get an appointment with some government officials, who are concerned about manufacturing capabilities and future technologies - who pull some strings, and then every patent clerk will receive a memo to double check the relevant patents when someone tries to register them.
Second, Chinese patents have a different weight than EU/US patents. As he writes, they are a dime a dozen. Probably not worth caring about, unless they are targeting the Chinese market. And if they are, the best defense would probably to register some patents their themselves.
China won’t enforce the patent of a foreign company against a domestic one. If anything, filing a Chinese patent assists copying and clones, because there’s less reverse engineering to do.
A genuine Question. Is open hardware even possible at some point? The advances in quality and speed are nothing short but impressive. I started 3d printing stuff in my basement one year ago (Ender V3 Plus). With the quality and speed improvements, comes technology which gets more complex every year. Companies spend millions to archive this. Why would they share it? I remember building drones in my basement (still on my wall) with open source software on the flight controllers. Now I can get a drone from DJI for less money with more features, in a smaller from factor, longer flight time, pre build and under 249g. Ofc this comes at the cost of repairability, control and trust. However I can still buy the hardware I used years ago. If I wanted to, I can build a drone by myself. I guess the same will happen to 3d printers.
It already is. And its been chaotic and amazing at the same time.
We already have open source:
5DoF 3d printers with slicers
Fixed wing and quad/hexa/octocopters
Medical drug fabrication (Four Thieves)
Electrochemical synthesis lab
Open source flow batteries
Stops and starts of industrial tooling (open source ecology)
I'm going to say something that is becoming less and less controversial: copyrights and patents are the real drag here. Individuals can get patents, but can't actually enforce. So they end as weapons as companies go after each other.
Copyright is also often intertwined into patents, so that if a thing isn't covered by a patent, copyright (with firmware) takes over. Then the DMCA and anti-circumvention shit.
The other problem here in the USA is almost impossible to source parts directly, or small fab labs that can do operations.
I was looking for a 5mm thick 500x500mm aluminum plate to be cut. Waterjet, plasma, whatever. I wanted it slightly undercut. I made blueprints in DXF and pdf. I contacted 2 waterjet companies, no response. Contacted a welding company with plasma table. No response. Down the list, no response.
As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
maybe you're just very unlucky because there are a number of places that do this right from their website ( another commenter mentioned sendcutsend as just one example ).
Open hardware for 3D printers is actually thriving.
There's a whole fleet of community designed hardware, with most innovations to consumer 3D printing still originating in the DIY community.
Multiple manufacturers have direct contact with community members to produce custom hardware at a small but affordable scale, and keeping up with rapid iterations and multiple hardware improvements throughout the year.
Some of the most cutting edge as well as niche 3D printing hardware available to consumers are being sold on small webshops operating out of someone's garage.
If anything, we're in a golden age right now. 3D printing in 2025 is a very exciting place to be.
As a person who chose to buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon rather than upgrade his Ordbot Quantum w/ a heated bed and enclosure and to then try to re-design it to use a CoreXY motion system, I would agree that is exactly the path which we are on --- the new printer came in at a lower price than just the initial parts order for heated bed and enclosure, let alone a different motion system. All of the printers which I wanted (Positron, Prusa Core One) or was considering (Bambu Labs P1S) were over twice or almost twice the price of the ECC.
Think about this question for a second and you'll realize that it's rooted in consumerism. We always want 'quality and speed', but most of all, convenience and apparent low cost (that 'apparent' part is important). What if the product wasn't cheap or the best you could get? What if the product requires more attention than being just a consumer? Conventional wisdom says that they'd be dead on arrival. But consumerism also comes with consumer exploitation.
There are numerous examples of this today. People yearn for dump large LCD panels (cheaper ones, not the ad panels or large monitors) instead of the sluggish, invasive, ad-ridden, irreparable and annoying smart TVs that we have today. Configurable modular laptops and phones like the Framework and Fairphone are enjoying a comeback today after decades of soldered-on components (even the battery), individually paired modules, glued on casings (instead of the convenient screwed on ones), horrendously costly repairs and depressingly short service life. The (paper) printer market is so rife with exploitation that their CEOs consider their customers as 'investments' that are lossy if they don't buy ink cartridges on subscription! Similar story in the automotive sector. People annoyed by full touch screen control panels, heated seats on subscription, parts that cannot be serviced by anyone else.. I could go on for hours.
It's very tempting to give up the reparable and open hardware in favor of mass produced better performing products on account of the cost, effort and time needed to deal with the former. But as their market dries up, the inevitable enshittification of the latter sets in. In pursuit of the continued satisfaction of the shareholders, it's no longer enough for the producers to take hefty margins on each unit you purchase. They move to squeezing every last penny off of you by seeking rent on products that shouldn't be under subscriptions in the first place. Eventually, you end up spending more than if you were using the dumb devices. And then predictably like clockwork, people start lamenting about the feature creep, loss of serviceability, loss of quality and greed.
It's at this point that dumb devices market open up again. The market is small and products are costlier owing to the low scale of production. But they grow a dedicated customer base and healthy revenues that improve over time. So with this hindsight, how about we stick with the open and reparable hardware? If their market doesn't crash, their costs wont rise either. This long term strategic decision can help consumers protect their rights and their savings. But that never happens. This is one scam that the world falls for again and again and again, no matter how many times it plays out.
LLM's natural language processing superpowers could stagnate the economy by helping to enforce libraries of over broad patents. Just applying existing patent law more efficiently could end US economic dominance.
Having spent my whole career in the manufacturing tech world after starting in the maker world (I started HackPgh), I love Open Hardware, but find it not a great fit beyond boards (Arduino, RPi, etc.).
I think the core issue is one of how expensive / complex the iteration cycle is, with even sophisticated circuit boards being possible to make on a hobbyist budget, but sophisticated 3D printers and other complex machine tools quickly get beyond what a single person's budget / shop can really support the development vs. mass produced closed machines.
Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
I've been asking: "When was the last time a new hardware dev product got >50% market share throughout industry?", and I think the answer is SolidWorks in ~1995 making affordable(ish) 3D CAD software.
This means all hardware dev tools have lagged, not just open source ones.
My take is that we need more non VC funding (gov't / foundation) of the basic science and early R&D, as VCs are forcing these companies to commercialize too quickly, and the tech doesn't get there, as operations is hard enough, let alone with half-baked tech. This happened to my last company Plethora, doing automated CAM + rapid CNC.
Citation from blog:
> The fact you hold a prior art in your hand, doesn’t mean much. The patent will still prevent you from importing/selling etc of the “infringing” stuff.
Could you please explain this to me? Let's say, they (Chinese) patent some complex part of my open-hw 3D printer, how this prevents me from importing parts of my 3D printer from other countries? Let's say from China. Company, which originally patent trolled me, must sue me first, no?
And they care about patents? Since when?
Suppose you created the original prior art and want to get your original design manufactured on China. The Chinese manufacturer might the best in the world and cheapest source but unwilling to defy the Chinese patent.
Your tiny order isn’t worth their whole business, but if you did the original design that feels patently* unfair to you.
Even if the patents are only valid in China, this is going to hurt western companies a lot. If you're manufacturing a product in China, you'll need to either:
1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins
2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country
In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.
I do not understand the connection between the patent concerns in the article and open-source 3D printing. In particular, the patent issues seem to be the case for all non-Chinese 3D printer companies, whether open source or not. I am not sure how sharing your designs makes this worse (I suppose with the original drawings it's a bit easier to write a patent in bad faith - but certainly not necessary). Something like a defensive patent grant might make a lot of sense (see Opus, AV1 etc) but that's also independent of whether the implementation is open source or not.
TFA didn't really make the problem clear to me. I think it something like this, but I'm not sure. Can anybody clarify?
Problem (?): We can't produce open hardware for things that others have patented. Chinese companies (and maybe others) are patenting lots of things, including things we might have ourselves developed and intended to keep open, so it makes it difficult and/or expensive for us to continue developing.
This could have been an interesting take from anyone but Prusa.
While they've earned themselves a great deal of goodwill from past contributions to the ecosystem, they're a failing company pivoting to dark patterns in an attempt to cling to relevance.
It's heart breaking to see they still haven't been able to take a good hard look at themselves, and understand their own role in why they are scrambling.
Blog posts like these might be heralding the beginning of the end for Prusa.
Your comment is essentially just an ad hominem that doesn't react to the content of the OP, or enumerate any of its claims. You are claiming to know better, but not substantiating anyhing. It's FUD, and the worst kind of comment, because it doesn't take the debate seriously.
Hi! Josef here! I was just recently sharing a little update on socials, here is a copy:
Since I posted my “OHW is dead” article, you’ve been asking me about “that patent”. I didn’t want you to miss the forest (thousands of filings since 2020) just because of one tree. But let’s take a look now. In this case: the MMU multiplexer (we open sourced it 9 years ago). Anycubic (another IDG Capital-backed company) used the tactic of filing in China for an easy initial grant: CN 222407171 U > DE 20 2024 100 001 U1 > US 2025/0144881 A1. The playbook: file a Chinese utility model (10-year patent, same protections, lower examination, already granted) claim that priority in Germany (again as a utility model, already granted) file in the US. Cheap to file, but expensive and time-consuming to fight. I already wrote why prior art isn’t a magic wand that solves it immediately in my article ⤵ And there are many more, we just found a new juicy one!
Edit: Emojis stripped from the original, tried to fix it a bit ;-)
All of Open Source needs a sunlit patent pool, a searchable database of documented inventions AND all of the follow on ideas around them. This could provide a way to force patent examiners to do their jobs and allow the Open Source Community to crowd source invention bombing the proprietary world.
How does one lookup these patents? They need more exposure so they can be refuted.
I work in a different industry, power tools. Somehow the USPTO allowed Milwaukee to patent a circ saw that spins at a certain rpm...
The things that get through the patent office are braindead. Patents are just weaponized legal minefields now. They've totally lost their original intent.
I am still waiting for video encoders and decoders patents to go away so we could have easy open source implementations that are royalty free, not patent incumbed to be easily available in open source applications that could be also commercial. We don't have any decent easy to go ones since Theora.
You know why IP is so strongly enforced? Because the US has been throwing all its strength behind it. This is why many countries around the world adopted heavy handed IP rights, because they came with a carrot (cheap loans, investment from the US) and a stick (sanctions). Now that the US positions itself as an adversary to other democratic countries I give it 5 years for these IP laws to stick. Everyone kinda hopes it's just Trump that lost his mind and next US govt will go back to normalcy. I doubt this very much. Once it becomes clear Trunp's symucessor is exactly the same well see US IP stop being enforced.
This has a disadvantage of no protection for genuine innovation, but who are we kidding? There is none anyway where it matters most (China). So why do we handicap ourselves following these stupid laws while the Chinese just break them and the US... Well in the US whoever has most money for lawyers wins.
For open source/hardware to thrive Ip laws have to be abolished or at least changed a lot.
LANAI, but maybe some kind of free market global license auction would better incentivize invention and reward prior art. Perhaps even outcompete the current authorities.
Clearly stovepiping the generation of IP monopolies and laundering them across borders and through unrelated court systems is a captured perverse incentive structure.
For most people this is just fine - your goals were not to build a 3d printer it was to build something that just happens to be build able on a 3d printer. That is the something you are building is the goal, not building a 3d printer. If the goal isn't building a 3d printer then buying a 3d printer that someone else has already debugged and made to work is the better way to get to what you really want to do in the first place.
In a way this is good. 3d printing is neat, but it got too much hype which was taken away from other useful things makers should also have experience in. More makers should think of injection molding when doing plastic parts. Many plastic parts makers are making would be better as metal done on lathes and milling machines (or if you want to have fun shapers and planers - both obsolete but still a lot of fun if time/money isn't important). Wood working has never really lost popularity, but it should be mentioned as a good option for makers. There are also cloth options - sew, knit, spin, tat (my favorite). There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Finally along those lines, for some just drawing something up in CAD and sending it off to someone else to make is a good option. FreeCAD has come a long way finally has reached 1.0, or you can pay for one of the commercial options - some of them are reasonable for makers though read the fine print.
The hobby sized machines would fit into your apartment. Sure I can do things on my big machines that you couldn't, but there are plenty of things my south bend heavy 10 cannot do.
> There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Yes but the fewest come at the price and versatility as 3D printing. Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement. Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
> Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement
You can make everything in your basement, just like you can make a 3d printer in your basement, and for similar prices. Almost nobody does it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
> Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
Skill is developed. You can do woodworking with just a sharp rock you find, no need for any more tools. Most people in woodworking choose to trade money for time and buy a lot of tools, but you can decide how far you want to go.
Time is the real constraint for everything of course. However that is my original point - if your goal isn't building a 3d printer (a fine goal) then trading money for time and buying the tools (which might or might not be a 3d printer) is probably you best bet. Assuming you have money to buy a 3d printer of course, but if you don't than a sharp rock and woodworking is probably your best hobby just because it is what you can afford.
As it happens with FOSS anything, that is not what the general public cares about, rather getting something easily at a store and fulfills their needs, which aren't how the thing works, rather as a tool for their actual work.
You have limited time. That year needed to build and debug a 3d printer (if you are single a year would be way to long, but for those with kids that is way too short) is a year that you can't spend on whatever your real hobby is. If you real hobby is 3d printers then that is great, but if not you shouldn't. I work on FOSS projects, but most of what I have installed on my system is a per-packaged distro from someone else who made it work (I have FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and Arch - each slightly different) because I don't have time to do linux/BSD from scratch even though I could. I have built gcc, but most of the time I just use the pre-packaged gcc so I can get on building the project I'm interested in.
> But around the year 2020 we registered the first mention of 3D printing as a strategic industry by the Chinese government. We know that now, after a few years of research. We first realized something is off when the price of the parts is higher than the sale price of a complete machine in some cases. That is what sparked our interest and research into the subsidies. They exist, and are very efficient https://rhg.com/research/far-from-normal-an-augmented-assess.... Our industry, desktop 3D printing, faces a bleak future. Comparable to the automotive sector as if only one high volume car brand, say Audi, remained outside of China. That’s it. An inch away from complete dependency on China in an vital piece of tech, the one absolutely critical for creation of new IP.
It seems like the real problem here is that China is able to identify strategic industries, subsidize them, and see the subsidies result in increased production and lower prices, while Western countries aren't. I'm not sure if Prusa themselves can do anything about it, but unless the West gets its shit together and decides to actually try to compete, it seems like eventually every advanced manufacturing industry will be mainly Chinese.
That is hardly a function of the printers being Open Hardware. There are lots of unreliable commercial printers as well as fiddly open ones. However, the most reliable ones in the desktop space have mostly been open - like the old Ultimakers or the Prusa MK series.
This is very much a bad faith argument without any specifics. I found Prusa to be good enough. Do you have any examples of open hardware printers that were evaluated that did not meet the bar?
Regardless the topic is about open hardware being squeezed using shady tactics. It means leas competition, less innovation. Rules to kick such players should be easy to enforce as opposed to required to pay quite a lot for such an action.
Uh yeah? Prusa Mini has his face as boot screen. Cannot find any ref’s online sadly (I sold the printer). Edit 1: speaking from a Prusa perspective I guess..
Edit 2: wait, i misunderstood ‘you cant be serious’? Not sure but what I tried to address was a cult of personality. Thats not something I feel fitting in this whole context.
The author decided to use Open Sans, which is a quite narrow font, and font weight 350, so my browser (and, I suspect, yours) renders it with "Open Sans Light" at a fixed 300 weight. That is hard to read with that gray #707070 over white.
I don't know Tailwind so perhaps it is not easy to fix.
While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under, the final point of the article (discussing patent related legal barriers on existing open source innovation becoming a main strategy of large industry players) is a very important one to keep in mind for people on this site in the hardware startup space:
"This is a story from 3D printing, but all the areas with heavy open hardware development are in Made in China 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 and its successors. Make sure you keep an eye on the filings around your expertise, it is incomparably much easier to do something now than later."
How's it not capitalism? If your definition of capitalism requires governments to either not exist or not act to improve the conditions of their subjects (including companies), you have a definition of capitalism where basically none existing or only failed states have a capitalist system.
Well they quite literally steal everything you push out. Anyone who’s done it out in the wide open knows this reality. Sometimes they will have the copy out faster than you. What’s the point? And customers do not care at all. I heard it so many times. People lack moral compass because they grow up in environments where you’re rewarded for stealing and cheating.
Given the lopsided cost that courts bring to the table, patents only help the big players- since only they canafford to play.
I invented something I ttruly think could change the world. Went to a patent attorney. He said basically - create a patent, wait till someone unsuspectingly builds a product with the same basic idea, and then sue the pans off them. If you try to develop it yourself, the patent will not help - the chinese will copy it and laugh, and the americans will copy it, modify it, and then sue you because they can push more patents than you can defend yourself against. In the best case, they may offer to settle for a small fee if you give them all your IP for free...
I have yet to see anything good from patents, but over the years I have seen just how much they prevent anything new from coming to the world.
It's time that prusa gets outside pressure their printers stagnated in innovation and got more expensive. They don't even have machines in the entry/starter category anymore. Why should anyone buy from you if he gets a better experience for less. Especially now that they started to abandon their own core values just have a look at their new offerings they are the opposite for what they plead here. Less open.
That’s a misframing of the situation explained in the post.
Prusa printers stagnated in innovation due to patents filed, making it more difficult to add features. Still, they did expand into SLA and CoreXY.
Prusa printers got more expensive because most of the expensive components come from China, which raised prices and gave subsidies to Chinese manufacturers. That is a de facto export tariff.
They do have entry-level printers, like the Prusa Mini. Of course, it does cost twice that of a Chinese-made clone, but that is because of the aforementioned subsidies.
”Less open” is just plain wrong, almost maliciously so. Prusa offers free printable models of all parts in their entire range of printers. Their firmware is open source, and their PrusaSlicer software is open source. How much more open can you get?
Why do they feel the need to talk about it? Because their $1000 (which was recently reduced in price even) bedslinger is outclassed by a $349 Bambu Lab A1, and they have lost their position as the printer to buy.
Exactly. Bambu really showed how the overall user experience can be, while prusa etc. persist in the enthusiast niche, which isn't as big as it was now that alternatives are available.
The article's assertion is specifically "open hardware" 3d printing, facing patent challenges [ other parties patenting designs released as "open" to the community ] especially in China, open hardware designers can't get their work manufactured in China ( in this very example, but similarly in any other country where the patents are filed ) or imported/exported because they become Infringing materials of the patents filed by other parties who have copied their designs.
Open Hardware designers are having to become international patent experts, which is more expensive than releasing the designs to the community for free.
Prisoner's dilemna world of so clever top-down Chinese strategizing on top of a 996 vs. Tang-ping aka. "lie down flat and get over the beatings" society. Maybe it's time for China to adopt a long term view about where this is all going? They seem to pride themselves on that.
If the US cared about remaining competitive with China, the government would attack this. Example approaches:
a) Smallish hammer: disallow priority based on Chinese patents.
b) Big hammer: if anyone wants to manufacture anything in the US and sell to the US market, give an automatic patent workaround. For example, there could be compulsory licensing, at enforced and genuinely reasonable prices, for all patents, foreign and domestic. If someone wanted to build an SLS printer or an e-ink display here ten years ago, they should have been allowed to while paying a small amount (small enough that the whole enterprise remained profitable) to the respective patent holders. Submarine patents should be completely inapplicable: if I opt to buy compulsory licenses, there should be a limited period for any patent holders to announce themselves, and then the patent holders could fight over the (capped) royalties while I continue to manufacture and sell the product.
c) b, with the system built in a way that works for open source too. I should be able to publish open source things with zero risk regardless of patents. I should be able to sell them and other people should be able to deploy them on their own under terms like (b) that make it economical to do so.
I think I agree with you.
That being said, I have doubts anything will change because I have a feeling that this system is continuing to "work as designed".
These failings are exploitable and since the US government is somewhat bought and paid for, this is how it works. The intent might be to keep it this way.
I run a company in this space...
First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.
The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
I do think there needs to be reforms about non-practicing entities holding large patent portfolios. Maybe we should have some kind of FRAND (or FRAND-like) requirements for their portfolios.
The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. Open-source and community-led IP contributions are grossly under-protected because of this, and those with capital become unopposed predators. This is a special-case of the more general observation that the justice system is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be. The answer is something you very rarely hear: the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions. Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room.
All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally.
It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.
The more I look into it, the more I'm convinced that current state of IP law is the rot at the core of western worlds technological stagnation. The rise of monopolistic megacorps, lack of independent innovation and enshittifcation can pretty much be traced back to the wide free market violating reach of current IP law.
This article just highlights it and shows how China weaponized this weakness of the west and is successfuly using it to pull ahead.
Meanwhile our own innovative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
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It's not a binary too string / too weak. It's that _copyright_:
- protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work) - IP should be collectively owned by the people who created it and selling it should be illegal,
- is too long, yes
- DMCA can be used to harass without actually owning the IP and there are no penalties
- the fair use exception can be used to allow clear cases of plagiarism where you mechanically transform an original work with barely any human input in such a way that it's hard or impossible to prove it was based on the original.
As for _patents_, they should simply require proof of work - basically they should only be for recovering research costs (with profit), not holding everyone hostage. They should also be subject to experts in the field verifying they are not trivial and how much work they would take to replicate.
And obviously China is a global parasite. We should apply to them the same standards they apply to us - none.
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More generally incentives matter. If trying something has (near) 0 cost but high reward, abusive actors will keep trying despite most of their attempts failing. Anybody who understands that incentives shape the world will immediately identify this pattern (any gamedevs here?). There must be punishments for provably bogus attempts to use IP - both copyright and patents.
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To be fair, in the States, you can own a small business, come up with a good idea, and someone can just copy it and compete against you regardless if it's copyright infringement or not. And that's in the context of a domestic legal issue.
You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point.
I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free.
Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them.
It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen.
Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood.
A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market.
No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.
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The driver of cost isn't paper or physical presence -- I'd be willing to print a few pages and show up downtown in my city where the court is much more if not for the real costs. It often costs hundreds of dollars to file in court (even for small claims in some states), which is a problem because misconduct under a few hundrs dollars is common. It is also almost always useful and often requied (such as when an LLC is a party) to hire lawyers. The law is so complex, and the court procedures too, that we need highly trained professionals to effectively represent people.
The model of paying these professionals from the salary of the average person who themself probably makes way less or from a cash strapped startup doesn't add up. Therefore, to fix the issue we either need to pay lawyers less, pay them from some other source (I'd like to see that in a court case either party can spend any amount on representation, but they must pay into a common pot that's split in half for the opposing party to hire their own representation of a similiar quality), or make them less needed (i.e., simplify and document law and court procedures then legalize pro se representation in all cases including LLCs such that anyone can effectively argue in court).
That would bring down the price of patent spam even more. The problem is the cost of protection relative to the cost of attack, you can't do much.
But it would also make patent spamming much less valuable and arguably more expensive for the spammer. If you spam patents and get one issued for something that isn't novel and/or already has prior art, everyone can fight it and it quickly gets its metal tested in court.
I imagine a fine for egregious patents could also be implemented. If your patent is demonstrated in court to lack standing, the civil liability is on you, not the patent office.
The hard reality is that nobody actually knows a priori what innovation is. Or how much an innovation is actually worth. If you removed patents that would pretty easily and trivially stop the spam.
The first problem is that what's written in the law and what actually happens are pushed apart by the ridiculous costs of using courts. If fixing that such that courts are fully accessible to anyone without worrying about the cost doesn't produce the desired outcome, then one should look to legislate that outcome. Bad legislation is thus the second problem.
Correct, bad actors would use this.
What if you have to pay a fee for each patent application that gets rejected?
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It would allow anyone to patent spam though, that could be a good thing.
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partial disagree, I think the issue is how the patent office abdicated any but the most superficial effort to validate patents onto the court system
It would be good if the difficulty of getting patents would go up by a factor of 10. To get less of them in volume, and less bullshit ones. Should also throw out a bunch of the existing bad ones.
>the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions.
And why would those in power do that, when the justice system as it is exists to serve their interests?
Time limits on cases would really help.
Ie. Each side has 15 minutes to explain their side, then the jury has 15 minutes to discuss, then a vote is taken and a decision made.
Sure, some more subtle outcomes would be 'wrong' - but does it actually matter?
Usually we need evidence to make a decent decision. It's not debate club.
Presence in the courtroom is kind of a red herring. It's uncommon for cases to get that far.
The real costs come from the US legal system being originally designed by and for agrarian villages of Saxons arguing with each other about who stole whose sheep, with the process handled in a more-or-less ad-hoc manner by village leaders for whom it's mostly a side responsibility, and the whole mess serving double duty as a source of community entertainment not unlike modern reality television.
A lot has changed over the past 1,000 years, but at it's core it's still a system that puts an incredible amount of focus on people arguing about Every. Single. Damned. Thing. No. Matter. How. Trivial. The really expensive parts of a lawsuit are the parts that create the most opportunity for this kind of bickering. Which is typically the parts that don't happen inside a courtroom. For example there's the discovery phase, which all by itself is so unusually complicated and expensive that it's spawned an entire multibillion dollar industry that basically only exists in English-speaking countries. And all the ancillary litigation over nitpicky procedural matters. And maybe other things, but those are the two that are the worst for being inherently expensive, easy to weaponize, and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon.
This would imply that civil law systems don't suffer from these problems, but they do. I don't think common law is to blame for the complexity of the justice system.
Actually AFIAK most of the US has moved to electronic filing, but that has actually made things more expensive. Typically courts hire out the electronic filing part. The hired companies typically collect money from both the state/county and the end user. Larger court systems like LA, NYC, and Cook are big enough to force concessions, or even fund new companies, but others have to buy into one system or another.
It would be great if a bunch of courts could band together to setup a shared open source solution, but courts at the state level are pretty fractious. And the legal system is both pretty slow and pretty reluctant to change.
No. The real story is China weaponizing the global IP system in an imbalanced manner.
IP ownership is not inherently capital-intensive in the US.
>Given the advent of computers, the internet, video conferencing, it is outrageous how much of the current system requires physical paper, physical presence in a courtroom. It is outrageous how the slowness and cost of the system itself is used by the wealthy to bully the poor.
You're leaving out the part that there are a limited number of judges, and to be a good judge requires a LOT of education, a LOT of experience, and a LOT of time (in other words it's expensive to become a good judge and they need to be compensated to reflect the cost of becoming one).
Computers and Zoom don't change the fact our options are either: Put thousands of new unqualified people into positions of power (judges) Or continue with the current system where getting into a court is slow and expensive.
Unless you're planning on building an entirely new court system removed from the current one specifically for IP. To which I say: good luck, because it'll be a massive expansion of government that doesn't include lining the pockets of our current little dictator or his supporters so we'll hear about how we need to shrink government and reduce the debt.
For what it's worth, I run a company in the space --
I 100% agree with you and luckily I think with AI this will rapidly change. The USPTO is bringing on as many AI tools as possible, as fast as they can. Similarly, we've built a product that can invalidate patents at scale, conduct prior art searches in 15 minutes what used to take weeks and thousands of dollars --
https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
We and others in the space are rapidly gaining traction, so I suspect it's only a matter of time. I should also mention there are whole networks out there battling patent trolls (LOT Network) and others working on open source, etc.
One solution may be to move from an adversarial system to more of an inquisitorial one. This mostly removes the need for lawyers.
Maybe the patent system isn’t “broken” - maybe it’s working exactly as intended: a modern master–slave dynamic where the rich can’t own people, so they own ideas and rent them back. Patents were sold as protection for inventors, but in practice they’re corporate minefields. Filing costs and enforcement make them useless to anyone without deep pockets, while big players hoard them to block competition, extract rent, and stall entire fields. With today’s tech, knowledge could be replicated and shared at near-zero cost, but the system manufactures artificial scarcity. A literal protection racket.
I'd vote for you
The fact that IP protection is expensive is essentially its defining feature. One way to think of "intellectual property" is precisely as a weird proof-of-work, since you are trying to simulate the features of physical property for abstract entities that by default behave in the exact opposite fashion.
This is the frustrating thing about getting into an argument about how "IP isn't real property" and then having the other side roll their eyes at you like you are some naive ideologue. They're missing the point of what it means for IP to not be "real property". The actual point is understanding that you are, and will be, swimming against the current of the fundamentals of these technologies forever. It is very very difficult to make a digital book or movie that can't be copied. So difficult in fact, that it we've had to keep pushing the problem lower and lower into the system, with DRM protections at the hardware level. This is essentially expensive, not just from a capital perspective, but from a "focus and complexity" burden perspective as well. Then realize that even after putting this entire system in place, an entire trade block could arbitrarily decide to stop enforcing copyright, AKA, stop fueling the expensive apparatus that is is holding up the "physical property" facade for "intellectual property". This was actually being floated as a retaliation tactic during the peak of the tariff dispute with Canada[1]. And in fact we don't even need to go that far, it has of course always been the case that patents vary in practical enforceability country to country, and copyrights (despite an attempt to unify the rules globally) are also different country to country (the earliest TinTin is public domain in the US but not in the EU).
Usually at this point someone says "It's expensive to defend physical property too! See what happens if another country takes your cruise liner". But that's precisely the point, the difficulty scales with the item. I don't regularly have my chairs sitting in Russia for them to be nationalized. The entities that have large physical footprints are also the ones most likely to have the resources defend that property. This is simply not the case with "intellectual property," which has zero natural friction in spreading across the world, and certainly doesn't correlate with the "owner's" ability to "defend" it. This is due to the fundamental contradiction that "intellectual property" tries to establish: it wants all the the zero unit-cost and distribution benefits of "ethereal goods," with all the asset-like benefits of physical goods. It wants it both ways.
Notice that all the details always get brushed away, we assume we have great patent clerks making sure only "novel inventions" get awarded patents. It assumes that patent clerks are even capable of understanding the patent in question (they're not, the vast majority are new grads [2]). We assume the copyright office is property staffed (it isn't [3]) We assume the intricacies of abstract items like "APIs" can be property understood by both judge and jury in order to reach the right verdict in the theoretically obvious cases (also turns out that most people are not familiar with these concepts).
How could this not be expensive? You essentially need to create "property lore" in every case that is tried. Any wish for the system to be faster would necessarily also mean less correct verdicts. There's no magic "intellectual property dude" that could resolve all this stuff. Copyright law says that math can't be copyrighted, yet we can copyright code. Patent law says life can't be patented, yet our system plainly allows copyrighting bacteria. Why? Because a lawyer held of a tube of clear liquid and said "does this seem like life to you?" The landmark Supreme Court case was decided 5-4 [4], and all of a sudden a thing that should obviously not be copyrightable by anyone that understands the science was decided it was. There's no "hidden true rules" that if just followed, would make this system efficient. It is, by design, a system that makes things up as it goes along.
As mentioned in other comments, at best you could just flip burden to the other party, which doesn't make the system less expensive, it just shifts the default party that has to initially burden the cost. Arguably this is basically what we have with patents. Patents are incredibly "inventor friendly". You can get your perpetual motion machine patented easy-peasy. In fact, there is so much "respect" for "ideas" as "real things", that you can patent things you never made and have no intention of making. You can then sue companies that actually make the thing you "described first". Every case is a new baby being presented to King Solomon to cut in half.
In other words, an inexpensive system would at minimum require universal understanding and agreement on supremely intricate technical details of every field it aims to serve, which isn't just implausible, it is arguably impossible by definition since the whole point of intellectual property is to cover the newest developments in the field.
1. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/canada-can-fight-us-tari...
2. https://tolmasky.com/2012/08/29/patents-and-juries/
3. https://www.wired.com/story/us-copyright-office-chaos-doge/
4. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/447/303/
While I don't entirely disagree with you. You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).
You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)
> In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years.
When did we start being a just society would you say? WWI? The Civil Rights Act? Unless you really stretch things, saying that justice declined in the last 50 years - even if true - means that justice "peaked" for a short period of maybe a generation. I suspect if you actually lived in that era[1] you wouldn't think that though so this whole framing is based on false nostalgia for a time you never experienced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
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That’s an exaggeration. As a famous example, Musk believed that laws didn’t apply to him and he ended up having to buy Twitter anyway after he tried to back out.
Corporate law is a thing. There are huge, consequential lawsuits between giant corporations.
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> we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years
How could I guess you are not black?
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In the US, laws protect the franchise. The franchise may have wealth but at least at this point in history we have as a nation, extended it to everyone.
If the laws protect the wealthy then perhaps your cynical view misses the fact that there is more wealth held by the average US citizen than that of any other nation on earth. Are we trending the correct direction? No. But that’s not the result of injustice, it’s the result of an economic system that prioritizes wealth extraction.
Wealth and power aren’t entirely the same.
"Democracy" boils down to choosing one point ("candidate") in a highly dimensional space to express your entire preference (actually a high dimensional vector). This is _obviously_ stupid.
You can see the effects in how people love simplifying things into the left/right spectrum, sometimes adding a second axis for conservative/liberal. Because if you do PCA, those are probably the most important factors for many people.
But they fail to generalize this realization to openly discuss the other "less critical" dimensions.
It's a failure of the education system and it perpetuates learned helplessness.
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> Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy
How do you think the wealthy resolve dusputes among themselves? You obviously have never lived in a truly lawless society
If you are a hobbyist or small business in desktop manufacturing you are basically forced to buy Chinese products.
I have never owned a Prusa, but I have owned several Creality and Bambu Labs printers, because I could get the same utility at half the cost. The same goes for soldering irons, linear actuators, oscillscopes, etc. I still buy European hand tools (Knipex, Wera, etc) because I know they won't break in a year, so they are good value in the long run.
Often the choice is whether to buy a used, last generation tool of eBay, or a brand new next-gen tool from China. The choice depends on how flawed the Chinese implementation is and the gap in utility between the generations.
The main problem with Chinese products is the lack of accountability. The same product will be sold under multiple brands, or by dropshippers, and you have no idea who actually made it, there are some strong Chinese brands that buck this trend, i.e. Bambu Labs. When you buy western tools you are buying peace of mind, something I can't currently afford.
Prusa makes their products locally, the spare part situation is good, the company runs an open Makerspace in their basement, helps host conferences and has done a lot for Open Hardware in general. They also have offered consistent upgrade paths for old machines for a long time and the repairability in general is good. You can also talk to them. These things matter for purchase decisions. Same logic as per your Knipex and Wera example.
I actually have a Bambu Labs at home for occasional use but I would not consider anything but Prusas for a general-use desktop FDM printer in basically any more serious setting. This has been the situation for many years now (over the last 12 years or so, I've had to make a few purchase decisions for batches of 5-15 FDM printers as well as different single specialty ones).
I want so much to like Prusa ... but the Bambu printer at my local makerspace costs half as much and is better in every way than the MK3S+ sitting in my basement. I'm fully aware that this is the result of shrewdness on the part of the Chinese, plus incompetence in the West, and it's so frustrating.
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Chinese stuff these days has pulled far ahead of the Harbor Freight reputation of my youth. I can't remember the last time I've seen a proper "Engrish" instruction manual, most of the things are well designed and well built. Meanwhile, the "good old American brands" seem to just be selling out for cheaper and better profit margin products, so you'll be ending up with Chinese stuff anyways, which is sometimes worse than the actual Chinese brands.
The Chinese stuff is now more often than not better. You cannot be the world's manufacturer for 30 years and not get good at making stuff.
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> a proper "Engrish" instruction manual
At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?
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Forced I don't know... But of course the financial incentives are very strong, as in many categories the Chinese brands have remarkable and sometimes astonishing value-for-money. But for a small business, the cost of these tools might be quite low relative to manpower anyway, so paying 2x might not be a big deal. We got 8 Prusa machines at our local hackerspace, and 10 at previous startup lab I was at.
I have Creality Ender3 v3 and Prusa mk4s and they are not the same, you can get them to produce same quality, but ender requires more tinkering and I have had more failed prints.
Creality software is awful, you get no firmware updates for a year and then you get 4 on same day, like do they even test before release? Slicer is also buggy and default settings seem to be max everything, so its loud and fast and has print quality issues.
When I was building the prusa kit, I kept thinking that this is how you should make a product, the machine feels well thought out and documentation is great. Of course prusa is 3x the cost of ender.
Hobbyists aren’t forced to buy anything.. I blame youtube for turning hobbies into an exercise at buying stuff. Affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money online and the reason why the majority of videos in the hobby space seem to be gear reviews. Yet as a hobbyist chances are you won’t practice enough to outgrow your tools anyway, and neither do you have the economic incentives of business owners.
Youtube may have exasperated the situation, but gear obsession in hobbies certainly predates even the internet, much less youtube. It seems kind of natural, mastering your tools takes time and maybe talent. Buying them just takes money.
I remember the original Dawn of the Dead poking fun at it when they raid the gun store in the mall:
Peter: Ain't it a crime.
Stephen: What?
Peter: The only person who could miss with this gun is the sucker with the bread to buy it.
This is a microcosm of what's happening all over the physical device world, and manufacturing: Everyone (Except Prusa; thank you for your service!) outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.
My Raise3D printer is high quality and reliable. It's a nice piece of hardware. The PCBs I order from JLC are high-quality, built-to-specs, and whenever there's an error, it's a design fault. They are cheap, and arrive in 10 days.
I don't like the idea of being this dependent on China, but it's where we are. Weaponizing patents a risk? Problem. Placing the knowledge of how to build civilization in a single country? Problem. At least someone is carrying the torch forward, so it could be worse.
> Everyone ... outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.
To me this is the fundamental problem with the notion of intellectual property and its protection: so much of it is trade secret and undocumented (let's be real, we disclose as little in patents as we can get away with). Companies come and go, and in the process, institutional knowledge of how to do things is lost because there is no incentive to make it public for others to replicate. This also means that once lost, it must be rediscovered later.
As a hardware guy, and someone who loves coming up with fun product ideas, China is the ASI LLM of the hardware world. Like don't even bother trying to compete, they are faster, cheaper, have better yield, and don't really need to be profitable.
Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it. It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.
That's the current reality of hardware in the western world. About 5 or 6 years ago I developed a product that cost me $75 in parts per unit (probably $60 if I could get to scale). The Chinese counterparts competing in the same category cost $70. I needed to sell at $200 to make a profit.
People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too. Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.
To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". IMO what the government is doing in that regard is more than misguided but other efforts exist. I'm optimistic about efforts like https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/. Permitting reform is a key piece which they work around, synergy from physical proximity is another. Both are addressed by the Solano Foundry project. One might see US labor cost as a disadvantage but with automation I don't think it matters that much. Jobs have been mostly lost to automation, rather than to China and that so only continue.
> To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back".
The reality is that you will also have to bring back less worker protection to make this competitive. The way I see it, it doesn't matter how good you are, if you have invest in R&D, China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here? I am pretty sure they are working their damnest to copy semiconductor manufacturing and if they can fully scale that up I can safely say the West is screwed technologically.
California Forever is a weird network state I wouldn't wish to be a part of.
I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.
Proprietary software has not been a business moat for decades. The moats are their complements: hardware, networks and protocols (including humans), data and formats.
That software reality you describe is not too far off. Not with LLMs alone, but definitely seen the software copy machines accelerate. Any novel idea launched on an app store that sees any traction or attention will be flooded with close imitations in weeks.
This was already reality before LLMs. If you put a successful game on any app store, expect Chinese and Korean clones of it within 2 weeks.
> It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.
That is already how I feel about LLMs being trained on my AGPL code to produce proprietary code and do so for money. And that's just today's shitty LLM. My condolences for you as a HW person who deals with an actually competent abuser of the system.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
What problem do you think needs fixing?
Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
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Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything. This also has the downstream effect of no one young learning how to make stuff, which then leaves you as a society that is forced to buy everything from China, and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want.
I can tell your first hand, that the engineers in the hardware/physical product space probably have an average age of 58 years old. That's very bad.
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> Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it.
Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.
I'm sorry, but isn't this a job for tariffs? Tariffs are how you impose an artificial cost on some exporter who is using an unfair subsidy, whether slave labor, bad environmental regulation, non-enforcement of the intellectual property system of the importing country, etc... all the way down to simple direct subsidy and willingness to take a loss in order to ruin the importing country's domestic industry.
The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets."
Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"
Tariffs only work if you have alternatives you can buy. China is the only reasonable source of procurement on the vast majority of goods in the world.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
I mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.
One must admire China’s pivot from 30 years of essentially ignoring IP and patent law to the detriment of Western companies, to now weaponizing IP and patent law against the rest of the world.
American industry also copied plenty from Britain and Germany during its industrialization in 19th century. Patents didn't really apply to foreign IP.
Sure, but they apply the moment you start selling back to the country that issued the patent. At least in theory.
They even copied lawfare techniques from American corporations, lol.
It will be "interesting" where this takes us. If the American government decides to just ignore Chinese patents then we could see the Berne convention become a paper tiger (or even more of one than it already is)
I hope that's the outcome. Down with intellectual property!
If you read into how/why Hollywood film industry was created, it isn't something new.
Interesting, I didn't know.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Compa...
Or criticze the west allowing patent law to stagnate and regress innovation and their economies.
Many Chinese CEO's are graduates of Western business schools. They learnt the Holy American Dao of weaponizing IP and patent law from established US business culture.
Capitalism, at least the American version of it, has a rich history of ignoring property rights, labor laws and ethics, regulations, etc. If anything, China has, and is, out-Westernizing the Western countries.
I really love takes like this. Talk about China as an emerging power in the 21st century while excusing them using tactics from the 19th. 10/10
China, being a planned economy at heart, has a "VC" system that is essentially just the government deciding what needs to be developed, and then Chinese banks lending without any practical strings to those developers.
Profit and loss, ROI, business plan, aren't really factored in. China wants to develop AI? You have some experience and want to start an AI business? Great! Here is a few million go make AI.
This is the system that led to those infamous ghost cities and billion dollar high speed trains to nowhere. China puts the carts before the horse, and hopes at at least a few of them get to the destination. They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.
It also means that if you are competing against one of these chosen industries, you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money, whereas you need to make interest payments.
> Great! Here is a few million go make AI.
So how is this different from the US? It’s VC’s making the choices not the gov - seems little different. Maybe scale?
> They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.
The chinese economy seems like proof this is a valid strategy that pays off in aggregate. Yet when gov here attempts any kind of economic development policy it seems largely unpopular.
> you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money
So like the american defense industry then?
VC's gauge what the market wants, the Chinese government is one person who decides what he wants.
One of these is grossly inefficient compared to the other, despite the final outcome looking similar from some angles.
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Can't tell if this post is against VC system or just China?
Yes
I mean they are 2nd largest GDP economy with "world factory" title
some words you said can be true of course but its clearly working out for them
There are some pretty big cracks underneath the surface. But yes they certainly have been successful at drawing in the manufacturing at the very least, even if it's ultimately not very sustainable.
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I don't see how that could be considered a planned economy, you're describing individuals creating startups of their own free choice and the government backing them with no strings. Individual choices are driving economic progress.
A planned economy would be some government committee deciding what specific startups and how many of them should be started up in any give year, and no one else can create a startup.
> don't see how that could be considered a planned economy, you're describing individuals creating startups of their own free choice and the government backing them with no strings. Individual choices are driving economic progress.
You have it backwards, the government decides which startups (by industry) will be funded and the individuals get drawn to those industries. There is a private VC market in China, but it's a rounding error compared to state investment.
The AI boom in China is directly from Xi himself setting it as a national priority. That means you will keep getting money to develop AI and AI adjacent tech regardless of how inefficient you are. There are no investors nagging for a return or wanting a path to profit.
This is why there are solar panel factories in China pumping out panels without slowing down, even though the market is saturated and they are losing money on each panel. You don't stop or slow until the leader says to.
Money (subsidies) and laws are exactly how economies are planned. When you've got scale like China, USA, EU, you can throw money at things you want to exist and there will be citizens who will just do those things because of the incentive.
"A planned economy would be some government committee deciding what specific startups and how many of them should be started up in any give year, and no one else can create a startup."
no it would not be...where is this definition from?
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Not IP related, but I built a Voron printer a while ago, which is sort of the last word in DIY printers. It's not so much a printer as a parts list and set of instructions, but something that's not lost on me is that most of the core components are Chinese parts.
I don't just mean screws and bearings (though they are too), you might install a board like this [0] which is a Chinese designed board I'd describe as open-ish. You get the firmware and schematics, but not a BOM or board layout. But that doesn't really matter, because nobody is going to make this board themselves anyways, you're going to buy it assembled, from China. There are other boards, but they are more expensive.
The majority of Voron builds use Chinese hotends. There are a lot of custom "for Voron" kits and components being made and sold there. Can you find a PEI-coated spring steel bed that isn't made in China? So while it's definitely more open than a Bambu printer, it's not really any less dependent on China.
I guess it would be technically possible to do a "no China" build, which would be an interesting (but expensive) project.
0 - https://github.com/bigtreetech/BIGTREETECH-OCTOPUS-V1.0
I bought my Voron Trident as a kit (from a Chinese company) and it is wonderful. As you say, there is an almost complete dependence on components made in China, but at least I can swap out / fix / upgrade parts as much as I like. I've also been able to make use of the schematics on the controller boards to troubleshoot issues myself and other people were having.
Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is "mine" and I don't need to worry about some company suddenly taking features and capabilities out from under my feet as Bambu has done. For anyone that feels strongly about this kind of thing, dive in and build a Voron.
Their business model might be dead, I don't know. But the latest Prusa printers are as far as I know not really open - I can't download the schematics for free and make a clone, can I? And also a truely open schematic that I could download that way wouldn't be affected by patents, as long as I'm not selling it. Granted, commercial development with open core might be in trouble.
But first, that is not a technical nor a business problem, that sounds like a political problem. Prusa is literally the leading european name in the 3D-printing industry. Surely they can get an appointment with some government officials, who are concerned about manufacturing capabilities and future technologies - who pull some strings, and then every patent clerk will receive a memo to double check the relevant patents when someone tries to register them.
Second, Chinese patents have a different weight than EU/US patents. As he writes, they are a dime a dozen. Probably not worth caring about, unless they are targeting the Chinese market. And if they are, the best defense would probably to register some patents their themselves.
China won’t enforce the patent of a foreign company against a domestic one. If anything, filing a Chinese patent assists copying and clones, because there’s less reverse engineering to do.
Wouldn’t Prusa abandoning open hardware (for some components) be a prominent example showing that open hardware is dying?
A genuine Question. Is open hardware even possible at some point? The advances in quality and speed are nothing short but impressive. I started 3d printing stuff in my basement one year ago (Ender V3 Plus). With the quality and speed improvements, comes technology which gets more complex every year. Companies spend millions to archive this. Why would they share it? I remember building drones in my basement (still on my wall) with open source software on the flight controllers. Now I can get a drone from DJI for less money with more features, in a smaller from factor, longer flight time, pre build and under 249g. Ofc this comes at the cost of repairability, control and trust. However I can still buy the hardware I used years ago. If I wanted to, I can build a drone by myself. I guess the same will happen to 3d printers.
> Is open hardware even possible at some point?
It already is. And its been chaotic and amazing at the same time.
We already have open source:
5DoF 3d printers with slicers
Fixed wing and quad/hexa/octocopters
Medical drug fabrication (Four Thieves)
Electrochemical synthesis lab
Open source flow batteries
Stops and starts of industrial tooling (open source ecology)
I'm going to say something that is becoming less and less controversial: copyrights and patents are the real drag here. Individuals can get patents, but can't actually enforce. So they end as weapons as companies go after each other.
Copyright is also often intertwined into patents, so that if a thing isn't covered by a patent, copyright (with firmware) takes over. Then the DMCA and anti-circumvention shit.
The other problem here in the USA is almost impossible to source parts directly, or small fab labs that can do operations.
I was looking for a 5mm thick 500x500mm aluminum plate to be cut. Waterjet, plasma, whatever. I wanted it slightly undercut. I made blueprints in DXF and pdf. I contacted 2 waterjet companies, no response. Contacted a welding company with plasma table. No response. Down the list, no response.
As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
>As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
Trying to make a thing and not sourcing stuff internationally is almost impossible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
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Did you try SendCutSend? They are in the US and this type of thing is their main line of business.
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maybe you're just very unlucky because there are a number of places that do this right from their website ( another commenter mentioned sendcutsend as just one example ).
Open hardware for 3D printers is actually thriving. There's a whole fleet of community designed hardware, with most innovations to consumer 3D printing still originating in the DIY community.
Multiple manufacturers have direct contact with community members to produce custom hardware at a small but affordable scale, and keeping up with rapid iterations and multiple hardware improvements throughout the year.
Some of the most cutting edge as well as niche 3D printing hardware available to consumers are being sold on small webshops operating out of someone's garage.
If anything, we're in a golden age right now. 3D printing in 2025 is a very exciting place to be.
As a person who chose to buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon rather than upgrade his Ordbot Quantum w/ a heated bed and enclosure and to then try to re-design it to use a CoreXY motion system, I would agree that is exactly the path which we are on --- the new printer came in at a lower price than just the initial parts order for heated bed and enclosure, let alone a different motion system. All of the printers which I wanted (Positron, Prusa Core One) or was considering (Bambu Labs P1S) were over twice or almost twice the price of the ECC.
That Elegoo seems to be supporting open standards: https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/elegoo-launches-aut... was one thing which allowed me to justify placing that order.
> Is open hardware even possible at some point?
Think about this question for a second and you'll realize that it's rooted in consumerism. We always want 'quality and speed', but most of all, convenience and apparent low cost (that 'apparent' part is important). What if the product wasn't cheap or the best you could get? What if the product requires more attention than being just a consumer? Conventional wisdom says that they'd be dead on arrival. But consumerism also comes with consumer exploitation.
There are numerous examples of this today. People yearn for dump large LCD panels (cheaper ones, not the ad panels or large monitors) instead of the sluggish, invasive, ad-ridden, irreparable and annoying smart TVs that we have today. Configurable modular laptops and phones like the Framework and Fairphone are enjoying a comeback today after decades of soldered-on components (even the battery), individually paired modules, glued on casings (instead of the convenient screwed on ones), horrendously costly repairs and depressingly short service life. The (paper) printer market is so rife with exploitation that their CEOs consider their customers as 'investments' that are lossy if they don't buy ink cartridges on subscription! Similar story in the automotive sector. People annoyed by full touch screen control panels, heated seats on subscription, parts that cannot be serviced by anyone else.. I could go on for hours.
It's very tempting to give up the reparable and open hardware in favor of mass produced better performing products on account of the cost, effort and time needed to deal with the former. But as their market dries up, the inevitable enshittification of the latter sets in. In pursuit of the continued satisfaction of the shareholders, it's no longer enough for the producers to take hefty margins on each unit you purchase. They move to squeezing every last penny off of you by seeking rent on products that shouldn't be under subscriptions in the first place. Eventually, you end up spending more than if you were using the dumb devices. And then predictably like clockwork, people start lamenting about the feature creep, loss of serviceability, loss of quality and greed.
It's at this point that dumb devices market open up again. The market is small and products are costlier owing to the low scale of production. But they grow a dedicated customer base and healthy revenues that improve over time. So with this hindsight, how about we stick with the open and reparable hardware? If their market doesn't crash, their costs wont rise either. This long term strategic decision can help consumers protect their rights and their savings. But that never happens. This is one scam that the world falls for again and again and again, no matter how many times it plays out.
LLM's natural language processing superpowers could stagnate the economy by helping to enforce libraries of over broad patents. Just applying existing patent law more efficiently could end US economic dominance.
Having spent my whole career in the manufacturing tech world after starting in the maker world (I started HackPgh), I love Open Hardware, but find it not a great fit beyond boards (Arduino, RPi, etc.).
I think the core issue is one of how expensive / complex the iteration cycle is, with even sophisticated circuit boards being possible to make on a hobbyist budget, but sophisticated 3D printers and other complex machine tools quickly get beyond what a single person's budget / shop can really support the development vs. mass produced closed machines.
Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
I've been asking: "When was the last time a new hardware dev product got >50% market share throughout industry?", and I think the answer is SolidWorks in ~1995 making affordable(ish) 3D CAD software.
This means all hardware dev tools have lagged, not just open source ones.
My take is that we need more non VC funding (gov't / foundation) of the basic science and early R&D, as VCs are forcing these companies to commercialize too quickly, and the tech doesn't get there, as operations is hard enough, let alone with half-baked tech. This happened to my last company Plethora, doing automated CAM + rapid CNC.
I did a podcast series on this:
https://manufacturinghappyhour.com/112-accelerating-the-pace...
Citation from blog: > The fact you hold a prior art in your hand, doesn’t mean much. The patent will still prevent you from importing/selling etc of the “infringing” stuff.
Could you please explain this to me? Let's say, they (Chinese) patent some complex part of my open-hw 3D printer, how this prevents me from importing parts of my 3D printer from other countries? Let's say from China. Company, which originally patent trolled me, must sue me first, no? And they care about patents? Since when?
Suppose you created the original prior art and want to get your original design manufactured on China. The Chinese manufacturer might the best in the world and cheapest source but unwilling to defy the Chinese patent.
Your tiny order isn’t worth their whole business, but if you did the original design that feels patently* unfair to you.
* sorry, couldn’t help myself
Even if the patents are only valid in China, this is going to hurt western companies a lot. If you're manufacturing a product in China, you'll need to either:
1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins
2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country
In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.
I do not understand the connection between the patent concerns in the article and open-source 3D printing. In particular, the patent issues seem to be the case for all non-Chinese 3D printer companies, whether open source or not. I am not sure how sharing your designs makes this worse (I suppose with the original drawings it's a bit easier to write a patent in bad faith - but certainly not necessary). Something like a defensive patent grant might make a lot of sense (see Opus, AV1 etc) but that's also independent of whether the implementation is open source or not.
TFA didn't really make the problem clear to me. I think it something like this, but I'm not sure. Can anybody clarify?
Problem (?): We can't produce open hardware for things that others have patented. Chinese companies (and maybe others) are patenting lots of things, including things we might have ourselves developed and intended to keep open, so it makes it difficult and/or expensive for us to continue developing.
Is that it?
This could have been an interesting take from anyone but Prusa. While they've earned themselves a great deal of goodwill from past contributions to the ecosystem, they're a failing company pivoting to dark patterns in an attempt to cling to relevance. It's heart breaking to see they still haven't been able to take a good hard look at themselves, and understand their own role in why they are scrambling.
Blog posts like these might be heralding the beginning of the end for Prusa.
what dark patterns?
And with Prusa, falls non-Chinese 3D printing.
Please elaborate
Your comment is essentially just an ad hominem that doesn't react to the content of the OP, or enumerate any of its claims. You are claiming to know better, but not substantiating anyhing. It's FUD, and the worst kind of comment, because it doesn't take the debate seriously.
As someone who is interested in owning a 3D printer someday and is leaning towards Prusa, I'm very interested in what dark patterns you're alleging.
Hi! Josef here! I was just recently sharing a little update on socials, here is a copy:
Since I posted my “OHW is dead” article, you’ve been asking me about “that patent”. I didn’t want you to miss the forest (thousands of filings since 2020) just because of one tree. But let’s take a look now. In this case: the MMU multiplexer (we open sourced it 9 years ago). Anycubic (another IDG Capital-backed company) used the tactic of filing in China for an easy initial grant: CN 222407171 U > DE 20 2024 100 001 U1 > US 2025/0144881 A1. The playbook: file a Chinese utility model (10-year patent, same protections, lower examination, already granted) claim that priority in Germany (again as a utility model, already granted) file in the US. Cheap to file, but expensive and time-consuming to fight. I already wrote why prior art isn’t a magic wand that solves it immediately in my article ⤵ And there are many more, we just found a new juicy one!
Edit: Emojis stripped from the original, tried to fix it a bit ;-)
All of Open Source needs a sunlit patent pool, a searchable database of documented inventions AND all of the follow on ideas around them. This could provide a way to force patent examiners to do their jobs and allow the Open Source Community to crowd source invention bombing the proprietary world.
How does one lookup these patents? They need more exposure so they can be refuted.
I work in a different industry, power tools. Somehow the USPTO allowed Milwaukee to patent a circ saw that spins at a certain rpm...
The things that get through the patent office are braindead. Patents are just weaponized legal minefields now. They've totally lost their original intent.
Fortunately patents are very time limited - and so all those will expire in a decade or so and then you can make whatever.
If it only was that easy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening
I am still waiting for video encoders and decoders patents to go away so we could have easy open source implementations that are royalty free, not patent incumbed to be easily available in open source applications that could be also commercial. We don't have any decent easy to go ones since Theora.
You know why IP is so strongly enforced? Because the US has been throwing all its strength behind it. This is why many countries around the world adopted heavy handed IP rights, because they came with a carrot (cheap loans, investment from the US) and a stick (sanctions). Now that the US positions itself as an adversary to other democratic countries I give it 5 years for these IP laws to stick. Everyone kinda hopes it's just Trump that lost his mind and next US govt will go back to normalcy. I doubt this very much. Once it becomes clear Trunp's symucessor is exactly the same well see US IP stop being enforced.
This has a disadvantage of no protection for genuine innovation, but who are we kidding? There is none anyway where it matters most (China). So why do we handicap ourselves following these stupid laws while the Chinese just break them and the US... Well in the US whoever has most money for lawyers wins.
For open source/hardware to thrive Ip laws have to be abolished or at least changed a lot.
This is an important and significant article.
200% tax relief on R&D was news to me (i.e. you get paid to do R&D), and indicative of what's going on.
If someone could reform patent law in such a way that it could be done in one country without jeopardising its interests, how could this be done?
LANAI, but maybe some kind of free market global license auction would better incentivize invention and reward prior art. Perhaps even outcompete the current authorities.
Clearly stovepiping the generation of IP monopolies and laundering them across borders and through unrelated court systems is a captured perverse incentive structure.
For most people this is just fine - your goals were not to build a 3d printer it was to build something that just happens to be build able on a 3d printer. That is the something you are building is the goal, not building a 3d printer. If the goal isn't building a 3d printer then buying a 3d printer that someone else has already debugged and made to work is the better way to get to what you really want to do in the first place.
In a way this is good. 3d printing is neat, but it got too much hype which was taken away from other useful things makers should also have experience in. More makers should think of injection molding when doing plastic parts. Many plastic parts makers are making would be better as metal done on lathes and milling machines (or if you want to have fun shapers and planers - both obsolete but still a lot of fun if time/money isn't important). Wood working has never really lost popularity, but it should be mentioned as a good option for makers. There are also cloth options - sew, knit, spin, tat (my favorite). There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Finally along those lines, for some just drawing something up in CAD and sending it off to someone else to make is a good option. FreeCAD has come a long way finally has reached 1.0, or you can pay for one of the commercial options - some of them are reasonable for makers though read the fine print.
> Many plastic parts makers are making would be better as metal done on lathes and milling machines
I'd love to, but I'm not getting those into my apartment.
The hobby sized machines would fit into your apartment. Sure I can do things on my big machines that you couldn't, but there are plenty of things my south bend heavy 10 cannot do.
> There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Yes but the fewest come at the price and versatility as 3D printing. Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement. Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
> Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement
You can make everything in your basement, just like you can make a 3d printer in your basement, and for similar prices. Almost nobody does it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
> Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
Skill is developed. You can do woodworking with just a sharp rock you find, no need for any more tools. Most people in woodworking choose to trade money for time and buy a lot of tools, but you can decide how far you want to go.
Time is the real constraint for everything of course. However that is my original point - if your goal isn't building a 3d printer (a fine goal) then trading money for time and buying the tools (which might or might not be a 3d printer) is probably you best bet. Assuming you have money to buy a 3d printer of course, but if you don't than a sharp rock and woodworking is probably your best hobby just because it is what you can afford.
As it happens with FOSS anything, that is not what the general public cares about, rather getting something easily at a store and fulfills their needs, which aren't how the thing works, rather as a tool for their actual work.
You have limited time. That year needed to build and debug a 3d printer (if you are single a year would be way to long, but for those with kids that is way too short) is a year that you can't spend on whatever your real hobby is. If you real hobby is 3d printers then that is great, but if not you shouldn't. I work on FOSS projects, but most of what I have installed on my system is a per-packaged distro from someone else who made it work (I have FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and Arch - each slightly different) because I don't have time to do linux/BSD from scratch even though I could. I have built gcc, but most of the time I just use the pre-packaged gcc so I can get on building the project I'm interested in.
> But around the year 2020 we registered the first mention of 3D printing as a strategic industry by the Chinese government. We know that now, after a few years of research. We first realized something is off when the price of the parts is higher than the sale price of a complete machine in some cases. That is what sparked our interest and research into the subsidies. They exist, and are very efficient https://rhg.com/research/far-from-normal-an-augmented-assess.... Our industry, desktop 3D printing, faces a bleak future. Comparable to the automotive sector as if only one high volume car brand, say Audi, remained outside of China. That’s it. An inch away from complete dependency on China in an vital piece of tech, the one absolutely critical for creation of new IP.
It seems like the real problem here is that China is able to identify strategic industries, subsidize them, and see the subsidies result in increased production and lower prices, while Western countries aren't. I'm not sure if Prusa themselves can do anything about it, but unless the West gets its shit together and decides to actually try to compete, it seems like eventually every advanced manufacturing industry will be mainly Chinese.
As someone that had open-hardware printers, they suck. They were fun to play with but not really ready for every day use.
So perhaps a bad thing for the hardware side, but as a consumer/user I want a smooth experience.
That is hardly a function of the printers being Open Hardware. There are lots of unreliable commercial printers as well as fiddly open ones. However, the most reliable ones in the desktop space have mostly been open - like the old Ultimakers or the Prusa MK series.
Prusa's printers have a reputation for being easy to use, but cost more than the Chinese competition.
Your comment is ignorant nonsense.
This is very much a bad faith argument without any specifics. I found Prusa to be good enough. Do you have any examples of open hardware printers that were evaluated that did not meet the bar?
Regardless the topic is about open hardware being squeezed using shady tactics. It means leas competition, less innovation. Rules to kick such players should be easy to enforce as opposed to required to pay quite a lot for such an action.
It was dead when I saw Joseph’s face on my Prusa Mini boot screen
You can’t be serious…
Uh yeah? Prusa Mini has his face as boot screen. Cannot find any ref’s online sadly (I sold the printer). Edit 1: speaking from a Prusa perspective I guess..
Edit 2: wait, i misunderstood ‘you cant be serious’? Not sure but what I tried to address was a cult of personality. Thats not something I feel fitting in this whole context.
China learnt patent trolling. Damn
Better printers came along, were not "open", but they were easier to use and maintain especially for first-time hobbyists and even for print farms.
Did whole 3d printing boom started because some of the patents expired?
unrelated to the topic but theme of website is so horendous to read
The author decided to use Open Sans, which is a quite narrow font, and font weight 350, so my browser (and, I suspect, yours) renders it with "Open Sans Light" at a fixed 300 weight. That is hard to read with that gray #707070 over white.
I don't know Tailwind so perhaps it is not easy to fix.
Yeah,thank God for reader mode, as I can't bloody see a thing, sat here on a beach as I am right now.
While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under, the final point of the article (discussing patent related legal barriers on existing open source innovation becoming a main strategy of large industry players) is a very important one to keep in mind for people on this site in the hardware startup space:
"This is a story from 3D printing, but all the areas with heavy open hardware development are in Made in China 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 and its successors. Make sure you keep an eye on the filings around your expertise, it is incomparably much easier to do something now than later."
> While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under
He seems to point pretty directly to Chinese subsidies allowing those printers to be sold under cost. That’s not capitalism.
Amazon operated under cost for years to capture the market, how is this any different?
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I think what you meant to say is "that is not an enforced fair and free market" which is much different than capitalism.
The free-market folks talk about something that works in theory as an ideal, but has never actually been put into practice.
How's it not capitalism? If your definition of capitalism requires governments to either not exist or not act to improve the conditions of their subjects (including companies), you have a definition of capitalism where basically none existing or only failed states have a capitalist system.
It is. Maybe not the capitalism you like.
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Well they quite literally steal everything you push out. Anyone who’s done it out in the wide open knows this reality. Sometimes they will have the copy out faster than you. What’s the point? And customers do not care at all. I heard it so many times. People lack moral compass because they grow up in environments where you’re rewarded for stealing and cheating.
The real issue is that we allow patents at all.
Given the lopsided cost that courts bring to the table, patents only help the big players- since only they canafford to play.
I invented something I ttruly think could change the world. Went to a patent attorney. He said basically - create a patent, wait till someone unsuspectingly builds a product with the same basic idea, and then sue the pans off them. If you try to develop it yourself, the patent will not help - the chinese will copy it and laugh, and the americans will copy it, modify it, and then sue you because they can push more patents than you can defend yourself against. In the best case, they may offer to settle for a small fee if you give them all your IP for free...
I have yet to see anything good from patents, but over the years I have seen just how much they prevent anything new from coming to the world.
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It's time that prusa gets outside pressure their printers stagnated in innovation and got more expensive. They don't even have machines in the entry/starter category anymore. Why should anyone buy from you if he gets a better experience for less. Especially now that they started to abandon their own core values just have a look at their new offerings they are the opposite for what they plead here. Less open.
That’s a misframing of the situation explained in the post.
Prusa printers stagnated in innovation due to patents filed, making it more difficult to add features. Still, they did expand into SLA and CoreXY.
Prusa printers got more expensive because most of the expensive components come from China, which raised prices and gave subsidies to Chinese manufacturers. That is a de facto export tariff.
They do have entry-level printers, like the Prusa Mini. Of course, it does cost twice that of a Chinese-made clone, but that is because of the aforementioned subsidies.
”Less open” is just plain wrong, almost maliciously so. Prusa offers free printable models of all parts in their entire range of printers. Their firmware is open source, and their PrusaSlicer software is open source. How much more open can you get?
The Core One makes your whole last sentence obsolete...
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this is an article about patent trolling and government involvement, not innovation or competition on price
Why do they feel the need to talk about it? Because their $1000 (which was recently reduced in price even) bedslinger is outclassed by a $349 Bambu Lab A1, and they have lost their position as the printer to buy.
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It's deflection.
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Exactly. Bambu really showed how the overall user experience can be, while prusa etc. persist in the enthusiast niche, which isn't as big as it was now that alternatives are available.
3d printing isn't dead. The policies and programs that encourage it's adoption with lower cost are.
But my bet is on clever people figuring out and systematizing things to reduce the current high cost items.
The article's assertion is specifically "open hardware" 3d printing, facing patent challenges [ other parties patenting designs released as "open" to the community ] especially in China, open hardware designers can't get their work manufactured in China ( in this very example, but similarly in any other country where the patents are filed ) or imported/exported because they become Infringing materials of the patents filed by other parties who have copied their designs.
Open Hardware designers are having to become international patent experts, which is more expensive than releasing the designs to the community for free.
The claim is about open hardware, not 3d printing in general. And the claimed problem is that the clever cost reduction is Chinese state subsidies.
Prisoner's dilemna world of so clever top-down Chinese strategizing on top of a 996 vs. Tang-ping aka. "lie down flat and get over the beatings" society. Maybe it's time for China to adopt a long term view about where this is all going? They seem to pride themselves on that.