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Comment by hamburgerwah | Hacker News Reader

Here is what will happen with this technology... nothing. The company is an IP play where they have locked up this concept in IP and will try and force it on jurisdictions by various means of legislation to ensure they can get the highest prices possible for said IP. Incumbents will resist choosing to continue with current public domain technology. In 30 years when the IP expires it might possibly come into more common use. The current IP regimes are a complete disaster and are hamstringing human progress.

PS: Also scroll compressors are substantially more energy efficient than rotary and various means of staging is even more efficient yet.

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> PS: Also scroll compressors are substantially more energy efficient than rotary and various means of staging is even more efficient yet.

PPS: Also the efficiency of a heat exchanger cycle has very little to do with the individual losses of the compressor components. Engine losses matter at the compression ratios you see in a combustion piston, but at the scale coolants run at (especially ones like in an AC that involve a phase change) it's almost noise when compared with the fundamental thermodynamic limitations. You can do a little better for sure; 33% lower friction losses seems reasonable.

But you can't do much better: the linked article is surely not talking about 33% better overall cooling efficiency, that sounds insane to me.

I agree about the 33% efficiency doesn't make any sense from a thermodynamic perspective. The discussion of the peak current for the compressor motor is quite strange. That is a fraction of a second that the system experience the Locked Rotor Amps (LRA). It is also solvable when a system has variable compressors or inrush current limiting.

One bit of reasonable efficiency gains to be had is by switching refrigerants to an R22 analogue. R22 is banned per the Montreal Protocol as of 2020.

However, R22 has thermodynamic properties that make it more efficient than the standard refrigerant of today's residential and small commercial units, R410A. This is particularly as the heat of the atmosphere being rejected into rises with some Coefficient Of Performance (COP) differences in the 10% range.

https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=86088...

There are some analogues to R22 without the ozone damaging properties that share or exceed the the thermodynamic performance of R22. R407C is one that comes to mind, but there's a handful that can be retrofitted or purchased new.

However, a trade off is that generally a newer Energy Star unit will be significantly more efficient than an older R22 unit. My point with the R22 is that the industry will slowly move towards some of these other refrigerants because of their better thermodynamics.

This technology (the idea of linear compressor directly driven by a coil) is used for at least two decades, particularly in LG compressors in AC and refrigerators [1].

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_compressor

> will try and force it on jurisdictions by various means of legislation

Have they said this is their strategy?

There are IP licensors (like ARM and the Fraunhofer Society) that sell licences to their IP without trying to force jurisdictions to adopt their technology.

> Incumbents will resist choosing to continue with current public domain technology

This would depend on the pricing of the IP licences and the competition within the market. If the licences are cheap enough and the market competitive enough that using this tech would provide an advantage, then incumbents would license it.

ARM sells... "intellectual property" that I might try to come up with a distinguishing definition from the IP of "one clever idea I want a monopoly on for a while".

A lot of IP boils down to an idea that you could describe in an elevator and a few good engineers could turn into a product in a few hours to a year.

ARM sells things that represent... thousands? hundreds of thousands? of engineer-years. You can't just whip that up in a short time, it totally makes sense to pay someone else for their trouble to make something... but if you wanted to and had a billion dollars to spare, sure you could do it yourself.

The problem with "I thought of it first" IP protections is the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery. A whole lot of ideas just have their time come, and tend to have multiple people working on them and coming to similar results in short periods. Making this a race and letting the winner sell out to groups that either want to extract rent out of the idea or to hide it in a safe to prevent competition for 30 years is not conducive to progress.

I patented a couple things just for the lulz, but in general I'm opposed to patents. I should have patented a couple others just because I kind of resent others claiming they invented it years later. But I can't complain too much, as I've also invented things that I later discovered I was late to the party.

Were you ever approached to have your lulz patents licensed?

The people who paid for all the patent paperwork owned the patents, and they licensed them, but I don't think anything ever came of them.

One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone, the other was a way to display lo-res graphics data without pixelation.

> One was a method of texting that didn't require looking at the phone

Oh that's easy, every phone before iPhone could do it - you need a) a physical keyboard, and b) a soft real-time OS. Tactile feedback of physical buttons + stable UI configuration with learnable delays = you could learn to operate the phone without taking it out of your pocket.

Joking aside, what was your invention? Could you link to the patent?

Patent 7831208 Wireless mobile phone having encoded data entry facilities

Patent 7812993 Lossy method for compressing images and video

Patent 7711748 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services

Patent 7028033 Method and apparatus for simplified access to online services

Patent 6897977 Lossy method for compressing pictures and video

Patent 6850782 Wireless device with vibrational communication capabilities

Patent 6657647 Controlling the order in which content is displayed in a browser

Patent 6418323 Wireless mobile phone with Morse code and related capabilities

AFAIK, none of these have been made use of. Though every time I see banding and blockiness in video, I think "they should implement triangles!"

Thanks! I've skimmed the ones related to vibrations/Morse code, I'll look at the rest later.

At the risk of forever poisoning myself for related work, I guess. Whose bright idea was with that "you look at it, and you and everyone you know is now liable for 3x more damages for accidental infringement" law?...

> Whose bright idea

Mine, obviously. All my ideas are Bright ideas.

The patents may have expired, anyway. One of the reasons I did the patents was I was always pestering people with those ideas, as I wanted someone to implement them. So they said "patent them, which will get the ideas out there."

The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.)

The graphics one was pretty straight forward. Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. Set a color for each triangle based on an average of the color pixels in it. Then, smoothly shade the rendering of the triangle based on the colors at each vertex. This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness. The number and placement of the vertices depends on the where the complexity in the image is, and of course would be adjustable.

The browser one is to have the browser rendering prioritize where the mouse cursor is. Great for slow connections.

> The idea was to put a rocker switch on the side, to rock between "dot" and "dash", and then use Morse code. To "read" Morse, the phone could vibrate, or at least decode it as text to read. You could text without walking into a tree (which I have done.)

I can imagine this working. Kind of like CW for HAMs, except with a 3-state switch and couple dozen more layers of abstraction between you and the wire :). I wish my Morse code wasn't so rusty though - and it makes me wonder, are there better text encodings that could be used for such purpose?

The method for texting without looking I described was only limited to writing, but it's also something I've done in practice before smartphones, in particular on a Sony Ericsson K800i. This was possible because of good-quality keyboard (and joystick), and good UI decisions. I don't know if they put an actual soft-realtime OS in there (I suspect so), but all the UI delays were always the same - so I naturally memorized sequences like "unlock, menu, texting, wait ~0.5 second for it to load, open thread, type in message, send". It probably takes teenage-level or business-professional-level of use to get that kind of muscle memory, though.

> Instead of dividing up the picture into rectangles, divide it up into triangles. (...) This will prevent any banding or that ugly blockiness.

Is the insight here that a triangle-based subdivision like this will make areas of detail not align on horizontal/vertical lines, unless the underlying image has its details aligned on a band? Or am I misunderstanding this?

I've never attempted to learn Morse, but it looks like a few hours of practice should do it. Anyone can learn it, but I expect younger people would be more willing to do it.

> the insight

The vertices will be on pixel addresses. The edges of the triangle will have no discontinuities themselves, and the triangles sharing an edge will have no discontinuities. Hence, no banding or blockiness. A naive renderer would just render the colors of the triangle as a straight linear interpolation. A more advanced one could look at the adjoining triangles, and render it so the first derivative would also be zero across the line. I.e. curve fit it.

The selection of where the vertices go would likely be best selected where the colors are shifting fastest, i.e. an edge in the picture.

The neato thing is one could render a low res image on a high res display and it'll still look good. You wouldn't have these stray pixels scattered around the text like jpg does. The other neato thing is more vertices can be put in the complex areas of the image, rather than wasting bandwidth on the parts of it that are smooth.

Progressive sharpening of the rendering also works, as more vertices can be added at any time.

Hexagonal, equivalently, equilateral triangular tessellations indeed have many advantages over using squares. Your scheme reminded me of Delaunay triangulation and its dual, Voronoi tessellation.

I have a faint suspicion that your familiarity with finite element models had something to do with your choice of triangles.

Triangles are used by game engines for good reason. Hexagonal cannot be mapped without discontinuities. Equilateral triangles are not necessary.

I've done finite element models, but they were pretty unsophisticated.

That's right, simplicial complexes of the right dimension would give one the most fidelity in terms of continuity. Triangles happen to be the one for 2D. For 3D one would get similar benefits using tetrahedra.

I was alluding the fact that barring boundary effects hexagonal tessellation and equilateral tessellation are essentially the same.

The method actually reminds me of a simple h-refinement scheme for FEM.

> The method for texting without looking I described was only limited to writing, but it's also something I've done in practice before smartphones, in particular on a Sony Ericsson K800i. This was possible because of good-quality keyboard (and joystick), and good UI decisions. I don't know if they put an actual soft-realtime OS in there (I suspect so), but all the UI delays were always the same - so I naturally memorized sequences like "unlock, menu, texting, wait ~0.5 second for it to load, open thread, type in message, send". It probably takes teenage-level or business-professional-level of use to get that kind of muscle memory, though.

Wow, this threw me back. :) Indeed this was not only possible, but actually easy. I don't think it took a lot of effort or any conscious effort even, actually, the UI was so good, but most importantly there were no unpredictable delays and no unpredictable inconsistencies!

Why is modern software so bad in comparison? Sure it can do more things, but it does them worse. The interface of everything is constantly changing for the unfounded whims of designers who simply think "this looks prettier to me", things are not laid out logically, adverts permeate the interface of most products from phones to TVs...

I'm sure I read the Morse code one in a '90s science fiction story, although I think that was described as pure haptics; not sure if that would count as prior art for your patent.

Certainly, Morse code itself isn't patentable. It's more the specific combination here.

Mitsubishi already have a (relatively) low-cost scroll compressor for air conditioning applications that works very well.

Also the refrigerants matter - unfortunately, the MOST efficient ones also happen to be really bad for the ozone layer so they've been "banned" (there are still plenty of units out there using them - just can't use on new systems).

So there's always a trade-off. You pay for this or you pay for that. And if its energy, you have to consider the material and energy supply chains or you are probably bullshitting people and yourself.

Ultimately an air con is a heat engine so Carnot's law applies. No possible magic beyond what thermodynamics allows.

ALL TOO MANY "inventions" summarily . You even have UC Berkeley getting into the con-game with the Water Seer (which claims violates thermodynamics). You'd THINK UCB wouldn't ever push physics-violating ideas but NOPE. A stain on the engineering school reputation!

My dad was making circular screw compressors back in the 70s and 80s...

I would think most of this stuff would have prior art...

SawStop tried this with table saws. Put such a bad taste in my mouth that I will never buy one.

Are you sure that isn't saw manufacturer propaganda?

I thought the issue with SawStop wasn't that the licensing was bad but that nobody was willing to take on the liability.

ie. If someone cut off their hand with a table saw, it was settled law that it was their own fault. If someone cut off their hand and the SawStop didn't fire, the manufacturer now had a gigantic liability.

SawStop is or was trying to get the government to ban the sale of saws without flesh detection technology. Guess who holds the patents for said technology?

Bosch came out with a superior design that doesn't use a brake at all, but were barred from selling it in the US because it infringed SawStop's patents.

> SawStop is or was trying to get the government to ban the sale of saws without flesh detection technology.

Yeah, that's bad. When you resort to lobbying, you're no longer on the good side of the ledger.

Tell that to the kids whose hands are saved.

https://www.swnewsmedia.com/shakopee_valley_news/news/educat...

We have a SawStop in our space for exactly that reason.

However, I don't find forcing everyone to have it by law to be particularly palatable.

I will tell you, however, that it goes off about once a month like clockwork and, as far as I can tell, it hasn't yet fired because someone was about to get injured (this is a good thing--it means our people aren't being stupid).

It's a $100-$200 hit every single time it fires. So, we have an ongoing expense of about $1500 every year for SawStop. That's a new saw every year.

Should that really be forced on people?

If it’s happening that frequently, and it’s not due to contact with flesh, then you’re cutting material that you shouldn’t be, or you should be disabling the protection feature.

> you’re cutting material that you shouldn’t be, or you should be disabling the protection feature.

I will absolutely fight you on this tooth and nail.

1) I don't want anyone to get into the habit of turning off safety features. Ever.

2) If the material can be cut on that saw without the SawStop, it should be able to be cut with the SawStop. If it can't, the fault is with SawStop, not the user.

I'm happy to pay the extra money for the extra safety. However, I will NOT allow you to blame the user for the fact that SawStop has not uncommon failure modes.

Uhh - the manual will tell you not to cut aluminum, very wet wood etc with sawstop feature on.

If you turn off feature you are back to your regular saw - hopefully you use a stick etc in all cases because as you note replacing cartridges is expensive.

One thing I like, it'll put feature back on automatically for the next time machine gets turned on.

The user's definition of "wet wood" and SawStop's often differ quite significantly. Hope you're keeping a moisture meter nearby.

You also have to wait for the blade to come to a complete stop before touching anything or you will fire the system. This can be annoying when you have the motor turned off, retracted the blade, and start setting up your fence only to have the system fire because it wasn't quite stopped.

Was there a sticker on something that was slightly metallic? Oops.

I'm happy to have a SawStop on my saws, and I would even recommend it. However, given how often it false fires, I'm not sure I would mandate it by law.

Every piece of wood at Home depot has a staple in it for the upc code.

Which does not trigger the device unless you are ALSO touching the staple or you cut with staple side down so you ground blade through staple into table.

THIS is actually a great suggestion. Have some lower speed that sawstop does not trigger below. It really does not need to trigger once its (very) slow unless you have a heavier dado blade maybe?

Or have a noncartridge saw brake on the saw, when you come off saw for more than 3 seconds put some light pressure on to slow it more quickly.

I think a fair number of false fires are from this rather than the "wet wood" worry.

So if we assume people are cutting appropriate material, your statement simplifies to "If it's happening that frequently you should disable it." And this is your argument in support of mandating it??

I think it's completely reasonable to require it but also mandate that the health insurance companies pay for it, and all cartridge replacements. It's in their best interest to prevent accidents, and the cost is miniscule compared to even a single ER visit.

Especially in SF bay area

$18K for a bottle of milk for a baby etc (trauma activation fees are crazy).

Absolutely not - no where did I say that anyone should be forced to buy the saw.

I was merely pointing out that saying you would never buy a sawstop for whatever crazy reason (ie, other companies wouldn't pay them the $3-$10 or whatever) seems a bit ridiculous.

If you have a fair number of folks using the saw, have them touch materials to saw first with saw off to get a read on it or list the ones not recommended.

Lobbying is simply the practice of petitioning the government to adopt a given policy.

That's a foundation of democracy, really: the right to petition the government. I think you might want to re-examine your view a bit.

>> Lobbying is simply the practice of petitioning the government to adopt a given policy.

Adopting a policy is different from having them mandate what people buy.

Hey, have people buy epipens and keep one at the school for each kid with allergies. Then later we will raise our prices 1000 percent. That's not influencing policy, its fucking people all the way to the bank - with government assistance.

I've done some unpaid policy work. Defending democracy by advocating election integrity. No one is writing books about my mendacious activities.

FANG has a phalanx of former electeds and staffers paid to hustle their former colleagues. To defend their grift and dismantle civil society. Grist for an endless torrent of outrage porn.

While pendants will argue both me and FANG are "lobbying", petitioning our governments, our respective efforts hardly seem comparable.

This is actually totally false.

Sawstop dropped blade below table. Bosch also dropped blade below table. So the invention was very fast acting sensing and then dropping blade. Sawstop added brake.

Sawstop ALSO did a brake. The brake made a pretty reasonable difference in terms of damage.

Plenty of youtube videos exposing this saw.

"SawStop uses a different mechanism to drop the blade, but also employs an aluminum brake. In our testing on both top and front strikes, the blade stopped with less damage to my hand than Bosch’s Reaxx."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3JsUGwt_Mg

What is false? Did not Sawstop sue Bosch for patent infringement?

"Bosch came out with a superior design that doesn't use a brake at all, but were barred from selling it in the US because it infringed SawStop's patents."

The design was not superior and the infringement was not based on a brake or lack of one. The infringement was because of copy of the skin contact sensing / blade drop technology as what were called underlying elements. I think the case may still be ongoing though? This one went a long while.

I never said that the infringement was related to the brake. I thought I was pretty clear that the patents were about skin-sensing technology.

And "not superior" is subjective. If the SawStop tech has enough false triggers and destroys as many blades as it apparently does based on what I've read (probably depends on material being cut), the increased cost almost certainly isn't worth it unless you're a high school shop class.

I don't think that was clear. You mentioned the Bosch system had a patent issue and immediately mentioned it didn't even use a break. While it's possible to read that as the Bosch system being superior because it lacks a break, the main topic was the patent issue, so it's more natural to read it as being related to that.

Meanwhile there wasn't even a mention of the sensing technology.

I literally said "flesh detection technology" in my original comment.

The sawstop story is interesting.

They basically tried to license it to the other saw companies.

The other companies said hell no. We have the market.

So sawstop started building their own (great) saws. They really are pretty to very high quality. The saw stop feature is also very effective.

It's so effective that if you are running a woodworking shop in a school, or ever want to let your kids use your saw, or have staff using your saw, you really owe it to them to ALWAYS buy a sawstop.

I've worked with a few owners who took the approach you did. Inevitably someone loses a finger - and after the dust settles and folks ask why they didn't put this VERY simple and not that expense solution in place - they usually regret it. Either they feel guilty for chisling on some $ and having someone lose function in their hand or if they are here in CA they pay out BIG TIME for their stupidity.

A series of meetings followed, in which Gass "negotiated with major players such as Ryobi, Delta, Black & Decker, Emerson, and Craftsman" in an attempt to license his invention; he followed those negotiations with a February 2001 presentation to the Defense Research Industry, a trade group for attorneys representing the power-tool industry.[7] That presentation immediately preceded one from Dan Lanier, Black & Decker's national coordinating counsel; Lanier's presentation gave Gass the impression he was unlikely to succeed in convincing major power tool manufacturers to license SawStop technology.[7]

The license fee was going to be around 3% of wholesale (so about $3 on a $100 wholesale saw that goes for $200 retail). I think he came very close to licensing to ryobi?

Anyways, if you think $3 for potentially incredibly QOL saving tech is too much for an inventor that actually invented something (and tested on his own finger) then I don't know what to tell you.

That said, once someone's parents (if you run a woodshop in a school) or employee sues you - you may start valuing this invention a bit more.

On the other hand (!), maybe the onus for the lost fingers is on SawStop for demanding those licensing fees.

Congratulations! You are today's 10,000th person to learn of: <Perverse Incentives>

How is it an example of a perverse incentive? If we don't reward inventors who make genuinely useful things, there's no incentive.

I was replying to a comment which suggested the investor should be punished for not offering their invention for free.

The poster wanted to punish inventors for inventing. If that isn't a perverse incentive I don't know what is.

> The poster wanted to punish inventors for inventing.

Please try reading what I wrote again.

> On the other hand (!), maybe the onus for the lost fingers is on SawStop for demanding those licensing fees.

Done.

Do you disagree that your writing says "the onus for lost finger is on SawStop"? Your writing seems very clear to me. I do not know why you are confused.

I said "maybe", as in who is the unfair party here? Nowhere did I say anyone should be punished.

To certain people.

Safety features are not free and no one should expect them to be.

If some safety feature is judged too important not to have, as it is common in cars, the government steps in and makes it mandatory, but it doesn't mean there are no more licensing fees. At best, the licensing fees are limited to a fair price.

> Safety features are not free and no one should expect them to be.

There's a difference between the cost to provide something and the license fee. Note the Moderna licensed its covid patents for $0.

> a fair price

What's a fair price? What is the rule that says one party is greedy and the other is reasonable?

There's a whole precedent for this with FRAND (Fair, Reasonable and Non-Discriminatory) licensing. It's really common for standards.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reasonable_and_non-discriminat...

All patents (really, all licensable IP) should be subject to this.

Did anybody use Moderna's patents? As far as I know nobody did because Moderna licensed them for a limited time in which nobody would be able to ramp up a completely new production line.

Almost always those 0 cost licensing agreements are just PR stunts.

Walter:

> On the other hand (!), maybe the onus for the lost fingers is on SawStop for demanding those licensing fees.

Also Walter:

> What's a fair price? What is the rule that says one party is greedy and the other is reasonable?

Not that this proves or disproves anything, but Volvo famously gave away the patent for the three-point belt systems in cars.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/douglasbell/2019/08/13/60-years...

Sometimes companies and individuals think that it's wroth losing financially for the sake of wider safety.

Like the polio vaccine.

As opposed to... giving the tech away for free? What alternative are you proposing is better?

I give away tech for free that I work full time on every day. (The D programming language). So does everyone else who works on it. It's how Open Source works.

Good for you. This isn't open-source though. It's capital intensive product development and people want to be paid for their efforts.

Are you seriously suggesting that they should just work for free?

Not at all. They're free to manufacture and sell sawstop saws. They can also supply the necessary hardware to other saw makers, saving them the trouble of developing it themselves. It'd be likely cheaper to just buy the hardware than reverse-engineer it.

It's good that the license was only $3, but the end user also has to buy at least one disposable $80 cartridge (probably more, apparently false alarms happen) for a problem that can be solved with a push stick.

Good point.

You can send in your activated cartridge to sawstop - if it was skin activated then they may replace it for free.

If you are concerned about a trip you can touch blade to piece with saw off and it'll tell you if would have tripped. Or do a first cut with system off. Or if you have a wet piece turn it off.

That said if you have a nail or something in piece there are situations that could trip it for sure.

I was at a shop that had a "wall of shame" with sawstop cartridges that had tripped when people tried to saw wet wood, metallized plastic, and other conductive materials.

The detection can be disabled for the case of cutting conductive materials.

It can also be used to sense if the wood is too wet - go to bypass, then do a cut in wettest part and you'll get an indication.

Push sticks have been turned into formidable projectiles, even by the most experienced and careful of user.

$3 was at least 100, if not 1000 times more than these manufacturers would have ever been willing to pay in license. That was just the license, the technology itself added significant cost, weight and complexity.

It's no surprise that sawstop can make a nice saw for 4 to 17x the price of competitors.

> The other companies said hell no. We have the market.

The other manufacturers would have had to immediately stop selling and possible have pulled all the other saws off the market. For liability reasons, you can't sell a line of saws that chop off fingers next to a line that doesn't. You're basically admitting the former is defective.

What is the basis for this claim? It doesn't sound particularly plausible compared to other safety features, such as car airbags, which are not offered across all products in a brand.

I'm not convinced about that legal theory. There's another precedent in motorcycle ABS: unlike cars, not all bikes have it yet, so you can buy a Ninja both with and without ABS. The feature is even more decisively important for bikes than cars because it keeps them upright and stable under hard braking, so it's not just stopping distance. It adds several hundred to the price.

Or maybe you're right and we'll see an "admission of defect" suit sometime soon.

This is nonsense. Saws that chop off fingers aren't defective - the user is. It's a simple argument to make.

Saw Y doesn't have safety features and you use it at your own risk of injury. Saw X will stop cutting the moment it detects a body part. You also use it at your own risk of injury.

For liability reasons, you can't sell a line of saws that chop off fingers next to a line that doesn't. You're basically admitting the former is defective.

I'd think the opposite is true - you can't sell a $250 saw that won't cut someone's finger off next to a $200 saw and expect it to sell. No one thinks it'll happen to them... otherwise Saw-stop's own line of saws would dominate the market. Some people will pay the premium, but I'd bet that most will not.

Vapor compression is a technology ripe for disruption. I reckon the IP holder knows this and is trying to monetize this while they can.

I think tech based on magnetocaloric cooling is one option. There was a company I was following a years ago (I've since forgotten the name) that was researching advanced thermoelectric cooling technologies that would be offer much better performance than peltiers.

Your hypothetical scenario requires everyone being irrational.

The company probably doesn't want to sit on their IP for 30 years and not yield any profit. How does that benefit them.

They'll try to bend some arms, and if this fails, they're most likely to drop licensing prices until they meet market demand.

And yes, there's demand for efficient AC. I mean, come on.

> Incumbents will resist choosing to continue with current public domain technology. In 30 years when the IP expires it might possibly come into more common use. The current IP regimes are a complete disaster and are hamstringing human progress.

I am curious. What explains the success of Microsoft Windows as the dominant "technology" for PCs and laptops? That's not due to "intellectual protection rights" is it? I am not a software engineer, just a display engineer, would I be correct if I alleged that "IP regimes" are hamstringing operating system progress? My gut instinct is no, that would be an absurd claim. Perhaps equivalent to me claiming that "IP regimes" are hamstringing search engine progress? I am genuinely interested to find out what people think about this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft_Cor....

Yes, IP regimes are definitely hamstringing operating system progress. https://en.swpat.org/wiki/NetApp%27s_filesystem_patents goes into some details about why Linux doesn't have automatic transparent instantaneous backups like the NetApp fileserver I was using a quarter century ago.

The federal government can and should suspend patent coverage for key climate-related innovations -- just like what was done for COVID vaccines.

Or it could just buy those patents, using eminent domain powers.

Using eminent domain still requires paying close to fair market value… determining that will find quite a few lawyers’ French chateaus.

Yes, removing the profit motive will surely incentivize such inventions!

I have two dozen patents to my name and know dozens of others who hold as many or more than I do. I also know just as many successful entrepreneurs.

Not one had ever said "I would commercialize <x>, but for the patents", nor have any said "I would stop doing innovation if patents ceased to exist".

I concede that there are some field where it might make sense (eg pharmacology), but most of the time, patents are a tax -- hugely expensive for small innovators and weaponized by mega-corps.

Further, in times of crisis (eg COVID or war with radar), patents are suspended for certain topics to promote speed of execution. We are at that point for climate change & energy efficiency.

There are a lot of inventors out there who can afford the fees.

I would love to see patent fees based on income level, and the more you get; the more they cost.

I would like to have a breakdown of individual vs. organization-backed inventors. Quite a lot of - but I don't know how much, relatively - patent applications are filled by individuals with help and in the name of their employer; there are companies who are proud of the number of patent applications they file per year - and those are mostly bona-fide inventions, not patent trolling.

(It's entirely expected, if you think about it - a big company employing skilled specialists doing actual[0] engineering is bound to become a patent mill, as those workers have to invent their way out of new problems.)

I suspect that this might be the primary way patents are applied for and awarded, and it's different from the usual narration, that patents are either small inventors wanting to ensure the market rewards them for their hard work, or evil megacorps buying them up as a part of peace-through-MAD balance with other evil megacorps.

[0] - Traditional, "trad", not-software engineering. I know this is just a stereotype, and this[1] series of articles does a great job debunking it, but... well, I haven't fully internalized these conclusions just yet.

[1] - https://www.hillelwayne.com/post/are-we-really-engineers/; thanks 'Twisol for bringing it up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28192650).

Yes, anecdata.

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