You know why release a product to the market that lasts longer when you can just hold the patent and make shitty panels that have to be replaced every so often? Forget the competitors. Forgive the cynicism but this was clearly a 20 year long win-win for the industry. Long live the big wheel industrial complex. F the consumer.
When I see a broad statement like this, it seems interesting to dig a little further.
The article itself doesn’t provide much detail to back up its claims. And specifically it would be interesting to understand the patent issue better.
The patent they cite says claims “ A silicon single crystal produced according to Czochralski method using a melt in contact with a quartz crucible, to which Ga (gallium) is added as a dopant that controls resistivity of the crystal in a range of 5Ω.cm to 0.1Ω.cm, wherein a diameter of the single crystal is 4 inches or more, and the single crystal is used for a solar cell.”
Which seems pretty broad. Would that really have held up in court if it was tested? Was this patent really blocking fabrication of gallium doped silicon?
A text from 2015 suggests there were open issues around fabricating gallium doped silicon:
So it seems likely that there were open issues around fabrication until at least 2015. Have there been other process developments that have made Gallium doping viable in recent years?
The patent largely covers the fabrication process, and was recently licensed to a Chinese fabrication company. Is it likely that this IP was really blocking them? I.e. given that they may not publicly disclose their fabrication process, how would you know they were infringing.
If this IP was of such fundamental importance why was it not challenged? This is rare in my experience (outside of semiconductors at least).
So, it doesn’t seem clear cut to me. And it would be interesting to understand the issues better.
Well I agree with you. And I also suspected those numbers, to be honest. A sudden increase to 80% of total production? 80% from what? Since when? But I did not do a lot of research: I tried to find sources as the article is not only vague on context but also on references, but the numbers I found were not clear either. They only showed that around 90% of the global production was from silicon crystal based panels already back in 2013, way before the patent expiration. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Growth_of_photovoltaics citing https://www.webcitation.org/6SFRTUaBS and https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/bitstream/J...). I found no breakdowns to compare boron vs. gallium doping over time. I do not know anything about foundries. Maybe replacing boron with gallium is not a trivial change in process. Maybe the patent and planned obsolescence are not the issues here and I was being pretty cynic on my comment without fact checking it anyway. But way too often they are. If that figure, 80%, is true, and the shift from boron to gallium happened over the last year like the article claims, it is very likely that 2 main factors, if not the main ones, were those.
And with plastic melting (FDM) 3D printers - they really don't have anything novel, just a bunch of steppers + heating element, all controlled with a cheap 8 bit microcontroller.
Yet AFAIK due to some patent being held by Stratasis that made only professional level horrendously expensive and proprietary 3D printers that never got any wide adoption, the 3D printing revolution was held a decade+ until the damned patent finally expired. And the rest is history.
It's a really interesting question! It worked okay for Encarta, but the original fractal-compression algorithm was the "grad student algorithm", where a grad student sat in a room fiddling with parameters until she got an image that looked right, which got really astounding compression ratios, dramatically better than the ratios they were able to deliver for Encarta. Maybe modern ANNs and optimization algorithms like Adam could produce much better fractal compression than the algorithms that were practical to automate 30 years ago?
The reason fractal compression sometimes got much better compression ratios than DCTs is apparently that it did a better job of capturing the structure of the world (a prior probability distribution), more than anything about the quirks of visual perception. We know lots of basis functions that are a little better at giving us sparse bases than DCTs for low absolute error on real-world images, even before any kind of perceptual weighting. IFSs aren't quite linear basis functions (I mean they're normally "linear", but what's being transformed linearly is the (x, y) vector and not the (r,g,b) vector), and it wouldn't be terribly surprising if they could do better still. Particularly given past examples of them doing amazing.
I think they should be more expensive too. The government shouldn't give a monopoly for cheap. Maybe $100k fee for first 5 years, with the ability to pay something like $1m to extend another 5 years would be long enough. Maybe $10M for another 5 years, and $100M for another 5 years.
You're forgetting about the small inventor. If I'm sitting in my garage and come up with a cool idea that takes me 5 years of knocking on doors to get funded, then I'll get screwed by your approach.
Small inventor already can't afford a patent. Let's say the small inventor spent the large amount of money for lawyers and patent searches and got a patent... How will they defend it when litigating a patent starts at around $1 million?
What this means is that any practical implementation of an idea needs to be a multi-million dollar idea in order to be worth patenting. Otherwise you're just wasting money.
Small inventors absolutely can afford to patent. A provisional patent for a small entity is $150. A full pro se application is something like $1500 IIRC.
The point is that with a patent, the small inventor can go on to raise further funds to exploit and defend the patent if necessary.
I’m not defending the patent system, but saying it’s too expensive doesn’t make much sense.
In some ways, I think we need a way to file a defensive patent, especially for a small player. So if you are a small firm, you can patent something and ensure that a big fish can’t also patent it and run you out of business, but without obligation (and maybe without rights to) enforce it if someone else uses your idea.
I.e., a patent that protects you against a later filer, but that’s it.
In theory, just publishing the invention means it'll become prior art and prevent its patenting. Supposedly the US patent examiners will review places like https://www.priorartarchive.org/ before issuing a new patent.
Prior art that was public knowledge before the filing is still supposed to invalidate a patent on the same thing. First-to-file means if person A was first to invent but kept their prior art secret (no publishing or filing), and then person B filed, person A's secret prior art can't invalidate B's patent.
As far as I understand patents still have to be "novel", i.e. new. You can't patent something that is already known to the public, otherwise people could start patenting chairs and sandwhiches.
Patents are meant as a reward for making an invention, the deal being that you get a monopoly on this new invention for a while and in exchange you have to tell the public how to implement your invention. If you could patent known things that would defeat the whole point.
What changed is that until recently the US operated under a first-to-invent principle, so if two people invented the same thing and they both wanted a patent on it, the one who invented it first would get the patent. As you can imagine, proving when you invented something can be quite difficult at times, and the whole process can be messy. First-to-file just means that in such a situation, the first person to file wins, which puts the US rules in line with other countries and makes things much simpler.
Well, if small inventors can not afford it (what is approximately correct), then it should just not exist. We don't need more government-enforced restrictions on small enterprises, we need less of them.
How often will that happen? The existing system seems to massively favour keeping existing big companies big. A small inventor can easily ignored. Meaning, there's quite a difference between being right and ensuring a company does the right thing.
Some products (e.g. mobile phones) are covered by hundreds of patents. A small inventor having a huge benefit from patents? It maybe happens, but I really doubt the benefits outweighs the clear damage that patents are having.
with both copyrights and patents, fees should be just rise geometrically, yearly (but can be prepaid into the future). so for instance, the first year might be $1000, the second, $2000, and the 10th year, ~$1MM (a 2^n progression). by year 20, nearly every patent and copyright would be relinquished as the fee would be ~$1B. with those kinds of rates, even disney would have to innovate to stay large and relevant, rather than sitting on their laurels and collecting rents in perpetuity.
A more famous case is the steam engine improvements by James Watt.
He used his political connections to extend his patent and only after that expired could the various improvements made by users (paricularly the cornish tin miners) be used more widely.
And as with anything that threatens the establishment, there's some right wing economist writing a paper about how it's all a myth:
Looks like he works for the Cato Institute now so we should probably consider this alongside their climate change commentary in terms of baysian likelihood of truth.
But interestingly, he's mostly responding to libertarian economist who argue that IP in general is a government monopoly with all the stuff you'd associate with that:
Fractal compression was never very good, so much so, that now, 30+ years after it's invention, is is not used anywhere. it was surpassed in nearly every way as soon as it was announced.
It was a completely obvious idea that, when the patent expired, was immediately widely adopted. It's clear in this case that the patent retarded progress rather than promoting it.
Everything is obvious once you know the secret. This went under patent protection in 2000, which is decades into the hunt for PV improvements and decades into gallium doping silicon substrate (which started in the 50s at the dawn of transistors.) Papers from the early 2000s talk about this improvement and about open questions regarding the cell lifetime and mixing gallium and germanium ratios, so it does not appear to be as obvious as you suggest.
But did the applicants of the patent show a working model? Or did they just patent a bunch of possible improvements in the hope that one of them would lead to a breakthrough?
If you read the patent [1], you would see that a lot of the claims are around the process and environment that is necessary to get the proper doping. In particular, it seems to involve some rather specific pressure control within the crucible as well as control of the amount of oxygen in the crucible by using argon as a buffer gas. This patent is less about the use of gallium to dope the silicon as it is about a specific and precise manufacturing process that is necessary to prevent the whole ingot from having too much resistance or having a lifetime worse than a boron-doped silicon ingot.
Random thought to throw out. Value patents based on the amount of work required to come up with them. So patenting some random shower thought is worth what you put into it. And what you can recover in a lawsuit is also tied to that.
"Yeah we violated your 'something but on the internet patent' Here's a $50 Home Depot card."
The same way the government funds any kind of project.
Contractor says: we can do this for $X.
Government says yes or no to the project.
You do the same for patent applications.
It's basically answering the question "how much is this technology worth to society?" If they don't pay for it, then the technology will end up as a trade secret.
This is actually already a part of the patent system, but not in the way you're thinking. If a contractor says publicly, "We can frotz quibbins with a turgut for $X," that counts as putting turgut-based quibbin-frotzing "on sale". This means that ⓐ nobody else can patent turgut-based quibbin-frotzing thereafter, and ⓑ the contractor themself only has a year to file a patent on turgut-based quibbin-frotzing from the date of that notice. This is called the "on-sale bar".
The idea is that patents are only supposed to be granted for novel, nonobvious things. If nobody had ever realized that turguts would be advantageous for frotzing quibbins, then you're an inventor if you figured out how to do it, and you can get a government-granted monopoly. But presumably if you're offering to sell someone a turgut-based quibbin-frotzing product, even if you haven't actually built it yet, you must be pretty sure it's workable and worthwhile. And now anybody else can go ahead and start frotzing the quibbins with a turgut now that you've pointed out how, and although the patent law gives you a bit of a grace period to patent it, it doesn't give you unlimited leeway.
If it turns out that the turgut has to be freebled first, then you (or anybody else) might be able to patent the freebling part at any later date, since that wasn't in the original offer to sell. But only if the need for freebling wouldn't be obvious to one skilled in the art.
So, basically, patents are intended for things that are not known to be possible until someone figures out how to do them. Lemelson got away with some pretty shameless exploitation of the loopholes in these criteria, a lot of which are now closed.
How do we measure the value of anything objectively.
But there is a world of difference between, 100's of people working for a decade on a problem kind of patents. And someone sitting on their couch for an afternoon patents. You seriously want to protect the former. And not really the latter.
Man, I hate this argument. A secret is a secret because it's not obvious. If something is naturally likely to be invented by the first person who happens to encounter the problem it solves, it's not a "secret."
That seems to have been what happened here. Society does not benefit from granting a government-enforced 20-year monopoly on things like this. In fact, the cost in terms of wasted energy is incalculable. Patents wall off entire areas of R&D in many instances; we literally don't know what they cost us to grant.
Since both gallium doping and PV panels predate this patent application by several decades I think that it is incredibly ignorant to think that this was obvious. Like a magic trick, once you know the secret it appears obvious, but until someone shows you or tells you how it works you have no chance of figuring it out. This whole 'anyone would have eventually figured it out' argument is the equivalent of saying 'draw the rest of the damn owl'; if it could have been done as easily as you suggest then it would have been done earlier.
Gallium (as GaAs) was being used in solar cells in the mid 60s. A quick search finds papers from the late 70s describing different effects of boron and gallium doping of silicon for solar cells to extend the life of satellites (the effect of the patent in question is to extend the working lifetime of panels so that solar radiation does not damage the panel.) So apparently this was so obvious that the first person who happened to encounter it missed it. It was then missed over and over and over again for at least 20 years and possibly 35.
Yeah, definitely something "likely to be invented by the first person who happens to encounter the problem it solves"...
I'm not talking about proving it in court, I'm asking you to consider it in your own mind. When the problem with boron doping was realized, how long do you think it would have taken everyone to go down that column of the periodic table and use gallium instead? It's not like there was a huge selection of elements to chose from.
Just looking at the field of software process, there are things I've been doing for 20 years that sure seem obvious to me and that I thought would be obvious to everybody else in short order. But here we are and the dominant process approach has gone from "chaotic waterfall" to "chaotic waterfall with Scrum jargon and modestly shorter delivery cycles".
Well, since you obviously can't be bothered to do the research I will tell you. It didn't take them long at all. There were studies looking at the impact of boron-doping and gallium-doping back in the 70s. So why was a patent issued in 2000 that everyone has been waiting to expire? Why hadn't we moved from boron-doped PV substrate to gallium-doped substrate in the two decades between those points? Maybe that is the question you should have been asking.
Turns out that it is incredibly fucking hard to manufacture silicon ingots with the correct doping but without too much oxygen in them that make the gallium-doped wafers perform worse than boron-doped ones. Everyone knew gallium was a better target, no one had a fucking clue how to make them at scale or at an acceptable cost. Figuring this out is ENTIRELY what this patent is about.
Possibly, but I’d like to pose a relevant question: had they discovered it and then chosen to keep quiet, how long would it have been before someone else discovered it independently?
Answer: definitely less than 20 years. So why then should the first group to discover this be given 20 years of exclusivity?
People claim that this promise of exclusivity drives the research. On the other hand, why pour money into research if there’s a strong chance that my competitor will beat me to the punch and then forbid me from making use of the equivalent outcome that my own research yields (and of the in-house talent I developed along the way)?
> Possibly, but I’d like to pose a relevant question: had they discovered it and then chosen to keep quiet, how long would it have been before someone else discovered it independently?
>Answer: definitely less than 20 years. So why then should the first group to discover this be given 20 years of exclusivity?
What is absolutely hilarious about your musings here is that you are completely, 100% wrong. You make un-informed guesses and manage to get just about every aspect of the issue completely wrong. Well done.
Would you like to know when it was known that gallium-doped silicon substrate was going to perform well and possibly better than boron-doped substrate? At least the mid-70s. Would you like to know when this patent was issued? 2000. So for almost 25 years everyone KNEW gallium was better. It was literally sitting out there on every periodic table on the planet and for some reason no one produced gallium-doped PV cells at scale or cost. Why is that?
Maybe because the trick was not knowing that gallium is what you wanted to dope the silicon with, but in knowing HOW TO ACTUALLY PULL IT OFF. For more than two decades it was staring everyone in the face. For more than two decades everyone knew what the target was. For more than two decades NO ONE DID IT. That is why the first group to figure out how to manufacture gallium-doped silicon with the proper amount of other components were given exclusivity, because if they had not managed to do it then maybe we would all still be waiting for gallium-doped PV cells.
I don't see how this works out economically. Having the patent invalidated is a public good. Fighting a patent in court is expensive and risky. Why should any particular company fight a patent for the benefit of its competitors, and against some decently-well-funded conglomerate, when it's already trying to make it in a competitive field?
The patent holder, Shin-Etsu Chemical, did license the technology. They licensed it to to JA Solar, Longi and Trina Solar, all large solar panel makers in China. JA Solar panels have had gallium doping since Q3 2020.[1]
The article somehow doesn't mention that.
JA mentions gallium, but they seem to consider the weather-tightness of the surface film to be a bigger factor in lifespan.
An alternative idea to the ones mentioned here already: Perhaps they simply didn't want to give away the fact that gallium doping is an idea worth holding onto. By letting the patent timeout they save themselves tonnes of licensing money in the future, whilst also offering a reason for customers to upgrade.
More cynically, they may have preferred the fact that the panels would degrade over time, driving sales. Now that the patent is expiring, they either dope with gallium or lose customers to their competitors.
Yeah, this is a stupid thing that stems from a sound shift in Ancient Greek about 2000 years ago, when Φ changed its pronunciation from [pʰ] to something like [f]. We have all kinds of evidence of more or less when and where this happened, but not why, although it's a thing that's happened in other languages too, where a phonetic distinction that's originally aspirated/unaspirated becomes a fricative/plosive distinction.
English has this stupid policy of keeping the original spelling of any loanword it picks up, gradually drifting closer and closer to being an ideographic script. In this case English got its Greek morphemes by way of Latin, where they'd mostly already acquired standard spellings based on the older pronunciation. In Spanish, which has a phonetic script, it's much saner: "panel fotovoltáico".
Preserving words history is far from stupid.
Spellings of words bear meaning. Ethymology is extremely important to understand your own language, and how it relates to others. If we were to write every languages strictly phonetically, some would lose more than just etymology, but would even become a lot less understandable.
There are modest but real improvements in efficiency and resistance to multiple cell degradation mechanisms. Cell lifetime does not have a hard cutoff. Typically a panel's lifetime is limited by failed backsheets or wiring/soldering rather than by the more gradual optical-electronic degradation mechanisms that gallium doping helps prevent.
The primary mechanism patents provide is the open publishing and explanation of the technologies/mechanisms/etc involved. The goal is to extract research from the depths of company archives and promote iteration on existing technologies without outright cloning them. In return, you get a guaranteed monopoly on your technology for X years, and protection from theft after your open-publishing.
This system has failed in a number of ways.
1. The rate of technological evolution was significantly slower, and a time-limited monopoly was less impactful, in previous history. The industrial revolution covers some 100 year period. The digital revolution covers about 40. Things get obsoleted much faster these days, to the point that a 20-year monopoly is literally the whole lifetime of the technology
2. Patents have been granted too easily for too little (largely because there’s no repercussion for filing, and re-filing, dumb patents) allowing for extremely broad interpretations, and a single technology incorporating hundreds of different patents (eg h265)
3. Because there’s so many of them, and they’re often so vaguely defined, I’m fairly certain almost no one actually reads them to learn how to implement something, or improve on the design. I’m also fairly certain that reading patents is a great way to “poison” yourself — if it can be shown you read the parent at some point, and then violated it, it’s a trivial lawsuit.
When we create a monopoly through regulation, we should also regulate the prices the monopoly can charge, because any market without competition is broken.
I guess if you patent something and then never use and/or sell it, it will just sit there, protected by law, like a valuable piece of land full of weeds and shrubs in the middle of a city.
Land titles and patents both have similar characteristics and both could be taxed by value to discourage idle use.
The key for both is that the government is providing exclusive security of tenure over some natural opportunity in order to facilitate production. But if people take the opportunity but don't do anything with it, whether for speculation or laziness, they are excluding others. That would only be acceptable if they have paid the community for that right to do so.
Because while the justification was more efficient innovation, their actual intended purpose was to create another form of property that could be capitalized.
Such a claim is naive. While I know nothing about this specific patent of the Japanese company Shin-Etsu, when a patent is owned by a very large manufacturer like this, they very seldom want to make money by licensing the patent but they use it to exclude any competitors.
This is done by either refusing to license the patent, or more likely by requesting royalties so large that the products made by any other company could not be cheaper than their own.
There are many examples of patents which had never been implemented in any product before the day when they expired.
In this case, Shin-Etsu would have probably been willing to supply Ga-doped silicon wafers to PV cell manufacturers, but only at prices too high in comparison with the current prices of the PV panels, so such wafers have never seen any significant use.
IMHO wacom did something similar for their EMR pen tablet technology - whole in this case indeed a clever idea (pen tabled needs no battery, possibly other benefits) they only choose to build super expensive pro level drawing tablets (especially the prices of their LCD drawing tablets used to be INSANE) and only licensed the technology for presumably lot of money for high end third party products.
End result - good chunk of a generation of aspiring digital artists lost due to unaffordable tools.
Now when their patents finally expired and they have actual competition (xp pen, huion and others) it turns out huge surprise they actually can produce good quality and achievable drawing tablets like the Wacom One.
It’s a big industry now, but 20 years ago? Back then, it was a bunch of smaller companies, probably none large enough on their own to afford the royalties or they were working with their own tech to bypass IP requirements.
*and the environment.