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.
IP is always strong, because information does not behave like other goods. There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.
It seems we tend to struggle with most things that obey power laws (wealth, attention, trust) in our economies and societies.
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.
While I sympathize with folks calling for weaker patents as an alternative solution, I think that's a non-starter given the power of entrenched interests.
If this were easily fixed, it would be fixed by now.
Best approach might be some OSS patent collective driven by community contributions and a legal team that heavily leverages things like AI to drive down costs. Even then, a big, well funded corp could just drain the coffers with a single, expensive legal battle.
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.
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.
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.
Patents just aren't necessary. When something is in the "air", sooner or later it will be invented because it will be obvious in the state of the art.
There's no need to grant monopoly privileges. Rather, I favor market governed subsidies and grants for innovators to recoup the cost of their effort. The government will play a role in setting up the market and running it. This will be more democratic as people will have a voice to reward inventors for their efforts.
I expect this to be complimentary to innovations that will already arise.
One argument is that patents encourage innovation. The promise of a patent and the rewards to be gained act as a motivating force for ideas. Supposedly.
> 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
While not addressing the situation in the same way, here's my knee-jerk idea for defense against patent trolls:
"If you want to sue a person or an organization, you must pay the legal fees for the defendant, in an amount equal or greater to the amount of money being spent by the plaintiff on legal matters pertaining to the case."
So a small business would get full funding for defense, but it would cost them double to sue someone else. I'd say that's an excellent trade-off. This would dissuade not just patent trolls but any lawsuit where money would be the determining factor for victory.
The Achilles' heel would be enforcement, leading to a new subcategory of legal efforts to ensure compliance. But there's an opportunity for a net reduction in legal action.
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.
>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?
>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.
How about making everything a jury trial? How about same-day trials? How about trials that take hours not years? How about doing things so fast events are still fresh in people's minds, and information can flow directly from the witnesses to the ears of the jury?
> The real story here is that IP ownership is capital-intensive when it shouldn't be
The backbone of the US economy are services and software, which depend a lot on IP. Deliberately or not, "low-value" American manufacturing was sacrificed for these high-margin industries[1]. AFAICT, it's impossible to turn back the clock on manufacturing without disadvantaging US software/services both on the legal regime and trade fronts
1. Which is why SWE salaries are higher in the US that RoW. I don't think trading high-salary service jobs for low-paying manufacturing is a good decision, but lots of people - including the current executive - think they can get it all. My working theory is Europe and China are not dumb and without agency and are just biding time for decoupling, should their manufacturing industries be undermined by US policy.
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.
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.
"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.
> 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).
It's amazing that after so many failures people are still preaching communism.
You'd have a leg to stand on if you could produce a single communist society which worked for the working class instead of the communist elites.
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.
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.
I get the feeling that it is not actually the tech involved in the printers that distinguishes Bambu from Prusa, I think it's more about the supply chain and the distribution network. If I go to Prusa right now to order a core one printer from the US it tells me this:
Estimated lead time 1–2 weeks
That means it's not even going to ship, from Europe, until then... And guess what? The shipping can range anywhere from 60$ to 300$ depending on the printer... Bambu has warehouses on US soil where they maintain stock of frequently purchased items and their printers/parts can be at my door in a matter of days with shipping ranging from 20$ to 100$ for their largest printer. It seems small but when you run a business that is reliant on 3d printers - these things matter. I think Prusa just honestly needs to focus on their distribution chain.
Like I really have considered Prusa printers for my business many times, but they either have had crazy lead times/shipping times or the prices out the door just don't make sense.
I tried to buy a Prusa. Even after I paid them they couldn’t tell me when the order would ship or be delivered.
Instead they pointed me at some webpage with a lead time table? Pretty sure the table also changed/slipped over the eight days I waited for them to get their act together.
If someone from Prusa is reading this: I don’t want to hear about your internal manufacturing lead times. Especially if they’re going to slip. Commit to a ship date you know you can meet and deliver.
When I found out that Prusa had absolutely no clue what the ship date would be, I cancelled my order and went with Bambu.
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.
I came across this[1] recently. It compares a Harbor Freight Icon ratchet ($70) to a Snap-On ratchet ($195). They are essentially using the same design and same parts. The Snap-On replacement part kit fits inside an Icon ratchet. Oh and the Icon is performs better than the Snap-On for a fraction of the price. The Gearwrench ratchet ($45) was even more impressive as it's only slightly worse than either of the others and not necessarily in ways most people will ever experience.
Some brands of cheap tools are getting really fucking good. There's still a lot of garbage out there though.
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.
Bambu is who's winning this space and largely took 3d printing from a hobby for its own sake to "it's another tool in your shop".
My bambu was FAR cheaper than a comparable prusa, and I took it out of the box, put filament in it, and it started producing effectively perfect prints immediately.
I just got a Creality K1 Max and I'm over the moon with it. Granted, my only frame of reference was a Prusa i3 knockoff kit I bought almost 10 years ago, upgraded with 3d printed parts, replaced the power supply with one from an old server, and added dual extruders. Basically If I wanted to use it, I'd have to tinker for hours to get a print started, and printing anything too large would almost definitely fail, or warp off the bed.
I've done multiple prints on the K1 Max where I started it, went to bed, and it was there, finished for me in the morning.
Since I'm familiar with the process, I just jumped straight to using OrcaSlicer and never touched creality's software. It definitely feels like Chinese hardware is progressing much quicker than their software.
I need an enclosed design and wanted to go coreXY, and Prusa's offering in that category was out of my budget, but they seem like a fabulous company.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.
How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner.
Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.
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.
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!"
> Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.
I got my bambu a1 for ~300 euros during the latest sales, I'm still kind of shocked at how good it is for the price. I can't remember the last time I was that impressed by a piece of hardware
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.
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.
This is why open source software is stronger than ever despite its shortcomings and efforts of large orgs to kill it. Rather than bending backwards and treating it like property (as originally demanded by Bill Gates in his open letter decades ago, we did the right thing and treated it like knowledge (e.g. like mathematics).
Intellectual property was a horrible flawed idea that the world will continue to pay for dearly for decades after it is finally discarded.
I started in Reprap in 2011...frequently spoke with Prusa and many, many others in IRC. Watched the development and commercialization of the whole project through the years.
My main takeaway (and one that I attempted to point out often) is that the value of the Reprap project and it's OSHW nature was not to "own a machine"...the true value was the process of building the machine, tuning and evolving. This all began to stagnate in 2014 when the "You are a fool to build your own printer when you can buy one prebuilt" came about. This seemed to be spread by people who either had no idea what they were doing...or were intentionally planting the seed of doubt. We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.
My current printer I built in 2015. It needs very little work but has evolved slightly through the years...mostly in electronics since it is my test platform for the V2 Smoothieboard development. It does not have a lot of the software "magic tricks" but it prints very reliably and solid (even after being toted around to events).
It was once said to me by Logxen "Opensource hardware is engineering on an artist's business model". IMHO...saying it is dead and giving up is the same as quitting doing art you love because someone else paints better/faster/cheaper.
A quote attributed to Limor Fried says it best "I'm going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it".
@josefprusa...since I know you frequent here...don't forget about the impact the projects have on the world. There are bigger things than just money. There was a time you cared about OSHW enough to get it tattooed on your arm.
> My current printer I built in 2015. It needs very little work but has evolved slightly through the years...
"It needs very little work" is very different from "an amateur with no knowledge can use it". You're overwhelmingly more qualified to adjust it and keep it running, you even enjoy that part of the process.
I've come to accept that an overwhelming majority of people are not 3D printER enthusiasts, they're barely even 3D printING enthusiasts. They're artists and minifigure builders and engineers and mechanics, and they care about the printer itself just as much as they care about a random screwdriver. Many don't even want to understand how the thing works, they just want it to work.
With those values, yes, buying one off the shelf that's assembled and tuned and adjusted and tested and can immediately begin making parts with decent reliability is better than building one.
> "You are a fool to build your own printer when you can buy one prebuilt" came about. This seemed to be spread by people who either had no idea what they were doing...or were intentionally planting the seed of doubt.
I started with a self-built printer and even got some key parts from members of our local 3D printing community, true RepRap style. I've spent a lot of time upgrading, modifying, tuning, debugging, and trying different controller boards over the years.
I also have a mass-produced printer.
I enjoy both for different reasons. I would never recommend the self-built route to anyone who wasn't looking for a project. The mass-produced printers are so much easier to get to printing rather than spending hours dealing with the printer every time you want to print.
Honestly, getting the mass-produced printer reignited my excitement for actually designing and printing parts. Instead of dealing with the printer, I can forget about the printer and just get straight to my project.
> We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.
This is the FUD I hear out of the 3D printing purists, but it doesn't match the experience of myself and my friends with printers from Bambu and a couple other companies.
I can get spare parts for both printers just as easily. To be honest, I have more faith that I can get something like a replacement heated bed for my Bambu 5 years from now than the custom-shaped heater for self-built which is sourced from a little operation that has to carry dozens of different sizes and variations.
Every time I read one of these posts praising self-built printers and downplaying the mass-produced machines, it comes down to something like this:
> My current printer I built in 2015.
I have a self-built printer from that era that has been upgraded throughout the years. I also have a Bambu. It's hard to explain just how much you're missing if you don't have experience with both.
It's nice to have a (niche) community around open source HW, but I'd argue it's even better when that community's ideals and ethics can spread to more people through OSHW business, not to mention the benefits flowing back to the community like e.g. cheaper parts.
No one's taking away the community right now, but if the business around it is disappearing, that's also a shame.
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.
In a conversation on another community, some people are voicing opinions that open hardware is indeed not dead, and that your post reeks as hubris and self-aggrandisement (not their literal words, I'm paraphrasing).
Sovol and Qidi have been cited as counter-examples.
Sovol has been flatout copying Prusa part for part for a long time now. Qidi seems to be doing the same with Bambu. Time will tell, but their oss contributions are not at the same level.
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.
People love to point out the ghost cities and high speed trains to "nowhere". But, for every ghost city, there are hundreds of thriving actual cities full of people. Shenzhen itself was a planned special economic zone that went from an impoverished fishing village to a thriving megalopolis and the worldwide center of electronics within decades.
And despite some high speed train stations being underutilized in the off season, the majority of Chinese cities are connected with blazing fast high speed trains that depart every 15 minutes. Even third tier cities have high speed trains and they are amazing. Now, despite using some underhanded tactics to get Siemens and others to hand over their IP initially, the Chinese high speed rail system is the envy of the world, with orders of magnitude greater coverage, track length, and ridership than Japan. At the same time, domestic innovations allow the newer trains to be a more comfortable, faster, and smoother ride than the Shinkansen, TGV, and ICE. I would take that any day over, say, California High Speed Rail dilly-dallying for decades with nothing to show for it.
The Chinese electric car industry is another one of those that are famously subsidized. People love to point out that some shady companies that have large lots of unsold new vehicles sitting there but written off as being sold via some accounting tricks. While that does happen and is deplorable, the fact is that Chinese EVs have basically leapfrogged the rest of the world in quality, capabilities, and innovation. The Xiaomi SU7 is amazing, for example. But don't despair, some Western companies like Tesla are still able to keep up with the pace of innovation.
Also, all this talk of the Chinese government subsidizing this, and subsidizing that being unfair competition, as though China had a magic money tree to fund everything. In contrast, it is sad that the US government, while having vastly greater tax revenue, fails to fund basically any sort of technological development, and instead wastes all of its enormous amounts of money on inefficiencies (e.g. our spending per capita on healthcare being the highest in the world, but most of it is going to bureaucracy, and we languish with poor life expectancy) while being saddled in debt.
I think you are misunderstanding, China pays for 10 cities and gets 3. No one denies the immense infrastructure they have. People deny that they did it practically, which they did not. If the US wanted to match Chinas debt level (national and provincial), they could burn $30 trillion for $10 trillion of eye popping functionality too.
Also in the US, private markets primarily fund advancement, not the government. Private markets generally don't burn money like governments.
Yes, I'm really tired of the propagandized "ghost cities" talking point. Having spent time in China, it's clear that they just put a little bit of planning into their development, where as in the US there is little to none, and the resulting infrastructure + development is far below China's.
And like you said, the capacity and capability is there, but the money gets disappeared into some DoD contractor instead. As well as there being thousands of failed projects, ghost towns, and empty neighborhoods across the US. But the propagandized talking point isn't there. Some wealthy anti-planning capitalists obviously made a successful media push about it. Much like other "enemies" of the US, nearly all reporting is loose on facts and biased negative.
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
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?
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.
Readit News
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.
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.
- 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.
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.
It seems we tend to struggle with most things that obey power laws (wealth, attention, trust) in our economies and societies.
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).
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.
While I sympathize with folks calling for weaker patents as an alternative solution, I think that's a non-starter given the power of entrenched interests.
If this were easily fixed, it would be fixed by now.
Best approach might be some OSS patent collective driven by community contributions and a legal team that heavily leverages things like AI to drive down costs. Even then, a big, well funded corp could just drain the coffers with a single, expensive legal battle.
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.
There's no need to grant monopoly privileges. Rather, I favor market governed subsidies and grants for innovators to recoup the cost of their effort. The government will play a role in setting up the market and running it. This will be more democratic as people will have a voice to reward inventors for their efforts.
I expect this to be complimentary to innovations that will already arise.
One argument is that patents encourage innovation. The promise of a patent and the rewards to be gained act as a motivating force for ideas. Supposedly.
While not addressing the situation in the same way, here's my knee-jerk idea for defense against patent trolls:
"If you want to sue a person or an organization, you must pay the legal fees for the defendant, in an amount equal or greater to the amount of money being spent by the plaintiff on legal matters pertaining to the case."
So a small business would get full funding for defense, but it would cost them double to sue someone else. I'd say that's an excellent trade-off. This would dissuade not just patent trolls but any lawsuit where money would be the determining factor for victory.
The Achilles' heel would be enforcement, leading to a new subcategory of legal efforts to ensure compliance. But there's an opportunity for a net reduction in legal action.
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.
IP ownership is not inherently capital-intensive in the US.
And why would those in power do that, when the justice system as it is exists to serve their interests?
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?
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.
The backbone of the US economy are services and software, which depend a lot on IP. Deliberately or not, "low-value" American manufacturing was sacrificed for these high-margin industries[1]. AFAICT, it's impossible to turn back the clock on manufacturing without disadvantaging US software/services both on the legal regime and trade fronts
1. Which is why SWE salaries are higher in the US that RoW. I don't think trading high-salary service jobs for low-paying manufacturing is a good decision, but lots of people - including the current executive - think they can get it all. My working theory is Europe and China are not dumb and without agency and are just biding time for decoupling, should their manufacturing industries be undermined by US policy.
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.
Working as intended then
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/
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)
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
Corporate law is a thing. There are huge, consequential lawsuits between giant corporations.
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.
How could I guess you are not black?
How do you think the wealthy resolve dusputes among themselves? You obviously have never lived in a truly lawless society
It's amazing that after so many failures people are still preaching communism.
You'd have a leg to stand on if you could produce a single communist society which worked for the working class instead of the communist elites.
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.
Dead Comment
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.
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).
That means it's not even going to ship, from Europe, until then... And guess what? The shipping can range anywhere from 60$ to 300$ depending on the printer... Bambu has warehouses on US soil where they maintain stock of frequently purchased items and their printers/parts can be at my door in a matter of days with shipping ranging from 20$ to 100$ for their largest printer. It seems small but when you run a business that is reliant on 3d printers - these things matter. I think Prusa just honestly needs to focus on their distribution chain.
Like I really have considered Prusa printers for my business many times, but they either have had crazy lead times/shipping times or the prices out the door just don't make sense.
Instead they pointed me at some webpage with a lead time table? Pretty sure the table also changed/slipped over the eight days I waited for them to get their act together.
If someone from Prusa is reading this: I don’t want to hear about your internal manufacturing lead times. Especially if they’re going to slip. Commit to a ship date you know you can meet and deliver.
When I found out that Prusa had absolutely no clue what the ship date would be, I cancelled my order and went with Bambu.
At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?
Some brands of cheap tools are getting really fucking good. There's still a lot of garbage out there though.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBItmykqu0I
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.
My bambu was FAR cheaper than a comparable prusa, and I took it out of the box, put filament in it, and it started producing effectively perfect prints immediately.
I've done multiple prints on the K1 Max where I started it, went to bed, and it was there, finished for me in the morning.
Since I'm familiar with the process, I just jumped straight to using OrcaSlicer and never touched creality's software. It definitely feels like Chinese hardware is progressing much quicker than their software.
I need an enclosed design and wanted to go coreXY, and Prusa's offering in that category was out of my budget, but they seem like a fabulous company.
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.
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.
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.
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.
How so? I'm not sure what benefits that bestows the repo owner.
Meta may run the React Native repo, for example, but I'm not sure how that is impacting Microsoft (who use React Native more and more, including deeply embedded in Windows) competitively negatively in any way.
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!"
I got my bambu a1 for ~300 euros during the latest sales, I'm still kind of shocked at how good it is for the price. I can't remember the last time I was that impressed by a piece of hardware
What problem do you think needs fixing?
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.
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 mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.
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.
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.
Intellectual property was a horrible flawed idea that the world will continue to pay for dearly for decades after it is finally discarded.
My main takeaway (and one that I attempted to point out often) is that the value of the Reprap project and it's OSHW nature was not to "own a machine"...the true value was the process of building the machine, tuning and evolving. This all began to stagnate in 2014 when the "You are a fool to build your own printer when you can buy one prebuilt" came about. This seemed to be spread by people who either had no idea what they were doing...or were intentionally planting the seed of doubt. We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.
My current printer I built in 2015. It needs very little work but has evolved slightly through the years...mostly in electronics since it is my test platform for the V2 Smoothieboard development. It does not have a lot of the software "magic tricks" but it prints very reliably and solid (even after being toted around to events).
It was once said to me by Logxen "Opensource hardware is engineering on an artist's business model". IMHO...saying it is dead and giving up is the same as quitting doing art you love because someone else paints better/faster/cheaper.
A quote attributed to Limor Fried says it best "I'm going to keep shipping open source hardware while you all argue about it".
@josefprusa...since I know you frequent here...don't forget about the impact the projects have on the world. There are bigger things than just money. There was a time you cared about OSHW enough to get it tattooed on your arm.
edit: grammar
"It needs very little work" is very different from "an amateur with no knowledge can use it". You're overwhelmingly more qualified to adjust it and keep it running, you even enjoy that part of the process.
I've come to accept that an overwhelming majority of people are not 3D printER enthusiasts, they're barely even 3D printING enthusiasts. They're artists and minifigure builders and engineers and mechanics, and they care about the printer itself just as much as they care about a random screwdriver. Many don't even want to understand how the thing works, they just want it to work.
With those values, yes, buying one off the shelf that's assembled and tuned and adjusted and tested and can immediately begin making parts with decent reliability is better than building one.
I started with a self-built printer and even got some key parts from members of our local 3D printing community, true RepRap style. I've spent a lot of time upgrading, modifying, tuning, debugging, and trying different controller boards over the years.
I also have a mass-produced printer.
I enjoy both for different reasons. I would never recommend the self-built route to anyone who wasn't looking for a project. The mass-produced printers are so much easier to get to printing rather than spending hours dealing with the printer every time you want to print.
Honestly, getting the mass-produced printer reignited my excitement for actually designing and printing parts. Instead of dealing with the printer, I can forget about the printer and just get straight to my project.
> We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.
This is the FUD I hear out of the 3D printing purists, but it doesn't match the experience of myself and my friends with printers from Bambu and a couple other companies.
I can get spare parts for both printers just as easily. To be honest, I have more faith that I can get something like a replacement heated bed for my Bambu 5 years from now than the custom-shaped heater for self-built which is sourced from a little operation that has to carry dozens of different sizes and variations.
Every time I read one of these posts praising self-built printers and downplaying the mass-produced machines, it comes down to something like this:
> My current printer I built in 2015.
I have a self-built printer from that era that has been upgraded throughout the years. I also have a Bambu. It's hard to explain just how much you're missing if you don't have experience with both.
No one's taking away the community right now, but if the business around it is disappearing, that's also a shame.
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 ;-)
How does one lookup these patents? They need more exposure so they can be refuted.
The things that get through the patent office are braindead. Patents are just weaponized legal minefields now. They've totally lost their original intent.
Sovol and Qidi have been cited as counter-examples.
What's your take on this?
Sovol has been flatout copying Prusa part for part for a long time now. Qidi seems to be doing the same with Bambu. Time will tell, but their oss contributions are not at the same level.
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)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Compa...
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.
And despite some high speed train stations being underutilized in the off season, the majority of Chinese cities are connected with blazing fast high speed trains that depart every 15 minutes. Even third tier cities have high speed trains and they are amazing. Now, despite using some underhanded tactics to get Siemens and others to hand over their IP initially, the Chinese high speed rail system is the envy of the world, with orders of magnitude greater coverage, track length, and ridership than Japan. At the same time, domestic innovations allow the newer trains to be a more comfortable, faster, and smoother ride than the Shinkansen, TGV, and ICE. I would take that any day over, say, California High Speed Rail dilly-dallying for decades with nothing to show for it.
The Chinese electric car industry is another one of those that are famously subsidized. People love to point out that some shady companies that have large lots of unsold new vehicles sitting there but written off as being sold via some accounting tricks. While that does happen and is deplorable, the fact is that Chinese EVs have basically leapfrogged the rest of the world in quality, capabilities, and innovation. The Xiaomi SU7 is amazing, for example. But don't despair, some Western companies like Tesla are still able to keep up with the pace of innovation.
Also, all this talk of the Chinese government subsidizing this, and subsidizing that being unfair competition, as though China had a magic money tree to fund everything. In contrast, it is sad that the US government, while having vastly greater tax revenue, fails to fund basically any sort of technological development, and instead wastes all of its enormous amounts of money on inefficiencies (e.g. our spending per capita on healthcare being the highest in the world, but most of it is going to bureaucracy, and we languish with poor life expectancy) while being saddled in debt.
Also in the US, private markets primarily fund advancement, not the government. Private markets generally don't burn money like governments.
And like you said, the capacity and capability is there, but the money gets disappeared into some DoD contractor instead. As well as there being thousands of failed projects, ghost towns, and empty neighborhoods across the US. But the propagandized talking point isn't there. Some wealthy anti-planning capitalists obviously made a successful media push about it. Much like other "enemies" of the US, nearly all reporting is loose on facts and biased negative.
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?
One of these is grossly inefficient compared to the other, despite the final outcome looking similar from some angles.
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.
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.
no it would not be...where is this definition from?
some words you said can be true of course but its clearly working out for them