Fabbaloo

I think it stalls more innovation than it encourages, and generally prevents new entry into a technology space, because the existing players have all the patents that a new player would need to get started. The fewer players you have in a technology space, the less innovation there will be, because “necessity is the mother of invention” and people don’t generally start working on an idea unless they are exposed to the problems of that field. In theory, a non-player could start a research shop and then sell the results of their research in the form of a patent, and this happens sometimes, but just as often the industry decides they don’t want to pay, and leaves the idea dead until the patent expires.

My pet example is the mosquito laser. They invented it at MIT, and showed that it could effectively shoot down mosquitos that pass between posts. The hardware costs were a bit high, but would come down drastically if someone mass-produced custom chips for it. But, the overall idea is patented, and currently held by a “think tank” licensing company, and no product has emerged. I can only assume that it is because their licensing demands are too high. I’d be happy to start my own company to build mosquito lasers, but I’m sure that their licensing costs would kill any profit from it, so I don’t. And so the world is left with no mosquito lasers for more than a decade.

If you want another extreme example, the 3D printer craze was kicked off by the expiration of a patent on…

This is from the prusa blog. RepRap started out originally as open source.

https://blog.prusa3d.com/the-state-of-open-source-in-3d-printing-in-2023_76659/

It's worth noting that in 2022, Prusa had 0 patents assigned to them.

https://www.fabbaloo.com/news/which-3d-print-company-has-the-most-patents

Very impressive, it won't be long or people will be using their webcams to scan 3D avatars of themselves. "The Street" isn't that far off.

the original article:

http://www.fabbaloo.com/2009/11/real-time-3d-scanning-with-webcam.html

Homepage of the guy that made it:

http://mi.eng.cam.ac.uk/~qp202/