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 telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.
I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations.
That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.
(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid.
This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a patent for a very long time would only be possible if it brings gobs of money, end even so, only for a reasonably limited time, because on 15th year the fee would be $10,737,418,240.
The inevitable result of this will be spamming the system with basically-the-same patents every year. This article lists the cost to fight patents at $6,000 to $75,000 for each patent. It’ll be hard for small players to adversarially strike down 3,000 self-similar patents every year which block real innovation.
Yes, the patent office should do a better job of understanding their areas of expertise and prior art. In absence of that, perhaps the patent fees could go to a revenue-neutral system where successfully overturning patents as a private citizen results in getting a share of the total pool of filing and renewal fees.
The cure for the spam problem is to turn the incentives around in the patent examination process. Make it highly adversarial from the go and reward the patent office staff for rejecting applications, with solid argument trails. A good part of that would be to have the applicants submit their researched potential prior art and PROVE that their patent is actually novel. (If they haven't submitted a clearly discoverable piece of prior art and the examiner finds that out, that's an immediate rejection. With extreme prejudice, and preferably multiplied rejection award.)
It would still be gameable (everything is), but it would certainly curb the flood of copycat "X-but-in-domain-Y" patents once the pool of prior art used to reject crummy patents becomes better known and established. The additional pool of rejected applications then also feeds into the prior art foundations.
This is an excellent idea. I would still limit the time though. Also inflation should be taken into account (maybe) not that in 10 years 10M dollars is a chocolate.
I think that the exponent grows so fast that it completely dwarfs normal inflation. If the inflation goes out of hand, Zimbabwe-style, then I won't expect patent enforcement to matter or work either. But well, a term like 15-20 years could be added just in case.
Why not make it so there is a limit to how many patents you can hold? So if you have 10 patents, to register an 11th patent you need to release one of the patents you already have.
That would only protect those variations, not the previously published original version. And if the variations are too obvious you could even challenge their patents with a good chance of overturning them (which brings us back to the issue of the legal system being too slow and expensive)
I feel like patents are nowadays only used for things that would be easy to reverse-engineer or must be made public anyway. You can't recreate any modern technology by looking at patents, from semiconductor manufacturing to food processing.
So if patents have lost their original purpose, I don't see any value left in perpetuating the system.
Not to mention that patents are so (intentionally) difficult to understand that even patented technology is basically trade secrets now anyway. And the useful designs are protected by NDAs.
You can't put a NDA on a Patent. NDAs are basically the modern version of guilds. Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
On the patent itself, no. But on design docs, CAD files, source code, circuit diagrams, etc. you can, and it is common practice to require NDAs for anyone who has access to them. And in some cases copyright law is also used to protect them.
> Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
This is already a reality at many companies, including large ones.
It's much easier to spread information now than in the past. NDAs are slow leaks if you don't keep your employees tightly monitored at all times. Or if they play War Thunder.
> it takes months of lawyers, just to understand if one idea we have is an infringement or not.
Even after that work, you don't know if your idea is infringing. All you have is a prediction on whether it will be found infringing if you are ever sued.
Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?
I know trade secret was much more important. Also the spirit of patents is to allow development by making all public.
But do they?! I’m tired of trying to extract useful information off patents, they are empty of content and full of BS is laywer language. Real important details are kept secret, as long as possible.
The current system is de facto not working properly. I’m not saying is the worst, or I have better ideas, but is clear that the system is being heavily abused in all corners.
It could be lethal if a guild member attempted to share secrets or sell methods to a competitive guild. An example:
"In 1754 the State Inquisitors of Venice learned that a worker at Daniele Miotti's factory had fled abroad with a copy of his master's books. Fearing that he would divulge secrets—especially in Bohemia, where there were important glass factories—they ordered his death."
Source: Zecchin, P., (2025) “Una condanna a morte di dubbia utilità: Sarebbe stato molto grave, per i vetrai muranesi, se il seicentesco ricettario Miotti fosse caduto nelle mani dei Boemi?”, Journal of Glass Studies 66: 7. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jgs.6939
Just how widespread it was for violent and lethal actions to be carried out in pursuit of maintaining guild secrecy, the evidence is murky.
It seems pretty unlikely that guild secrets could be sustained against the modern internet in the absence of any legal protections. One disgruntled employee and your secrets are anonymously contributed to the Wikipedia article on your product.
> Glassmakers were not allowed to leave the island without permission from the government. Leaving without permission, or revealing trade secrets, was punishable by death
>It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.
Nowadays HFT technology is extremely competitive, with firms investing tens of millions in custom harder to achieve nanosecond latency improvements, but all this has happened entirely without patents. As an industry HFT is way less monopolised than tech, suggesting trade secrets alone are enough to achieve growth and competition.
I mean, with limiting the allowed use of force to guard secrets, we are probably nowhere near as at risk for the worst of the past? As you said, the competition to guard secrets could be quite severe, and they were not exactly good at knowing actual leaks of their secrets versus someone else independently arriving at them.
That is, I think having the assumption of independent discovery would go a long way to preventing abuse.
I could see some hazard that small shops can't protect their secrets from partner manufacturers and such. But that is exactly where we are with a lot of stuff today?
That is silly. My point was that we have better law enforcement period. Are we currently perfect? Of course not. But to use that as your argument is, amusingly, a silly premise for an argument.
Yes, that's why the people behind the United whistle blower "suicide" or the Epstein "suicide" we promptly brought to justice /s
Our law enforcement is "better" when it comes to enforcing the law against the lower 99%. When it comes to enforcing it against the kind of people who're actually likely to kill to protect their secrets...good luck
It's a factor, but I also wonder whether the key morpheme there isn't the "mega" in "megacorps". If, say, entity A attempting to enforce IP against entity B had to pay fees proportional to the size ratio (e.g., Megacorp enforcing against Little Joe's Software requires a $1 billion fee from Megacorp), things would be different.
The problem there is identifying the relevant entity, and I think that is the key. And it's not just a problem with IP, it's a problem with all property: it's just too easy for "real" beneficial ownership to be hidden so that penalties and enforcement can be accurately targeted at big market players. A few well-targeted such actions could loosen things up a lot.
Just ignore the size of the plaintiff and make everything depend on the size of the defendant. Is the defendant a huge megacorp? Make every inference against them. Is it a tiny small business? Give them every benefit of the doubt.
Then if megacorp tries to set up a tiny shell company to do their dirty work, you just ignore the shell company and sue the megacorp. Whereas if something is actually a small business, there is no megacorp hiding anywhere behind it.
How do you propose it could ever be otherwise? Under this system it's hard to sue small entities, but under any system it's generally useless to sue small entities except as a harassment mechanism because they don't have any money to pay damages anyway.
If IP laws and patent laws were created to protect right holders from abuse of bigger players on the market, and they are used to actually entrech those players...
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.
---
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.
> - 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,
That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking risk so they need a risk premium.
The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
The general principle is inverting who has power. It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money whose primary business of redistributing money and taking a cut.
If they are allowed to ask for something, they will and because they have more power, they are able to pressure people into unfavorable deals. They don't need your band, there's plenty of others who will take the deal. But you need their money or someone else's but that somebody else will offer similar terms, unless those exploitative terms are illegal because people united against parasitism.
> It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money
I don't like the conclusion, but I've convinced myself that curating and selecting what is worth doing is actually the real work. Picking where the bridge is to go is more important than building it. So allocating money is the important work. It feels icky to me... but also inescapable.
How would people with money and no artistic talent know? If we're not talking about art but some other kind of productive work - again - money does not qualify them. It gives them the power to decide, it probably lets them cultivate a skill for knowing which investments are gonna make money and which are gonna lose it. But it does not qualify them to decide what is beneficial for others.
As for the analogy - who picks where it gets built? It better be an engineer. And just look at the mounf of work done by the engineer, the builders and some suit who rubber stamps it. Work and skill is what should be rewarded, not having money.
You could have a system that limits sale of IP to clearly defined capitalization, I.E. instead of "You own this IP for 20 years and get x% of profits in return for funding/publishing and giving my y% of profits" it could be "In return for funding/publishing in the next 5 years, you get x% of profits and I get y% of profits, but I still own my IP and your rights expire after a short period of not publishing.
AFAIK that's actually standard for writers: publishers usually license the IP for a period for a prescribed royalty blend and for publishing, and after a certain amount of time or if they don't publish the rights revert, and international/audio/digital rights are negotiated separately.
There's an argument for "What if I don't want to deal with capitalizing on this whatsoever and just want to sell it for a cash payment now because I literally don't want that to be my job," but even then there should probably be a minimum royalty along with the lump sum to protect against exploitation.
>> That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.
> It should.
Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income.
Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.
Why shouldn’t a band be permitted to do something similar, getting money now in exchange for future income and, at the same time, transferring the risk of their future product being a flop to a third party?
>Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income
I'm against those as well. Buy stuff after you can afford it.
>Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.
I'm against insurance companies too. Have a public insurance fund instead.
Britain was also putting into place laws/regulations/policies requiring that the U.S. purchase from British manufacturers rather than developing native production --- there's a reason why the first printing press in North America was in Mexico.
Copyright/patents/laws are just tools. They can be used for both good and evil.
The early US had pro-social goals such as democracy or freedom. And yes, they used slaves because there are no good guys in history or politics, there's various shades of bad.
Current China has anti-social goals such as total control of the population through technological means and expansion by conquest - see them harassing the legitimate government of all of Chine in Taiwan constantly with the military or trying to sink Philipino fishing boats with their warships (two crashed into each other recently). It is also currently committing genocide through both murder and sterilization.
So yeah, I am totally for considering them a parasite and treating them as such.
Who knows? Votes should be public, otherwise this is an easy way to make opinions less visible without having to provide any justification.
Sometimes very similar comments in favor of protecting producers get upvotes on one post and downvotes on another. I also started seeing a pattern - even if a particular comment ends up downvoted in the end, there's usually a few upvotes first, sometimes with comments, then downvotes quickly to get it negative and there's never any comments justifying it and few if any comments after it gets negative. This indicates downvoting works well to silence the discussion.
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.
* You are given an exclusive right to exploit a work, for enough time to make it worth your while.
* Everyone gets the work in the end.
We're not succeeding at this. The terms are a little too short for biotech. They're wayyyyy too long for software. The barriers to entry to get and enforce IP are too large for small businesses. But it's also too easy to figure it all out and generate tons of fake IPR to harass real business with.
People who aren't rich already don't have any intellectual property anyway. The idea of nobody having them seems inherently more suitable insofar as someone could as it stands just ignore your property anyway with the primary difference in this hypothetical reality that instead of being able to copy you AND shut you down they just copy you.
Depending on what your your personal net worth percentile threshold is for the word "rich," there are tons of open source software authors who own intellectual property, release it under permissive licenses, and are not rich.
Intellectual property isn't some sort of elite, elusive thing. Anyone can make it.
Maybe the real problem is that easy low-hanging-fruit inventions attainable by individuals in the garage are long gone, and are now so capital intensive that it doesn't make sense to keep the system in hopes of protecting this fictional small inventor.
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.
> There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.
It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux.
The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect.
Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).
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.
Any company that tried to bring a lawsuit for patent infringement would potentially face dozens of suits for their own infringement, a kind of legal mutually assured destruction.
Then companies with deep pockets can reapply, while individuals who get rejected due to mistakes won't be able to afford it.
The problem is the size difference between the applicants, and just saying "charge by their income" wouldn't help when a shell company with no income applies.
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.
Magna Carta didn't make us a just society, it was the start of making us a just society.
Being a just society is not a boolean. We never got 100% there. Nor is it along a single dimension -- you could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white.
> could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white
Well that is certainly one take. I really don't see how you can argue that position in good faith but I won't spend energy to refute it since you didn't actually argue it at all beyond making the supposition.
> I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
Ahahaha, this is the most anglocentric thing I've heard in a while. That's not remotely the case, and it's certainly not something an historian would say.
"Justice" is not a scalar. It is a matrix, at best.
In some parts of America, and in some aspects, "justice" was still clearly increasing up until the second Trump presidency. This is especially true for the treatment of various marginalized groups (especially queer people, where it's quite obvious that "justice" for them increased markedly with the Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015, and continued to improve in many ways after that).
In other areas and ways, it peaked before 9/11 and has dropped a great deal since.
In still others, it's been on a long slow decline since some time in the latter part of the 20th century.
And this is part of why some people are so angry these days: they see "justice" decreasing for them, while it increases for other people—including some of the people they've always considered to be beneath them—and they wrongly conclude that it's a zero-sum game, and they need to reduce justice for those other people in order to bring it back for them.
Probably 50s-70s? The golden age of capitalism oddly enough. Among other things taxation maintained a more even wealth distribution during this time in many western countries. Combined with a record large generation that had few children and parents that dies in wars (almost everyone working), this lead to a surplus. When there is a surplus the overlords are generous. Now that generation is old and dependent on the handful of children they had. There is no longer a surplus. There is hope that the technologies we are creating could bring enough productivity gains to return to surplus conditions, but the population decline that will have to overcome is extreme. IP laws aren't encouraging these productivity gains like we need them to, so we should ignore them. The west deciding to ignore chinese IP won't be the thing that starts the war, and it isn't like china ever respected the IP of the west. We should be buying up all the tooling we need to painfully bootstrap automated manufacturing ourselves and reverse engineer it.
Just going off my own experience. While violent crime has diminished, other crimes are going on in plain sight with prudence from the courts. Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there. I remember when "debtor's prison" was illegal. Now it's not. So you can brush it under a rug, claim things are better, claim we are more just than we used to be, but I never claimed that we ever were 100% just. Only that we used to be more just than we are today.
They are. Debtors prison is illegal with one exception - if you already went to prison due to a crime and then completed your sentence, many states will charge you for the full cost of your prison stay (often upwards of thousands of dollars). And since a lot of sentences involve some amount of parole after the prison sentence, you’ll be sent back to prison under a parole violation if you fail to pay back the fees by the due date.
It's the only way to create career criminals now... The private prisons need career criminals to justify their existence. Career criminals become career criminals because they can't earn their way to an honest living (outside of mental health issues) because of the debts they owe. It's a vicious cycle. They want repeat offender by the time they turn 24. Statistically, that means they'll be in and out of the system for life.
> Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there.
"I hereby inform you under powers entrusted to me under Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order Number 438476, that Mr. Buttle, Archibald, residing at 412 North Tower, Shangri La Towers, has been invited to assist the Ministry of Information with certain enquiries, the nature of which may be ascertained on completion of application form BZ/ST/486/C fourteen days within this date, and that he is liable to certain obligations as specified in Council Order 173497, including financial restitutions which may or may not be incurred if Information Retrieval procedures beyond those incorporated in Article 7 subsections 8, 10 & 32 are required to elicit information leading to permanent arrest notification of which will he served with the time period of 5 working days as stipulated by law. In that instance the detainee will be debited without further notice through central banking procedures without prejudice until and unless at such a time when re-imbursement procedures may be instituted by you or third parties on completion of a re-imbursement form RB/CZ/907/X..."
Arguably justice in general started declining with the invention of the typewriter, and injustice accelerated with the invention of the word processor and will get far worse with LLMs. The cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law. Personally I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.
> I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.
I could really get behind this sort of rate-limiting. It would also make the thinktank-written legislation a little less appealing for the lawmakers, as they'd still need to write everything out.
Implicitly, the argument is that, when "cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law," justice for litigants declined when sheer access to the necessary legal funds and time began to outweigh other costs and benefits as a factor in determining pursuit of justice. Maybe it's not self-evident, but I don't think direct quantifiable evidence of justice is necessarily available, so what qualitative evidence would be capable of confirming support?
My counterargument would be that before the typewriter literacy rates were much worse than they are now. So while it's true that laws were simpler, interpreting those laws was still out of reach for many at the bottom of the economic ladder. It would be interesting to try to compare legal complexity with the percentage of society that has a sufficient reading comprehension to meaningfully interact with those laws across various eras.
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.
That's a whole other can of worms... For them, it's been more like 500 years. The user danaris said it best I think, it depends on who you are. While some groups have had their justice increased, others have seen theirs decrease.
> 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 don't even care much about cost, but the Bambu Lab printers are simply better. I have been selling my Prusas (MK3S+ and XL), because they are just too much of a hassle. Prusa has fallen behind in R&D, the Bambu Lab printers work better, are more automated, have more nicely engineered features (having to babysit my XL and wipe the dripping filament off the print heads was such a disappointment).
And yes, I have had to fix both brands. The repairability of the Prusa is largely a myth, you still need to order replacement parts from Prusa, just as with other brands.
It cannot be overstated how critical good defaults and “just works” are for any kind of mass-market product.
Knobs and toggles to allow enthusiasts to dial in everything perfectly aren’t a bad thing. You don’t need make your product a featureless orb. That said, users shouldn’t need to tinker around with any of them to get up and running or for basic use.
This is where Bambu excels. More involved printers are simply not interesting for many people outside of the 3D printing sphere, even if they’d become enthusiasts after buying a printer. They need a “gateway drug” of a printer that’s dead simple to use and get good results out of to even consider buying one. After that they might go down the rabbithole and seek out more technical options, but jumping straight to tinkerville is just too far of a leap for most.
I got into 3D printing a year ago and decided on the Bambu. I started with a P1P to see if I'd like it, got an AMS, got an enclosure in the span of about 9 months. Would I have saved money if I got all of that at once? Of course. But I didn't know if I'd like 3D printing. The P1P worked so well and so easily, it was a "gateway" and did suck me in.
Prusa is good enough for me. I owned both Bambu and Prusa latest generation printers. Both products got their shares of downtime so from my perspective either are pretty interchangable.
Case in point, the AMS. The Bambu system is so clean. It sits on top of the printer even if you don't have an enclosure. The Prusa system requires you to lay the spools out on runners on the table, taking up a ton of desk space.
The point is not that Prusas need constant repair. The point is that they are reliable workhorses and repairable and usually also long-term-upgradeable.
> For many things Prusa printers produce higher quality prints.
I have yet to have this happen, despite a lot of trying. The Bambu just works and the results are better. The Prusa requires constant recalibration and tuning, and still produces an inferior looking product. I'd love to be proven wrong here.
It's probably the case that somebody with a ton of experience can squeeze better results out of a Prusa ... but that kind of proves my point.
It makes a big difference if you're painting the prints - things that look okay out of the printer will turn into a disaster once paint brings out all the details.
People are getting great quality out of the Bambus now - basically a slight tier below Resin, without any of the health issues that require PPE.
(Old video, state of the art has advanced since. Also, the issue with his other printer turned out to be a simple maintenance item (dirty pulley) the video maker skipped over in Bambu's basic troubleshooting guide.)
You’re 2 essentially 2 versions behind. The Core One is basically equivalent to the X1C and it’s the same price. $300 cheaper if you buy the kit instead of the assembled version.
Cool, but that's not why people buy things. I don't buy a bike for the pleasure of getting to repair it when I inevitably eat shit on a gravel road.
While you're busy ordering parts for your Prusa and taking it apart, people just buy another A1 or P1P for basically nothing. While you're spending 5 hours trying to stabilise your printing plate and ensuring your nozzle isn't vomiting out super melted <weird filament you got>, the bambulabs go haha printing goes brrr thanks for feeding me shale oil it'll work great. If you're 3d printing enough that your printer breaks, you are 100% making enough money to just eat the costs of another printer.
Are you confusing Prusa with older Enders? If you buy assembled, they just work like any other modern printer. In fact they're known for long-term reliability. If there's any detraction, it's on the basis of printing speed, price, and availability, but not on fragility.
You don't care how expensive and complicated it is to repair and maintain your mountain bike (especially if you plan to eat gravel a lot)? And your take on machines is that you better throw away a bunch of working 3D printers and replace them instead of upgrading the old ones and adding new ones as needed? Hope you have a lot of money to burn in your personal and business life. ;)
> You don't care how expensive and complicated it is to repair and maintain your mountain bike (especially if you plan to eat gravel a lot)?
I have 3 bicycles at the moment and use one as my main way of buying groceries.
My ideal bicycle ownership experience is: I change the brake fluid every few years, I spray the chain whenever I remember to, I change tires and brake pads when they wear out, and I never, ever have to do any other maintenance.
I don't care about the bicycle itself, I care about what the bicycle lets me do.
What's your point? As you basically yourself, there is a need for a bit of maintenance on machinery because it's not really possible to design that away completely. That is, unsurprisingly, the case with bikes, Prusas, Bambus and pretty much all other machines.
Another user made the point: maybe you care about 3D printERS. The vast majority of people care about the printed end result, and buying more printers in the case of massive failure (which is already rare) makes more sense. If you're 3D printing for fun at home, a Bambu will basically never break.
Spending 3 days tracking down the parts for a Prusa, taking it apart, fixing it, realising some settings have gone to shit, fixing it? I hope you have a lot of time to burn in your personal and business life :)
As mentioned in my parent comment, I've made purchase decisions for FDM desktop printers since before Prusa (as a company and product) was around and I've been responsible for 3D printers from a lot of different manufacturers over the years. I'm not attached to any particular company or anything like that.
If I needed more "quality" (in the sense of less visible layer lines) than what comes out of a modern Bambu, Prusa (or some other modern FDM printers), I would use another manufacturing process instead of FDM printing. And no idea where you are in the world but I'm in Europe where I can get Prusa parts from different vendors very quickly and reliably and most of them (including Prusa themselves) have processes in place for B2B and public sector transactions which can be important for professional life as well.
Again: I'm not saying that Bambu printers are not very good in many ways. As I said in my parent comment: I have one. Doesn't change my other points.
Okay, but that is a complete misrepresentation of Prusa machines. You can buy a Prusa today and it'll spit out prints like any other modern printer. And this has been the case for a long time now. Only a small minority of people actually tinker with their machines. It seem like you're attacking a complete projection.
> 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.
Then maybe don’t phrase it like this. And also acknowledge that it’s a nonsense comparison. People that don’t know Prusa model numbers will just assume the OP is talking about comparable products.
“I really want to like Macs, but the new Lenovo I got for work is better and costs half as much as the 5 year old Mac I have in my basement. Why is the west so incompetent?”
Let me clarify. I paid $325 for a used MK3S+ and that seems to be the going rate. The printers at the Makerspace are A1 and A1 minis. The former cost $399 or less on sale, and the latter definitely under $300 always. So yes, the comparison seems fair.
1. You said the Bambu costs half as much when it actually costs more. $399 vs $325
2. I wouldn’t pay more than $200 for a MK3S+ because it’s now 4 generations out of date. Used markets are often overpriced for rapidly advancing technology because most sellers are basing their pricing on what they paid originally not what the item is worth today.
Many times it’s just not worth the hassle for people to sell for what they are actually going to get, so you see a ton of overpriced items just sitting there not selling.
But also I do care about ease of use. I imagine that someone who wants to run their printer for many thousands of hours or who is going to do a lot of tinkering might pay more for a used Prusa than I would.
If we’re talking new comparable printers out today. The Core One and the X1C. They have very similar print quality. The Prusa is $50 cheaper, and the Prusa has many additional benefits.
Chinese government subsidies aside, mass produced 3D printers are always going to enjoy the economies of scale that are difficult to replicate with kits. Prusa printers are awesome pieces of engineering, but sometimes you can just get equally good results for a fraction of the price, in a much more user-friendly "plug and play" fashion, once you have a million of them rolling out of a factory instead of 10,000 kits full of 3D printed parts.
I thought I could fix AMS mainboard by re-soldering connectors, so reached out to support and they helped me find which connectors I needed to buy. Unfortunately, there was more damage, that could be fixed by re-soldering them, so I simply replaced the mainboard and it was easy.
I get the feeling that it is not actually the tech involved in the printers that distinguishes Bambu from Prusa, I think it's more about the supply chain and the distribution network. If I go to Prusa right now to order a core one printer from the US it tells me this:
Estimated lead time 1–2 weeks
That means it's not even going to ship, from Europe, until then... And guess what? The shipping can range anywhere from 60$ 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.
You could also buy from PrintedSolid, which is a US company that Prusa bought. Looks like they have a free shipping deal, but the lead time is similar for the Core One. Maybe when they catch up with demand, they’ll keep it in stock in the US? I don’t see a lead time for the Mk4.
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 always think it is amusing that some people make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese can only make cheap crap(forgetting all their cell phones and apple laptops come from there).
The American market only wants to buy cheap crap so that is what is made and sent. Usually though the skills involved in making something cut-rate are just as applicable to making something top notch.
American manufacturing skills have atrophied as it has moved to a service economy while as you say the Chinese have been boosting manufacturing for 30 years.
I was thinking a snarky thought reading another comment in the chain: "DJI and Anker aren't Chinese brands, because they're good and they have brand reputation".
"Chinese" in my ape brain is Harbor Freight junk, or cheap houseware from Amazon with names like "KRLFOCGY".
Honestly, even harbor freight has some pretty good tools these days. They do have disposable level crap, but even one level above that is quite serviceable.
One thing I've noticed and have also seen on Project Farm YT tool reviews is that Harbor Freight tiers tend to be by country: lowest end is often from mainland China but the next higher tier is from Taiwan.
I think it makes more sense to separate "cheap" from "crap". US/EU never valued East Asian labor at equal value. Rather than complaining, East Asia just "let them have it" and it wrecked industrial base for both in the long run.
I mean, it doesn't make sense that typical guidance units for missiles are more expensive than DJI drones. Everyone thinks Chinese products got a little more expensive lately, so they must have quit doing cheap part of cheap and crap, and it's just my gut feeling, but, I would be not so sure about that.
Or maybe just better accounting for the total lifecycle and disposal of products. If a company had to pay a bond to cover the long term impact of their shit products I bet we'd see higher quality goods.
It's very common to have multiple chinese brands competing against each other, throwing out better products every year... with western companies maybe having one or two products.
See something like Roomba vs. Xiaomi/Roborock/Deebot/Ecovacs/etc.
This is a real example how western IP stagnates western economy and it's making it not competitive - the IP law makes it easy for incumbents to kill of iteration and competition.
It shouldn't be a surprise to people that quality isn't there if you buy a nameless thing at the cheapest possible price, regardless of where it's made.
On the other hand, China has major brands in many markets. DJI drones, Anker chargers and cords, Lenovo computers, Polestar cars. TCL TVs and Haier appliances (which I believe also owns the GE consumer brand) are also very common. Roborock vacuums seem to be considered a better value than Roomba now.
It's an interesting counterpoint to the old cliche about paying for brands. Clearly buying on price alone is foolish, as is not considering the reputation of the maker of a product.
It's the exact same thing that happened with Japanese cars. Believe it or not, Japanese autos used to be considered cheap junk in the 70s and early 80s.
Same thing with Germany in the 19th century: "inferior copies of English designs".
Those who don't know history will be forced to repeat past mistakes.
I've recently been putting together a large aquarium build for the first time in ~15 years, and it's really shocking how good and how cheap the Chinese stuff is now. Of particular note is lighting, where the price/W on non-Chinese equipment is 4-10x the Chinese equivalent.
Recently I've bought a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress and its box and manual are 100% in Chinese. Google Translate took care of it.
Why did I buy a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress? It looks like all western brands decided to keep using NiMH batteries on their designs, and I really don't like my trimmers dying in the middle of a cut and me, now with a half-shaved beard, having to wait 12 hours for it to recharge. Xiaomi did something very revolutionary: used a Li-Ion battery.
Interesting. I never cared about what my Japanese beard trimmer uses as battery, because whenever it dies on me (which is long after prominently lighting a red LED), it works instantly fine connected to the wall to let me finish my cut, and can take however long it wants to recharge after that ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
You see, some Philips MBA decided to pinch 0.0001 pennies and forgo installing a red LED to warn the user the battery is drained, and a diode to allow it to run from the wall.
It's already here. All the best cheap microcontrollers have datasheets written purely in Chinese. Most Westerners don't use them because the datasheets are written purely in Chinese, and therefore, Western products with cheap microcontrollers use inferior ones.
I myself have been preparing for that day, learning simplified Mandarin and trying to expose myself to Chinese online presence. :)
I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare, but they are getting closer, and if that ever properly happens, I'm quite ready, and if not, at least I get a whole new language out of it and a better understanding of a huge culture that felt a lot more out of reach before.
For context, I'm from Russia, so maybe it's easier for me to trade one foreign hegemony for another than for many others..
> I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare
Is that adequately measured from the English side of the internet? I honestly don't know. I don't participate in Chinese technology communities online and have zero basis to measure any amount of tech mindshare that it has. I do know that a number of English based tech forums are entirely dependent on a select few microcontrollers for their builds. Surely on the Chinese side of things there are discussions going on about who is building the next cheapest microcontrollers and how they achieve it?
I do know that absolutely nothing that we have in the "West" can compare to what hardware hackers can accomplish in Shenzhen thanks to the overwhelming amount of electronics knowledge and availability in the area. I have to wonder how much of that mindshare "we" actually have.
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.
Military and government buy locally produced things, for a good reason. This allows some industries to re-shore.
Retail customers sometimes buy something not based on price and quality alone, but due to fashion and other such considerations. This works, but only when people have enough discretionary income to spend on such self-expression. Quite many people can't afford the luxury.
Great, so your country will probably suffer inflation. Otherwise, your neighboring country can spend the same amount to get 10x more resources (think GPUs).
> 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.
I was thinking along the lines of, for example, a mobile phone company that controls the worlds most popular open source smart phone operating system. In theory, since they are guiding the development of the mobile OS, they should be the first to be able to release hardware that takes advantage of the newest versions of the software. They could tailor their hardware to perfectly fit the future of the software.
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
> Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
Note that this has been the reality of countries in the Third World who aligned themselves with the US, a foreign power whose interests were misaligned with theirs.
The US is now having a taste of their own medicine.
There is no misaligned goal. China isn’t out to destroy the US.
It’s more jealousy of being overpowered. It’s sad but I think this is ultimately the brutal truth we have to accept. There’s no other logical outlook on this. Literally if left to its own devices China isn’t interested in the war.
The US is out to do everything to stop Chinas ascendency to become the new world power. And of course both sides as a result will increase military presence but neither side wants to engage in war.
Why have they built innovative Taiwan invasion barges if they do not want war?
Building weapons to sink American carriers and boats and having a limited nuclear arsenal can be seen as trying to prevent the US from being able to blockade China from it's food and energy imports.
But there is no possible way to wave away the literal Taiwan invasion barges and the planning they signal. That's not something you build unless you plan on invading your island neighbor.
They want Taiwan. That's for sure. But they don't want war. War is a last resort action they will go to, to get Taiwan.
But war with the US? They don't want it and are trying to avoid it at all costs.
Taiwan is none of the US's business right? The war here is in actuality really just the US starting it. The US in the end will have to make a choice here. Do we fuck with China and Taiwan or do we not?
So in short. They want Taiwan. War can happen because the US is trying to start war. So the barges you see are in preperation for that.
Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country".
Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought.
>Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country".
From Chinas point of view it's not another sovereign country. But from the US pov, it's a pawn they can use to fuck with China as much as possible to stop the ascendency to power. Also the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. They never fucking did.
>Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought.
Taiwan was never an ally. I'm Taiwanese. I know. The USA doesn't give a flying fuck about Taiwan. Like I said the UN and the US never recognized Taiwan as a sovereign country and the US has NOT promised to back Taiwan in the event of a take over.
Two things America cares about: Technology and Power. So right now you're busy extracting OUR technology by making us build unprofitable chip factories on your soil AND you're refusing to allow China to have that technology as well. It is WELL KNOWN among taiwanese people that the US factories are fucking useless from a profit perspective.
Either way. War is not possible. If China and the US go to war, rest assured if the China starts losing, they're going to prevent loss by slaughtering everyone in DC with a nuclear bomb. The losing country in it's desperation will turn to nukes. Even the US can do that. Imagine Chinese troops at the doorstep of the whitehouse, what will trump do? Nuke half of China that's what.
So war technically won't happen. Nobody in actuallity wants it. It's all sabre rattling.
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.
> and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want
Those nations that were close allies of the US before 2025 are watching American society "rug pull" itself straight to hell right now with little to no effort at all from China.
> Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything.
I'm sorry, it's very hard to take this sort of concern seriously.
The express goal of US's take on neoliberalism was to dump all manufacturing onto countries like China while abusing IP to prevent anyone else, China included, from ever being able to compete.
Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul?
The US needs to put on their big boy pants and figure out ways to compete in the same terms that everyone else had to endure, just like the whole world was forced to learn how to deal with that. If someone else has the IP you need, pay them. Or do you honestly expect that arbitrary rules are only acceptable if they clearly benefit you alone?
> Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul?
I don’t know about the person you replied to, but I think a lot of us have watched US factories closing down and moving to other counties in the last couple decades and it’s just been a constantly disappointing train wreck. Auto manufacturing moving to Mexico and Canada, various factories shutting down because they can’t compete with foreign prices or volume, and politicians who happily didn’t care beyond lip service - the only reason it matters to any politician now is because trump brought attention to it (though accidentally) with the stupid tariff business.
The people who actually could’ve done something have sat here for the last few decades and been largely inactive other than giving deals to Big Tech to open data centers while making empty promises about “bringing jobs back” because no one was offering the kind of kickbacks that Bezos and Musk can throw around, and now they’re only making any stink because it looks better than not.
Sounds like modern neoliberalism, and it's proponents, are the big mistake here to me, and those shortsighted enough to offshore work of all sorts to countries that aren't close allies should get a big spanking.
Regardless of whether or not it's "fair" or "right" (not that our adversaries do any more than lip service to those concepts anyways), we've got to do something rather than just lay down and take it. If nothing else, there are a lot of people that need to answer as to why if you want all these labor and environmental laws and so on, why it's ok to buy and do things somewhere that's not aligned with those. If you wouldn't subject you and yours to something, it should be illegal to cheat and make someone else do it. "Comparative advantage" is bullshit excuses to offload labor and environmental abuse because it's poor vulnerable brown people somewhere else and I need my cheap shit now.
> 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.
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)
Probably more that IP laws and their practical implementation need to be fixed. I have a hard time seeing how what you suggest won't inevitably benefit big, powerful, consolidated and influential players at the expense of the small, inovative ones, further slowing down the pace of innovation. Of course an even more obvious "fix" would be to outlaw "big, powerful, consolidated and influential players", oh, wait!
Many Chinese CEO's are graduates of Western business schools. They learnt the Holy American Dao of weaponizing IP and patent law from established US business culture.
Capitalism, at least the American version of it, has a rich history of ignoring property rights, labor laws and ethics, regulations, etc. If anything, China has, and is, out-Westernizing the Western countries.
I don't think China is necessarily being excused, but even immoral actions can draw admiration, due to the sheer complexity and brazeness, especially considering that on paper, the groups these actions are being done to are not groups of toddlers, they're equality aggressive countries themselves, historically.
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.
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
Do you genuinely believe dictator-for-life\\esc\\esc president Xi Jinping is picking projects personally?
And if the problem is just efficiency, that’s not really a moral failing. It’s just an optimization issue.
I’m not defending the chinese system because i think it’s good - i’m saying it’s not substantially different from the american system. A group of rich oligarchs and a couple semi-randomly selected smart+lucky sociopaths get to pick industries that get flooded with cash based on how much money they think they will make or if they will stroke their ego - not based on if they will be good for the planet or the people on it.
I’d actually prefer a world where anybody who wanted to start a business was given a shot and money to make it happen based on if people want to work on it. Not blessed oligarchs, but the actual people who will build the thing or use the thing.
Not only are US VCs dumping billions in shitty Bluetooth connected dog collars and other kinds of crap, apparently according to you because that's "what the market wants", it's also an incredibly stupid reading of how the Chinese government works.
They target specific industries that are important, according to them, like solar panels, batteries, cars, etc. They then dump billions into a bunch of companies, and see which ones come out alive and on top.
As it stands, it's been pretty accurate for many things, and has made them market leaders on many, many things. But sure, jerk off the VC model, after all YC thinks the market wants... AIs and ERPs. Woo.
I'm failing to see where our descriptions diverge. You aren't acknowledging is that China has unbelievable waste and crushing debt from it (provincial debt, because they typically finance these projects).
Of course the system is great for getting projects build and advancing. China has a massive workforce to fund it's money hose. It's awful for doing it efficiently, because there is no incentive to be efficient when you never have to pay the creditor back.
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.
I'm not sure "economic incentives" are what most people classify as a "planned economy", unless you want to take the broadest, most expansive possible understanding of that term. All Western nations would have planned economies under such a definition given the existence of tax incentives and such.
"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?
That's how planned economies worked under "proper" communism in the Soviet Union or pre-Deng and how we ended up with stories about factories only baking giant screws to meet weight quotas to the switch to tiny screws to meet quantity quotas while no medium-sized screws people actually needed for produced.
Two distinct words night be useful to distinguish between planned without any market feedback and heavy industrial policy like we see in China now. In fact the CCP recently voiced their impatience with Cuba refusing to introduce market-oriented reforms.
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.
"There are some pretty big cracks underneath the surface"
they are just as vulnerable as western counterpart has, I can assure you that just media narrative that make it overblown. Yes western can sanction them and hurt them but they also hurt western economy in the process
I'm not referring to sanctions or tariffs. I'm referring to inefficient resource allocation, debt, unsustainably low margins, companies not making any profit, etc.
Not IP related, but I built a Voron printer a while ago, which is sort of the last word in DIY printers. It's not so much a printer as a parts list and set of instructions, but something that's not lost on me is that most of the core components are Chinese parts.
I don't just mean screws and bearings (though they are too), you might install a board like this [0] which is a Chinese designed board I'd describe as open-ish. You get the firmware and schematics, but not a BOM or board layout. But that doesn't really matter, because nobody is going to make this board themselves anyways, you're going to buy it assembled, from China. There are other boards, but they are more expensive.
The majority of Voron builds use Chinese hotends. There are a lot of custom "for Voron" kits and components being made and sold there. Can you find a PEI-coated spring steel bed that isn't made in China? So while it's definitely more open than a Bambu printer, it's not really any less dependent on China.
I guess it would be technically possible to do a "no China" build, which would be an interesting (but expensive) project.
I bought my Voron Trident as a kit (from a Chinese company) and it is wonderful. As you say, there is an almost complete dependence on components made in China, but at least I can swap out / fix / upgrade parts as much as I like. I've also been able to make use of the schematics on the controller boards to troubleshoot issues myself and other people were having.
Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is "mine" and I don't need to worry about some company suddenly taking features and capabilities out from under my feet as Bambu has done. For anyone that feels strongly about this kind of thing, dive in and build a Voron.
Agreed! I love my Trident. This is the best hobby I have taken up in a long time. So fulfilling. Especially now that I'm learning freecad. Getting started can be expensive. There is an awesome community on discord that loves to help, and there are lots of small businesses that sell every part you can think of, custom mods from github, and if you email them they will respond promptly and personally. 10/10
+1 for FreeCAD. It has come a long way with the release of 1.0 Yeah it is still well behind the big players, but it can do what I need it to do as a hobbyist and there are lots of nice improvements like the new transform tool in the weekly releases. Some of the folks on the FreeCAD Discord actually suggest treating FreeCAD as a rolling release and using the weeklies rather than sit on 1.0 until 1.1 comes out.
I also appreciate those folks that model stuff in FreeCAD and share their models along with the .stl files on Thingiverse or Printables. It is really a good way to discover new ways of using the program.
I agree, we have Bambus at work, and they are an outright pain to fix compared to my Voron. And things do break. On our new H2D, we had some filment get jammed in the extruder. Fixing it basically entails taking the entire front of the toolhead apart, dealing with fragile custom-pcb ribbon cables, and trying to not get the grease from the greasy parts on the other parts.
On the Vorons, everything is just behind an M3 screw or ten.
I was thinking the same but got a prusa kit instead. Have you use or built a prusa before - how do they compare? At some point I’ll want two printers and was thinking a voron or similar would be perfect because I could print parts for it now.
I think the beauty of voron is that if you lost access to Chinese parts tomorrow you could source replacements elsewhere. Some would be difficult at first, like PCBs, but most like stepper motors are commodity parts that are easily replaced
Their business model might be dead, I don't know. But the latest Prusa printers are as far as I know not really open - I can't download the schematics for free and make a clone, can I? And also a truely open schematic that I could download that way wouldn't be affected by patents, as long as I'm not selling it. Granted, commercial development with open core might be in trouble.
But first, that is not a technical nor a business problem, that sounds like a political problem. Prusa is literally the leading european name in the 3D-printing industry. Surely they can get an appointment with some government officials, who are concerned about manufacturing capabilities and future technologies - who pull some strings, and then every patent clerk will receive a memo to double check the relevant patents when someone tries to register them.
Second, Chinese patents have a different weight than EU/US patents. As he writes, they are a dime a dozen. Probably not worth caring about, unless they are targeting the Chinese market. And if they are, the best defense would probably to register some patents their themselves.
China won’t enforce the patent of a foreign company against a domestic one. If anything, filing a Chinese patent assists copying and clones, because there’s less reverse engineering to do.
If the US cared about remaining competitive with China, the government would attack this. Example approaches:
a) Smallish hammer: disallow priority based on Chinese patents.
b) Big hammer: if anyone wants to manufacture anything in the US and sell to the US market, give an automatic patent workaround. For example, there could be compulsory licensing, at enforced and genuinely reasonable prices, for all patents, foreign and domestic. If someone wanted to build an SLS printer or an e-ink display here ten years ago, they should have been allowed to while paying a small amount (small enough that the whole enterprise remained profitable) to the respective patent holders. Submarine patents should be completely inapplicable: if I opt to buy compulsory licenses, there should be a limited period for any patent holders to announce themselves, and then the patent holders could fight over the (capped) royalties while I continue to manufacture and sell the product.
c) b, with the system built in a way that works for open source too. I should be able to publish open source things with zero risk regardless of patents. I should be able to sell them and other people should be able to deploy them on their own under terms like (b) that make it economical to do so.
Requiring an annual patent maintenance tax proportional to pre-declared fair licensing fee will ensure fairness for everyone. Including foreign patents. So whichever jurisdiction, patent holders want to retain the rights, can pay the tax annually. We can even come up with a public domain threshold as well. If 1000 people / company paid your pre-declared licensing fee, it becomes public domain. And no more per device license fee. 1 Patent, 1 Fee, 1 Annual Tax.
That being said, I have doubts anything will change because I have a feeling that this system is continuing to "work as designed".
These failings are exploitable and since the US government is somewhat bought and paid for, this is how it works. The intent might be to keep it this way.
First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.
The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
I recall reading 10+ years ago that Chinese economists were calling for stronger IP laws in China to accelerate their technical progress. Maybe the government listened.
This matches the economic literature [1] about the historical development of other industrialized nations as well, including the US. The theory is: when a country is starting to industrialize, they prefer weak IP rights to reduce friction in copying and learning rapidly ("knowledge diffusion".) However, when their industries mature, develop a strong technical base, and start competing by pushing the state of the art through their own inventions, they tend to prefer strong IP rights to protect their investments in R&D.
I do think there needs to be reforms about non-practicing entities holding large patent portfolios. Maybe we should have some kind of FRAND (or FRAND-like) requirements for their portfolios.
I gave the e-ink example quite intentionally. The patents were held by a practicing entity. You could buy their mediocre implementation of their excellent underlying invention at an outrageous price and probably not with the specs you wanted.
I’m all for rewarding inventors like this for their inventions. I do not think that the reward should include any sort of ability to stifle use and further development of the invention.
The law should make it possible to build, sell, and profit from a better e-ink product at a lower price. The law should make it possible to sell things that use H.265 at a credible price without needing to be involved in the mess of figuring out who owns what patent. If patent holders, practicing or otherwise, want to sue each other, fine, but I don’t think there should be any requirement for the companies building and selling products to be parties to those legal messes at all.
As far as I know, radio in the US actually mostly works this way. To broadcast a copyrighted song, you pay a fee, and that’s it.
A genuine Question. Is open hardware even possible at some point? The advances in quality and speed are nothing short but impressive. I started 3d printing stuff in my basement one year ago (Ender V3 Plus). With the quality and speed improvements, comes technology which gets more complex every year. Companies spend millions to archive this. Why would they share it? I remember building drones in my basement (still on my wall) with open source software on the flight controllers. Now I can get a drone from DJI for less money with more features, in a smaller from factor, longer flight time, pre build and under 249g. Ofc this comes at the cost of repairability, control and trust. However I can still buy the hardware I used years ago. If I wanted to, I can build a drone by myself. I guess the same will happen to 3d printers.
It already is. And its been chaotic and amazing at the same time.
We already have open source:
5DoF 3d printers with slicers
Fixed wing and quad/hexa/octocopters
Medical drug fabrication (Four Thieves)
Electrochemical synthesis lab
Open source flow batteries
Stops and starts of industrial tooling (open source ecology)
I'm going to say something that is becoming less and less controversial: copyrights and patents are the real drag here. Individuals can get patents, but can't actually enforce. So they end as weapons as companies go after each other.
Copyright is also often intertwined into patents, so that if a thing isn't covered by a patent, copyright (with firmware) takes over. Then the DMCA and anti-circumvention shit.
The other problem here in the USA is almost impossible to source parts directly, or small fab labs that can do operations.
I was looking for a 5mm thick 500x500mm aluminum plate to be cut. Waterjet, plasma, whatever. I wanted it slightly undercut. I made blueprints in DXF and pdf. I contacted 2 waterjet companies, no response. Contacted a welding company with plasma table. No response. Down the list, no response.
As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
I think "sourcing internationally" is one thing and avoiding China (or any single country for that matter) is another. The current administration puts a lot of effort on being independent from everyone else. I think that approach is misguided. We have allies and we need them anyways. Unlike the Soviet Union, China has 3x the population of the US. If we want to have weight on the international stage, we need our allies. If we can source pieces from multiple countries and ideally from allies, it's IMO a very minor issue. Always needing pieces that only come from a single country, especially one that's not a liberal democracy, is a much bigger issue.
That said, I think Chinese manufacturing has a huge advantage from factories being close to each other. Getting your PCB for prototyping in a few hours instead of 10 days is a huge advantage.
I'm also not a Sinophobe. I've ordered plenty from China. I even have a XiaoHongShu account.
As an inventor, one thing that greatly speeds up making stuff is a rapid order and getting parts. And in my case, I literally needed a rectangular sheet of aluminum. I did all the CAD work, submitted to local companies who could do it, and not a peep. I would have paid the American premium of getting it made locally.
I'm also not the only person with this problem. I know others who wanted to hire a welder for a 2 hour job. Even went to the Union hall. Nobody. Nada. And the guy was also part of the IBEW as well. Doesn't matter if you're paying.
And again, this was over a metal plate. No powder coating. No special treatment. Nothing.
I know its a very boomerish thing to say, but its like companies in the USA really don't want to work. My thing would have been small. But I would have brought more small fabrication jobs, and informed local makers that they could do this. But no.
"I know its a very boomerish thing to say, but its like companies in the USA really don't want to work. My thing would have been small"
This rings truer than it should. We had a locksmith out to give us an estimate to install several high-security locks that I can only assume would have been fairly good business. Never heard back from them. We didn't bother following up with them either because if they can't even bother writing up the estimate, how can I trust their work?
I wonder if it's a lack of competition in part based on a labor shortage and tight occupational licensing
You could get that for $75 to $150 (depending on lead time and whether you want 5052 or 6061) from SendCutSend or OshCut (both US-based), as long as you're willing to use 3/16 inch (4.7 mm) plate instead of 5 mm. They'll also bend it for you if you want.
But at a higher level you're right: availability of fabrication services in the U.S. is pretty poor, and most shops are optimized for a few larger orders, not small mix orders like yours.
maybe you're just very unlucky because there are a number of places that do this right from their website ( another commenter mentioned sendcutsend as just one example ).
Open hardware for 3D printers is actually thriving.
There's a whole fleet of community designed hardware, with most innovations to consumer 3D printing still originating in the DIY community.
Multiple manufacturers have direct contact with community members to produce custom hardware at a small but affordable scale, and keeping up with rapid iterations and multiple hardware improvements throughout the year.
Some of the most cutting edge as well as niche 3D printing hardware available to consumers are being sold on small webshops operating out of someone's garage.
If anything, we're in a golden age right now. 3D printing in 2025 is a very exciting place to be.
As a person who chose to buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon rather than upgrade his Ordbot Quantum w/ a heated bed and enclosure and to then try to re-design it to use a CoreXY motion system, I would agree that is exactly the path which we are on --- the new printer came in at a lower price than just the initial parts order for heated bed and enclosure, let alone a different motion system. All of the printers which I wanted (Positron, Prusa Core One) or was considering (Bambu Labs P1S) were over twice or almost twice the price of the ECC.
Think about this question for a second and you'll realize that it's rooted in consumerism. We always want 'quality and speed', but most of all, convenience and apparent low cost (that 'apparent' part is important). What if the product wasn't cheap or the best you could get? What if the product requires more attention than being just a consumer? Conventional wisdom says that they'd be dead on arrival. But consumerism also comes with consumer exploitation.
There are numerous examples of this today. People yearn for dump large LCD panels (cheaper ones, not the ad panels or large monitors) instead of the sluggish, invasive, ad-ridden, irreparable and annoying smart TVs that we have today. Configurable modular laptops and phones like the Framework and Fairphone are enjoying a comeback today after decades of soldered-on components (even the battery), individually paired modules, glued on casings (instead of the convenient screwed on ones), horrendously costly repairs and depressingly short service life. The (paper) printer market is so rife with exploitation that their CEOs consider their customers as 'investments' that are lossy if they don't buy ink cartridges on subscription! Similar story in the automotive sector. People annoyed by full touch screen control panels, heated seats on subscription, parts that cannot be serviced by anyone else.. I could go on for hours.
It's very tempting to give up the reparable and open hardware in favor of mass produced better performing products on account of the cost, effort and time needed to deal with the former. But as their market dries up, the inevitable enshittification of the latter sets in. In pursuit of the continued satisfaction of the shareholders, it's no longer enough for the producers to take hefty margins on each unit you purchase. They move to squeezing every last penny off of you by seeking rent on products that shouldn't be under subscriptions in the first place. Eventually, you end up spending more than if you were using the dumb devices. And then predictably like clockwork, people start lamenting about the feature creep, loss of serviceability, loss of quality and greed.
It's at this point that dumb devices market open up again. The market is small and products are costlier owing to the low scale of production. But they grow a dedicated customer base and healthy revenues that improve over time. So with this hindsight, how about we stick with the open and reparable hardware? If their market doesn't crash, their costs wont rise either. This long term strategic decision can help consumers protect their rights and their savings. But that never happens. This is one scam that the world falls for again and again and again, no matter how many times it plays out.
Stuff like this is sad, especially looking at the costs involved.
It just shows the stark contrast: China is interested in building and being competitive (through unruly means as well as legitimate ones) while the US is a 'lawfare society' prioritizing paperwork and bureaucracy and not moving to help actual physical industries that matter.
We don't need more of our economy relying on lawyers and paper pushers. We need builders and innovators back at the forefront. China gets this.
This could have been an interesting take from anyone but Prusa.
While they've earned themselves a great deal of goodwill from past contributions to the ecosystem, they're a failing company pivoting to dark patterns in an attempt to cling to relevance.
It's heart breaking to see they still haven't been able to take a good hard look at themselves, and understand their own role in why they are scrambling.
Blog posts like these might be heralding the beginning of the end for Prusa.
Your comment is essentially just an ad hominem that doesn't react to the content of the OP, or enumerate any of its claims. You are claiming to know better, but not substantiating anyhing. It's FUD, and the worst kind of comment, because it doesn't take the debate seriously.
Even if the patents are only valid in China, this is going to hurt western companies a lot. If you're manufacturing a product in China, you'll need to either:
1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins
2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country
In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.
Citation from blog:
> The fact you hold a prior art in your hand, doesn’t mean much. The patent will still prevent you from importing/selling etc of the “infringing” stuff.
Could you please explain this to me? Let's say, they (Chinese) patent some complex part of my open-hw 3D printer, how this prevents me from importing parts of my 3D printer from other countries? Let's say from China. Company, which originally patent trolled me, must sue me first, no?
And they care about patents? Since when?
Suppose you created the original prior art and want to get your original design manufactured on China. The Chinese manufacturer might the best in the world and cheapest source but unwilling to defy the Chinese patent.
Your tiny order isn’t worth their whole business, but if you did the original design that feels patently* unfair to you.
Having spent my whole career in the manufacturing tech world after starting in the maker world (I started HackPgh), I love Open Hardware, but find it not a great fit beyond boards (Arduino, RPi, etc.).
I think the core issue is one of how expensive / complex the iteration cycle is, with even sophisticated circuit boards being possible to make on a hobbyist budget, but sophisticated 3D printers and other complex machine tools quickly get beyond what a single person's budget / shop can really support the development vs. mass produced closed machines.
Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
I've been asking: "When was the last time a new hardware dev product got >50% market share throughout industry?", and I think the answer is SolidWorks in ~1995 making affordable(ish) 3D CAD software.
This means all hardware dev tools have lagged, not just open source ones.
My take is that we need more non VC funding (gov't / foundation) of the basic science and early R&D, as VCs are forcing these companies to commercialize too quickly, and the tech doesn't get there, as operations is hard enough, let alone with half-baked tech. This happened to my last company Plethora, doing automated CAM + rapid CNC.
> Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
They simply succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money, and then especially stop investing in software, which is where Bambu have their edge, as many of their improvements are software related.
i.e. if you spend upfront in software you can create an improved experience with the same parts for every subsequent unit. The Chinese have actually internalized this lesson, while in the west we have forgotten it.
Re: "succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money"
I don't find that true of any of the companies I mentioned at least. They all were/are going hard on development, but the tech problems were just really hard compared to funding, and they never made any major breakthroughs on capability.
Chinese companies have been great at going from 1 to n in the 3D printing space with a lot of cost, reliability, etc. refinements, but I haven't seen a transformative technology from them yet either (re: comment on ~1995 SolidWorks being the last one).
Reminds me of cellular phones / I hope that one corporation doesn’t lock down the 3d printing industry in a similar way to cell phones.
We really have two types of smartphones Android based and iOS Apple. The patents surrounding wireless radio transmission and cellular connectivity esssentially make it impossible for any competition outside of mega corporations.
The cost is so high that likely only Microsoft could attempt (again) such a move or maybe Amazon or Space X.
“
Extensive Patent Portfolio:
Motorola has a large number of patents related to cellular technology, with over 1,900 patent families considered essential to 3G, 4G, and 5G standards, according to Lenovo.
Strategic Acquisition:
Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2011 was largely driven by the desire to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio to defend Android.
Licensing Agreements:
Motorola has entered into cross-licensing agreements with other companies, such as Sharp, to share their respective wireless communication technologies.
Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs):
Motorola holds SEPs related to mobile phone signal standards, obligating them to license these patents to competitors on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms.
Patent Disputes:
Motorola has been involved in patent infringement lawsuits, including cases against companies like Hytera and Apple, regarding their cellular technology patents. ”
This post unfortunately isn’t drawing the necessary distinctions between utility models, published applications, and issued patents. And it isn’t focusing on the claims. Patent law is complicated and it is easy to draw the wrong inferences.
TFA didn't really make the problem clear to me. I think it something like this, but I'm not sure. Can anybody clarify?
Problem (?): We can't produce open hardware for things that others have patented. Chinese companies (and maybe others) are patenting lots of things, including things we might have ourselves developed and intended to keep open, so it makes it difficult and/or expensive for us to continue developing.
I am still waiting for video encoders and decoders patents to go away so we could have easy open source implementations that are royalty free, not patent incumbed to be easily available in open source applications that could be also commercial. We don't have any decent easy to go ones since Theora.
@Prusa. I want your company to survive. We have Prusa printers and our own self-made high-speed printers.
I use the Prusa's all the time. They just work. Not the fastest, but that's not a problem. When we need fast we use our own brushless servo-driven stationary table beast.
Build a good MK3/4 style 350 x 350 x 350~500 printer and I will likely buy it. Not interested in the other stuff. Don't even care about multi-material. We use 3D printers for design validation and to explore concepts. Don't need the complexity at all. Don't need crazy speed. Just a good solid printer that works reliably and I don't have to think about. This isn't a hobby, it's a tool. I want it on the network and don't need (can't have) external connectivity (ITAR).
I very recently was in the market for a 3d printer and was interested in making a voron or something diy, but even ordering parts from china it would've cost about double just getting a pre built with better software presets, less room for error, and about the same specs from a Chinese company. It's hard for me to comprehend how diy buying parts individually from AliExpress can be more expensive before shipping,but I guess that's what economics of scale get you.
> But around the year 2020 we registered the first mention of 3D printing as a strategic industry by the Chinese government. We know that now, after a few years of research. We first realized something is off when the price of the parts is higher than the sale price of a complete machine in some cases. That is what sparked our interest and research into the subsidies. They exist, and are very efficient https://rhg.com/research/far-from-normal-an-augmented-assess.... Our industry, desktop 3D printing, faces a bleak future. Comparable to the automotive sector as if only one high volume car brand, say Audi, remained outside of China. That’s it. An inch away from complete dependency on China in an vital piece of tech, the one absolutely critical for creation of new IP.
It seems like the real problem here is that China is able to identify strategic industries, subsidize them, and see the subsidies result in increased production and lower prices, while Western countries aren't. I'm not sure if Prusa themselves can do anything about it, but unless the West gets its shit together and decides to actually try to compete, it seems like eventually every advanced manufacturing industry will be mainly Chinese.
I do not understand the connection between the patent concerns in the article and open-source 3D printing. In particular, the patent issues seem to be the case for all non-Chinese 3D printer companies, whether open source or not. I am not sure how sharing your designs makes this worse (I suppose with the original drawings it's a bit easier to write a patent in bad faith - but certainly not necessary). Something like a defensive patent grant might make a lot of sense (see Opus, AV1 etc) but that's also independent of whether the implementation is open source or not.
That is hardly a function of the printers being Open Hardware. There are lots of unreliable commercial printers as well as fiddly open ones. However, the most reliable ones in the desktop space have mostly been open - like the old Ultimakers or the Prusa MK series.
This is very much a bad faith argument without any specifics. I found Prusa to be good enough. Do you have any examples of open hardware printers that were evaluated that did not meet the bar?
Regardless the topic is about open hardware being squeezed using shady tactics. It means leas competition, less innovation. Rules to kick such players should be easy to enforce as opposed to required to pay quite a lot for such an action.
I have a good friend who’s in the “hi end desktop cnc” bizness (with some very cheap models). Asked why he doesn’t do 3D printers (he designed plenty) and he told me the market is SO competitive and products so cheap it’s impossible to compete.
Designing a controller for his machines and as much as I would love to put the thing as OH, I don’t even think of it.
It's time that prusa gets outside pressure their printers stagnated in innovation and got more expensive. They don't even have machines in the entry/starter category anymore. Why should anyone buy from you if he gets a better experience for less. Especially now that they started to abandon their own core values just have a look at their new offerings they are the opposite for what they plead here. Less open.
That’s a misframing of the situation explained in the post.
Prusa printers stagnated in innovation due to patents filed, making it more difficult to add features. Still, they did expand into SLA and CoreXY.
Prusa printers got more expensive because most of the expensive components come from China, which raised prices and gave subsidies to Chinese manufacturers. That is a de facto export tariff.
They do have entry-level printers, like the Prusa Mini. Of course, it does cost twice that of a Chinese-made clone, but that is because of the aforementioned subsidies.
”Less open” is just plain wrong, almost maliciously so. Prusa offers free printable models of all parts in their entire range of printers. Their firmware is open source, and their PrusaSlicer software is open source. How much more open can you get?
Why do they feel the need to talk about it? Because their $1000 (which was recently reduced in price even) bedslinger is outclassed by a $349 Bambu Lab A1, and they have lost their position as the printer to buy.
They couldn't match Creality on price either, but for a time, Prusa was still the printer with the best quality. As in many industries, there was dependence on the idea that non-Chinese products supposedly had better quality, so you were willing to pay the higher prices. However, in 3D printing, and in other industries, that barrier is falling.
Obviously state support can lead to "unfair" price advantages, but in the example of the A1, even at an equivalent price, the A1 still holds the advantage (larger print bed and additional functionality, for example). This isn't the single-dimensional disadvantage that Josef Prusa is making it out to be.
Exactly. Bambu really showed how the overall user experience can be, while prusa etc. persist in the enthusiast niche, which isn't as big as it was now that alternatives are available.
For most people this is just fine - your goals were not to build a 3d printer it was to build something that just happens to be build able on a 3d printer. That is the something you are building is the goal, not building a 3d printer. If the goal isn't building a 3d printer then buying a 3d printer that someone else has already debugged and made to work is the better way to get to what you really want to do in the first place.
In a way this is good. 3d printing is neat, but it got too much hype which was taken away from other useful things makers should also have experience in. More makers should think of injection molding when doing plastic parts. Many plastic parts makers are making would be better as metal done on lathes and milling machines (or if you want to have fun shapers and planers - both obsolete but still a lot of fun if time/money isn't important). Wood working has never really lost popularity, but it should be mentioned as a good option for makers. There are also cloth options - sew, knit, spin, tat (my favorite). There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Finally along those lines, for some just drawing something up in CAD and sending it off to someone else to make is a good option. FreeCAD has come a long way finally has reached 1.0, or you can pay for one of the commercial options - some of them are reasonable for makers though read the fine print.
The hobby sized machines would fit into your apartment. Sure I can do things on my big machines that you couldn't, but there are plenty of things my south bend heavy 10 cannot do.
Which ones do you have in mind? Enclosed "desktop" mills, like Nomad 3 - that I can understand (although that one is pricey, and I can't can't even find what it would cost to get where I live).
Regular mills and lathes would basically turn the room where it's located into a shop, with chips flying everywhere, so you better have a spare room. Noise might also be a problem. Even moving them is a project by itself. Tall ask for a hobbyist.
> There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Yes but the fewest come at the price and versatility as 3D printing. Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement. Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
> Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement
You can make everything in your basement, just like you can make a 3d printer in your basement, and for similar prices. Almost nobody does it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
> Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
Skill is developed. You can do woodworking with just a sharp rock you find, no need for any more tools. Most people in woodworking choose to trade money for time and buy a lot of tools, but you can decide how far you want to go.
Time is the real constraint for everything of course. However that is my original point - if your goal isn't building a 3d printer (a fine goal) then trading money for time and buying the tools (which might or might not be a 3d printer) is probably you best bet. Assuming you have money to buy a 3d printer of course, but if you don't than a sharp rock and woodworking is probably your best hobby just because it is what you can afford.
As it happens with FOSS anything, that is not what the general public cares about, rather getting something easily at a store and fulfills their needs, which aren't how the thing works, rather as a tool for their actual work.
You have limited time. That year needed to build and debug a 3d printer (if you are single a year would be way to long, but for those with kids that is way too short) is a year that you can't spend on whatever your real hobby is. If you real hobby is 3d printers then that is great, but if not you shouldn't. I work on FOSS projects, but most of what I have installed on my system is a per-packaged distro from someone else who made it work (I have FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and Arch - each slightly different) because I don't have time to do linux/BSD from scratch even though I could. I have built gcc, but most of the time I just use the pre-packaged gcc so I can get on building the project I'm interested in.
i've never own a prusa printer, they are too expensive for me. I know it's great, it's reliable, but 3d printing is just a hobby to me after all. That's why i have to cope with less reliable solutions from Anycubic and Ender.
Now I own a bambulab. They are as cheap as the one from Anycubic, but much more reliable and easier to setup. I honestly don't know how can they make it so cheap, even my a1 mini, cost less than $250, has wifi, a camera for timeplase. Back in the day all you can get is a controller board with monochrome LCD running 8 bit mcu.
The westerner had a big head start, but they became greedy. Ultimaker could be the today Bambulab if they had spent more on RnD, and tried to bring their tech to broader market.
The world would be a better place if we just completely abolished the patent system. There is no need to come up with convoluted new schemes, just delete it, done. The resulting progress will be incredible.
Given the lopsided cost that courts bring to the table, patents only help the big players- since only they canafford to play.
I invented something I ttruly think could change the world. Went to a patent attorney. He said basically - create a patent, wait till someone unsuspectingly builds a product with the same basic idea, and then sue the pans off them. If you try to develop it yourself, the patent will not help - the chinese will copy it and laugh, and the americans will copy it, modify it, and then sue you because they can push more patents than you can defend yourself against. In the best case, they may offer to settle for a small fee if you give them all your IP for free...
I have yet to see anything good from patents, but over the years I have seen just how much they prevent anything new from coming to the world.
You know why IP is so strongly enforced? Because the US has been throwing all its strength behind it. This is why many countries around the world adopted heavy handed IP rights, because they came with a carrot (cheap loans, investment from the US) and a stick (sanctions). Now that the US positions itself as an adversary to other democratic countries I give it 5 years for these IP laws to stick. Everyone kinda hopes it's just Trump that lost his mind and next US govt will go back to normalcy. I doubt this very much. Once it becomes clear Trunp's symucessor is exactly the same well see US IP stop being enforced.
This has a disadvantage of no protection for genuine innovation, but who are we kidding? There is none anyway where it matters most (China). So why do we handicap ourselves following these stupid laws while the Chinese just break them and the US... Well in the US whoever has most money for lawyers wins.
For open source/hardware to thrive Ip laws have to be abolished or at least changed a lot.
Uh yeah? Prusa Mini has his face as boot screen. Cannot find any ref’s online sadly (I sold the printer). Edit 1: speaking from a Prusa perspective I guess..
Edit 2: wait, i misunderstood ‘you cant be serious’? Not sure but what I tried to address was a cult of personality. Thats not something I feel fitting in this whole context.
LANAI, but maybe some kind of free market global license auction would better incentivize invention and reward prior art. Perhaps even outcompete the current authorities.
Clearly stovepiping the generation of IP monopolies and laundering them across borders and through unrelated court systems is a captured perverse incentive structure.
In my humble opinion, if a work is a community project it should stay open regardless of some small feature tweaks, and any kind of commercial revenue should be used to support the original authors as it literally costs people nothing as a tax deductible donation.
The key word here is "Should", as different places have different cultural values regarding intellectual property. Some see bad faith verbatim cloning as lucrative business opportunities (it rarely is), and creatives as a natural resource to be exploited (unfortunately they often are.)
Notably, a large part of the community quietly financially supports this cloning practice, and rarely follow their lofty ideals when purchasing.
Commercial opportunities are naturally degenerating in a saturated market, and businesses that did innovate their own unique products owe people nothing.
Note, competing with free is a bad business model, and the faster cloners fail the better. Prusa was boosted by the rep-rap project, and has spent decades rehashing the same core designs. It is not a sustainable growth strategy. =3
The author decided to use Open Sans, which is a quite narrow font, and font weight 350, so my browser (and, I suspect, yours) renders it with "Open Sans Light" at a fixed 300 weight. That is hard to read with that gray #707070 over white.
I don't know Tailwind so perhaps it is not easy to fix.
While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under, the final point of the article (discussing patent related legal barriers on existing open source innovation becoming a main strategy of large industry players) is a very important one to keep in mind for people on this site in the hardware startup space:
"This is a story from 3D printing, but all the areas with heavy open hardware development are in Made in China 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 and its successors. Make sure you keep an eye on the filings around your expertise, it is incomparably much easier to do something now than later."
Also partially subsidized by the government, who charged their mom-and-pop brick and mortar competitors sales tax while Amazon avoided subjecting their customers to sales tax for many years. That, plus Amazon's ability to operate at a seemingly perpetual loss, was absolutely predatory.
And the government sat on its hands and our representatives loved all the Prime boxes stacked at their doorstep. It has ensh#ttified entire industries that once depended upon retail as their interface with customers.
Private companies spending (and potentially wasting) money investors voluntarily gave them because they think it may lead to a big payoff down the road is capitalism.
Companies doing the "same thing" with government handouts (where the ultimate source of the money had no say in the matter) is not.
It's like the difference between companies that hire workers and those that use slave labor. They may have otherwise identical business models, but the later are operating at an unfair advantage.
If we would know the true motivation of the government, then we could make a difference, but until we don't know it exactly, then there really isn't.
It is entirely possible that that government is giving money against shares or future profits.
It gets problematic and different if, for example, let's say the motivation is to use it as political leverage or even installing backdoors and collect user data.
How's it not capitalism? If your definition of capitalism requires governments to either not exist or not act to improve the conditions of their subjects (including companies), you have a definition of capitalism where basically none existing or only failed states have a capitalist system.
Well they quite literally steal everything you push out. Anyone who’s done it out in the wide open knows this reality. Sometimes they will have the copy out faster than you. What’s the point? And customers do not care at all. I heard it so many times. People lack moral compass because they grow up in environments where you’re rewarded for stealing and cheating.
The article's assertion is specifically "open hardware" 3d printing, facing patent challenges [ other parties patenting designs released as "open" to the community ] especially in China, open hardware designers can't get their work manufactured in China ( in this very example, but similarly in any other country where the patents are filed ) or imported/exported because they become Infringing materials of the patents filed by other parties who have copied their designs.
Open Hardware designers are having to become international patent experts, which is more expensive than releasing the designs to the community for free.
Prisoner's dilemna world of so clever top-down Chinese strategizing on top of a 996 vs. Tang-ping aka. "lie down flat and get over the beatings" society. Maybe it's time for China to adopt a long term view about where this is all going? They seem to pride themselves on that.
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 telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.
I'm not sure what the correct solution is to this problem. We want to avoid anything that causes a return of the guild system, but at the same time we don't want small inventors steamrolled by large corporations.
That said, I think corporations should be much more limited in their Patent powers. In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents. If another large corporation "steals" the idea and capitalizes on it first that is their own fault. The only people who profit are the lawyers.
(Repeating for umpteenth time:) I wish patent fees were exponential. Pay $10 the first year, $40 the second year, $160 the third year,.. $10,485,760 the tenth year, etc. The patent expires and goes to public domain the first year when the fee has not been not paid.
This way there'd be enough time to commercialize an invention for basically peanuts, so the small guy won't be dissuaded from doing so. OTOH holding on a patent for a very long time would only be possible if it brings gobs of money, end even so, only for a reasonably limited time, because on 15th year the fee would be $10,737,418,240.
The inevitable result of this will be spamming the system with basically-the-same patents every year. This article lists the cost to fight patents at $6,000 to $75,000 for each patent. It’ll be hard for small players to adversarially strike down 3,000 self-similar patents every year which block real innovation.
Yes, the patent office should do a better job of understanding their areas of expertise and prior art. In absence of that, perhaps the patent fees could go to a revenue-neutral system where successfully overturning patents as a private citizen results in getting a share of the total pool of filing and renewal fees.
The cure for the spam problem is to turn the incentives around in the patent examination process. Make it highly adversarial from the go and reward the patent office staff for rejecting applications, with solid argument trails. A good part of that would be to have the applicants submit their researched potential prior art and PROVE that their patent is actually novel. (If they haven't submitted a clearly discoverable piece of prior art and the examiner finds that out, that's an immediate rejection. With extreme prejudice, and preferably multiplied rejection award.)
It would still be gameable (everything is), but it would certainly curb the flood of copycat "X-but-in-domain-Y" patents once the pool of prior art used to reject crummy patents becomes better known and established. The additional pool of rejected applications then also feeds into the prior art foundations.
Just deny the same patents and put a exponential fee for resubmitting if found to be the same patents.
This is an excellent idea. I would still limit the time though. Also inflation should be taken into account (maybe) not that in 10 years 10M dollars is a chocolate.
Thanks! The idea is not mine :)
I think that the exponent grows so fast that it completely dwarfs normal inflation. If the inflation goes out of hand, Zimbabwe-style, then I won't expect patent enforcement to matter or work either. But well, a term like 15-20 years could be added just in case.
Why not make it so there is a limit to how many patents you can hold? So if you have 10 patents, to register an 11th patent you need to release one of the patents you already have.
Who is "you"? The company? The subcompany? The CEO? Each individual employee? Patsy #1281?
Pointless as you could easily diversify by having your family members be official patent holders
This is actually a ... solid idea upon short consideration!
I like it! Thank you for posting it: I hadn't seen it before.
That still seems pretty easy to game by re-filing slight variations of the original patents
That would only protect those variations, not the previously published original version. And if the variations are too obvious you could even challenge their patents with a good chance of overturning them (which brings us back to the issue of the legal system being too slow and expensive)
Won't these be invalidated by having prior art already in public domain?
I feel like patents are nowadays only used for things that would be easy to reverse-engineer or must be made public anyway. You can't recreate any modern technology by looking at patents, from semiconductor manufacturing to food processing.
So if patents have lost their original purpose, I don't see any value left in perpetuating the system.
I think relying on trade secrets for many things would actually be an improvement over what we have now.
You could still keep your recipe secret, but someone else could come up with something similar with no risk.
Not to mention that patents are so (intentionally) difficult to understand that even patented technology is basically trade secrets now anyway. And the useful designs are protected by NDAs.
You can't put a NDA on a Patent. NDAs are basically the modern version of guilds. Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
> You can't put a NDA on a Patent.
On the patent itself, no. But on design docs, CAD files, source code, circuit diagrams, etc. you can, and it is common practice to require NDAs for anyone who has access to them. And in some cases copyright law is also used to protect them.
> Imagine a world where absolutely everything about your job is kept under a strict NDA. This is true of startups, but it doesn't scale, especially once you start actually selling product and need to make customers happy to get the sale.
This is already a reality at many companies, including large ones.
It's much easier to spread information now than in the past. NDAs are slow leaks if you don't keep your employees tightly monitored at all times. Or if they play War Thunder.
So make NDAs unenforceable.
Where I work it takes months of lawyers, just to understand of one idea we have is an infringement or not. Is a mined field, on purpose.
> it takes months of lawyers, just to understand if one idea we have is an infringement or not.
Even after that work, you don't know if your idea is infringing. All you have is a prediction on whether it will be found infringing if you are ever sued.
“ In fact it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporation patents”
I think it’s overwhelmingly negative. They are killing innovation by small players and don’t produce much innovation compared to their size.
Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?
I know trade secret was much more important. Also the spirit of patents is to allow development by making all public.
But do they?! I’m tired of trying to extract useful information off patents, they are empty of content and full of BS is laywer language. Real important details are kept secret, as long as possible.
The current system is de facto not working properly. I’m not saying is the worst, or I have better ideas, but is clear that the system is being heavily abused in all corners.
It could be lethal if a guild member attempted to share secrets or sell methods to a competitive guild. An example:
"In 1754 the State Inquisitors of Venice learned that a worker at Daniele Miotti's factory had fled abroad with a copy of his master's books. Fearing that he would divulge secrets—especially in Bohemia, where there were important glass factories—they ordered his death."
Source: Zecchin, P., (2025) “Una condanna a morte di dubbia utilità: Sarebbe stato molto grave, per i vetrai muranesi, se il seicentesco ricettario Miotti fosse caduto nelle mani dei Boemi?”, Journal of Glass Studies 66: 7. doi: https://doi.org/10.3998/jgs.6939
Just how widespread it was for violent and lethal actions to be carried out in pursuit of maintaining guild secrecy, the evidence is murky.
It seems pretty unlikely that guild secrets could be sustained against the modern internet in the absence of any legal protections. One disgruntled employee and your secrets are anonymously contributed to the Wikipedia article on your product.
> Was really so (specifically “lethal”? Do you have sources?
Pretty famous example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venetian_glass#Island_of_Muran...
> Glassmakers were not allowed to leave the island without permission from the government. Leaving without permission, or revealing trade secrets, was punishable by death
Though importantly this was enforced by state.
>It's telling that before the Patent system the solution was secretive guilds that jealously (sometimes lethally) guarded their secrets to avoid competition. This was obviously terrible since it greatly slowed down innovation.
Nowadays HFT technology is extremely competitive, with firms investing tens of millions in custom harder to achieve nanosecond latency improvements, but all this has happened entirely without patents. As an industry HFT is way less monopolised than tech, suggesting trade secrets alone are enough to achieve growth and competition.
I don't think I would use HFT as a stand-in for companies that produce useful goods or services.
> it's questionable how much value society gets out of large corporations
ftfy
It ain't just patents
I mean, with limiting the allowed use of force to guard secrets, we are probably nowhere near as at risk for the worst of the past? As you said, the competition to guard secrets could be quite severe, and they were not exactly good at knowing actual leaks of their secrets versus someone else independently arriving at them.
That is, I think having the assumption of independent discovery would go a long way to preventing abuse.
I could see some hazard that small shops can't protect their secrets from partner manufacturers and such. But that is exactly where we are with a lot of stuff today?
Ah yes, if only murder had been illegal back then! Yes, making murder illegal must have been what was missing.
Sorry, but your argument has a bit of a silly premise.
That is silly. My point was that we have better law enforcement period. Are we currently perfect? Of course not. But to use that as your argument is, amusingly, a silly premise for an argument.
Yes, that's why the people behind the United whistle blower "suicide" or the Epstein "suicide" we promptly brought to justice /s
Our law enforcement is "better" when it comes to enforcing the law against the lower 99%. When it comes to enforcing it against the kind of people who're actually likely to kill to protect their secrets...good luck
I would expect things like this were far more prevalent in previous times. Like, comically so.
Again, we should continue to push for better things. But don't ignore how much better we are from where we were.
>Meanwhile our own innvative companies and individuals get ground into dust by the boot of patent lawyers wielded by megacorps.
So they sell a large part of their company to capital who can afford to acquire and defend IP. In this happy case they are only ground into 90% dust.
Yeah, people complain about AI companies "stealing" IP, but it's becoming accepted, both by judges and the US president [1].
I'm not sure weakening of IP law is such a bad thing after all. Let's just hope the weakening trickles down from AI juggernauts to smaller fish.
[1] https://torrentfreak.com/president-trump-its-not-doable-for-...
It's a factor, but I also wonder whether the key morpheme there isn't the "mega" in "megacorps". If, say, entity A attempting to enforce IP against entity B had to pay fees proportional to the size ratio (e.g., Megacorp enforcing against Little Joe's Software requires a $1 billion fee from Megacorp), things would be different.
The problem there is identifying the relevant entity, and I think that is the key. And it's not just a problem with IP, it's a problem with all property: it's just too easy for "real" beneficial ownership to be hidden so that penalties and enforcement can be accurately targeted at big market players. A few well-targeted such actions could loosen things up a lot.
Just ignore the size of the plaintiff and make everything depend on the size of the defendant. Is the defendant a huge megacorp? Make every inference against them. Is it a tiny small business? Give them every benefit of the doubt.
Then if megacorp tries to set up a tiny shell company to do their dirty work, you just ignore the shell company and sue the megacorp. Whereas if something is actually a small business, there is no megacorp hiding anywhere behind it.
That's an interesting idea, but I don't want to let small operators run roughshod over other small operators.
How do you propose it could ever be otherwise? Under this system it's hard to sue small entities, but under any system it's generally useless to sue small entities except as a harassment mechanism because they don't have any money to pay damages anyway.
If IP laws and patent laws were created to protect right holders from abuse of bigger players on the market, and they are used to actually entrech those players...
They need a drastic reform.
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.
---
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.
> - 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,
That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal. Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made. And if they are fronting the money before it exists, then they are taking risk so they need a risk premium.
The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
All are workable, but with their own tradeoffs.
The other replies are good.
The general principle is inverting who has power. It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money whose primary business of redistributing money and taking a cut.
If they are allowed to ask for something, they will and because they have more power, they are able to pressure people into unfavorable deals. They don't need your band, there's plenty of others who will take the deal. But you need their money or someone else's but that somebody else will offer similar terms, unless those exploitative terms are illegal because people united against parasitism.
> It should always be with people doing real positive-sum work, not those with money
I don't like the conclusion, but I've convinced myself that curating and selecting what is worth doing is actually the real work. Picking where the bridge is to go is more important than building it. So allocating money is the important work. It feels icky to me... but also inescapable.
How would people with money and no artistic talent know? If we're not talking about art but some other kind of productive work - again - money does not qualify them. It gives them the power to decide, it probably lets them cultivate a skill for knowing which investments are gonna make money and which are gonna lose it. But it does not qualify them to decide what is beneficial for others.
As for the analogy - who picks where it gets built? It better be an engineer. And just look at the mounf of work done by the engineer, the builders and some suit who rubber stamps it. Work and skill is what should be rewarded, not having money.
You could have a system that limits sale of IP to clearly defined capitalization, I.E. instead of "You own this IP for 20 years and get x% of profits in return for funding/publishing and giving my y% of profits" it could be "In return for funding/publishing in the next 5 years, you get x% of profits and I get y% of profits, but I still own my IP and your rights expire after a short period of not publishing.
AFAIK that's actually standard for writers: publishers usually license the IP for a period for a prescribed royalty blend and for publishing, and after a certain amount of time or if they don't publish the rights revert, and international/audio/digital rights are negotiated separately.
There's an argument for "What if I don't want to deal with capitalizing on this whatsoever and just want to sell it for a cash payment now because I literally don't want that to be my job," but even then there should probably be a minimum royalty along with the lump sum to protect against exploitation.
>That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.
It should.
>Without access to people with money now a lot of it wouldn't get made.
So be it.
>The other results is art made by those who don't need it, purely made by amateurs, grant funded art, or socially funded art.
Sounds amazing.
We don't need to go with the default vanilla options that are passed as inevitable...
>> That's like say a band getting an advance to record their album should be illegal.
> It should.
Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income.
Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.
Why shouldn’t a band be permitted to do something similar, getting money now in exchange for future income and, at the same time, transferring the risk of their future product being a flop to a third party?
>Mortgages and car loans can be seen as advances on future income
I'm against those as well. Buy stuff after you can afford it.
>Insurance is a way to split a risk from a property. For example, if I own a house there’s a risk it burns down. With fire insurance, you keep the house, but the insurer takes on the risk, in exchange for a fee.
I'm against insurance companies too. Have a public insurance fund instead.
>And obviously China is a global parasite.
Britain said the same things about the US in the early days. We told them to f* off about copyright/patent stuff quite often.
Britain was also putting into place laws/regulations/policies requiring that the U.S. purchase from British manufacturers rather than developing native production --- there's a reason why the first printing press in North America was in Mexico.
Which is pretty much what patent law ends up being right? The patent holder telling the licensee the conditions.
Copyright/patents/laws are just tools. They can be used for both good and evil.
The early US had pro-social goals such as democracy or freedom. And yes, they used slaves because there are no good guys in history or politics, there's various shades of bad.
Current China has anti-social goals such as total control of the population through technological means and expansion by conquest - see them harassing the legitimate government of all of Chine in Taiwan constantly with the military or trying to sink Philipino fishing boats with their warships (two crashed into each other recently). It is also currently committing genocide through both murder and sterilization.
So yeah, I am totally for considering them a parasite and treating them as such.
I'm really fascinated about heavy downvotes for your post because it makes a lot of sense.
I wonder who the people who show up to defend IP law are in these conversations. Why do it? What's the gain?
Who knows? Votes should be public, otherwise this is an easy way to make opinions less visible without having to provide any justification.
Sometimes very similar comments in favor of protecting producers get upvotes on one post and downvotes on another. I also started seeing a pattern - even if a particular comment ends up downvoted in the end, there's usually a few upvotes first, sometimes with comments, then downvotes quickly to get it negative and there's never any comments justifying it and few if any comments after it gets negative. This indicates downvoting works well to silence the discussion.
When you think about it, it really doesn't make much difference if it's a downvote-a-bot or not.
If it acts like a bot, walks like a bot, and quacks like a bot, it might as well be a bot.
Nobody's comments are read only by humans any more.
"protects the wrong entities (corporations instead of individuals who did the real work)"
> laughs in Capitalism
Oh, yeah, 5 upvotes and 2 comments, then suddenly 7 downvotes without any replies. Totally organic.
To be fair, in the States, you can own a small business, come up with a good idea, and someone can just copy it and compete against you regardless if it's copyright infringement or not. And that's in the context of a domestic legal issue.
You have to be able to defend your intellectual property, and that's expensive, which is the parent comment's point.
I mean, imagine you, AlexandrB, come up with some good idea, start working on the implementation and delivery of that good or service, and someone just... copies it. Or copies it and releases it for free.
Should... we just not care about that? Because the idea of not having any intellectual property protections whatsoever is even more absurd than having them.
It requires incredible, statistically insurmountable effort, attention, and revenue to create even a two-person, full-time, sustainable business. More so in software and hardware where everyone is releasing open source software, everyone wants everything to be free, no one wants to pay for anything, and hardware designs are regularly stolen.
Forget that dude, you can make more money selling lemonade in your neighborhood.
A kid selling candy bars for school fundraisers has a better chance than someone creating a product in our field and taking it to market.
No, we definitely need intellectual property protection and it should be essentially free to defend yourself as an individual or small business.
The deal is supposed to be that there's a trade:
* You are given an exclusive right to exploit a work, for enough time to make it worth your while.
* Everyone gets the work in the end.
We're not succeeding at this. The terms are a little too short for biotech. They're wayyyyy too long for software. The barriers to entry to get and enforce IP are too large for small businesses. But it's also too easy to figure it all out and generate tons of fake IPR to harass real business with.
> Should... we just not care about that?
... Yes.
Speaking from the half of the crowd that actually produces intellectual property, no.
People who aren't rich already don't have any intellectual property anyway. The idea of nobody having them seems inherently more suitable insofar as someone could as it stands just ignore your property anyway with the primary difference in this hypothetical reality that instead of being able to copy you AND shut you down they just copy you.
Depending on what your your personal net worth percentile threshold is for the word "rich," there are tons of open source software authors who own intellectual property, release it under permissive licenses, and are not rich.
Intellectual property isn't some sort of elite, elusive thing. Anyone can make it.
Maybe the real problem is that easy low-hanging-fruit inventions attainable by individuals in the garage are long gone, and are now so capital intensive that it doesn't make sense to keep the system in hopes of protecting this fictional small inventor.
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.
> There are no “degrees” either you have protection and enforce it, or you dont.
It's quite possible to have a narrow IP right. Copyright is a good example. The existence of a copyright on Windows doesn't stop anybody from creating Linux.
The problem isn't the copyright itself, it's the likes of DMCA 1201 which allows the copyright on one thing to be leveraged into control over other things, e.g. by restricting adversarial interoperability. Which then gets leveraged into control over things with a network effect, and that's where all the problems come from. An exclusive right should never apply to a network effect.
Likewise, they issue patents not just on ingenious inventions but on abstract gibberish that amounts to a claim on the problem to be solved rather than any particular solution, which they simply ought not to do. Let there be patents on engines and batteries (concrete things) but not software (an abstraction that exists only as information processing).
The driver of cost isn't paper or physical presence -- I'd be willing to print a few pages and show up downtown in my city where the court is much more if not for the real costs. It often costs hundreds of dollars to file in court (even for small claims in some states), which is a problem because misconduct under a few hundrs dollars is common. It is also almost always useful and often requied (such as when an LLC is a party) to hire lawyers. The law is so complex, and the court procedures too, that we need highly trained professionals to effectively represent people.
The model of paying these professionals from the salary of the average person who themself probably makes way less or from a cash strapped startup doesn't add up. Therefore, to fix the issue we either need to pay lawyers less, pay them from some other source (I'd like to see that in a court case either party can spend any amount on representation, but they must pay into a common pot that's split in half for the opposing party to hire their own representation of a similiar quality), or make them less needed (i.e., simplify and document law and court procedures then legalize pro se representation in all cases including LLCs such that anyone can effectively argue in court).
That would bring down the price of patent spam even more. The problem is the cost of protection relative to the cost of attack, you can't do much.
But it would also make patent spamming much less valuable and arguably more expensive for the spammer. If you spam patents and get one issued for something that isn't novel and/or already has prior art, everyone can fight it and it quickly gets its metal tested in court.
I imagine a fine for egregious patents could also be implemented. If your patent is demonstrated in court to lack standing, the civil liability is on you, not the patent office.
The hard reality is that nobody actually knows a priori what innovation is. Or how much an innovation is actually worth. If you removed patents that would pretty easily and trivially stop the spam.
The first problem is that what's written in the law and what actually happens are pushed apart by the ridiculous costs of using courts. If fixing that such that courts are fully accessible to anyone without worrying about the cost doesn't produce the desired outcome, then one should look to legislate that outcome. Bad legislation is thus the second problem.
Yes this.
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.
It would allow anyone to patent spam though, that could be a good thing.
How? Compare to email spam where the cost is zero. Is that in any way better than a world where it takes substantial capital to send email spam?
Lower cost = more patents = more patent trolls = less innovation.
Maybe they think it'd be a good thing because it would eventually phase out patents?
Any company that tried to bring a lawsuit for patent infringement would potentially face dozens of suits for their own infringement, a kind of legal mutually assured destruction.
That would lead to even more centralization of email than we already have, and that's a bad thing.
What if you have to pay a fee for each patent application that gets rejected?
Then companies with deep pockets can reapply, while individuals who get rejected due to mistakes won't be able to afford it.
The problem is the size difference between the applicants, and just saying "charge by their income" wouldn't help when a shell company with no income applies.
Correct, bad actors would use this.
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 --
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.
partial disagree, I think the issue is how the patent office abdicated any but the most superficial effort to validate patents onto the court system
It would be good if the difficulty of getting patents would go up by a factor of 10. To get less of them in volume, and less bullshit ones. Should also throw out a bunch of the existing bad ones.
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.
> Patents just aren't necessary.
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.
One solution may be to move from an adversarial system to more of an inquisitorial one. This mostly removes the need for lawyers.
No. The real story is China weaponizing the global IP system in an imbalanced manner.
IP ownership is not inherently capital-intensive in the US.
>the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions.
And why would those in power do that, when the justice system as it is exists to serve their interests?
Time limits on cases would really help.
Ie. Each side has 15 minutes to explain their side, then the jury has 15 minutes to discuss, then a vote is taken and a decision made.
Sure, some more subtle outcomes would be 'wrong' - but does it actually matter?
Usually we need evidence to make a decent decision. It's not debate club.
Sure - but you better fit the evidence inside 15 mins too
>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?
You realize a jury trial would make everything even slower right?
Jury selection alone can take months…
And doesn’t solve the judge problem at all.
This is why the FSF is important with software and OSH needs a similar organization.
> 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.
I'd vote for you
> used by the wealthy to bully the poor
Working as intended then
The fact that IP protection is expensive is essentially its defining feature. One way to think of "intellectual property" is precisely as a weird proof-of-work, since you are trying to simulate the features of physical property for abstract entities that by default behave in the exact opposite fashion.
This is the frustrating thing about getting into an argument about how "IP isn't real property" and then having the other side roll their eyes at you like you are some naive ideologue. They're missing the point of what it means for IP to not be "real property". The actual point is understanding that you are, and will be, swimming against the current of the fundamentals of these technologies forever. It is very very difficult to make a digital book or movie that can't be copied. So difficult in fact, that it we've had to keep pushing the problem lower and lower into the system, with DRM protections at the hardware level. This is essentially expensive, not just from a capital perspective, but from a "focus and complexity" burden perspective as well. Then realize that even after putting this entire system in place, an entire trade block could arbitrarily decide to stop enforcing copyright, AKA, stop fueling the expensive apparatus that is is holding up the "physical property" facade for "intellectual property". This was actually being floated as a retaliation tactic during the peak of the tariff dispute with Canada[1]. And in fact we don't even need to go that far, it has of course always been the case that patents vary in practical enforceability country to country, and copyrights (despite an attempt to unify the rules globally) are also different country to country (the earliest TinTin is public domain in the US but not in the EU).
Usually at this point someone says "It's expensive to defend physical property too! See what happens if another country takes your cruise liner". But that's precisely the point, the difficulty scales with the item. I don't regularly have my chairs sitting in Russia for them to be nationalized. The entities that have large physical footprints are also the ones most likely to have the resources defend that property. This is simply not the case with "intellectual property," which has zero natural friction in spreading across the world, and certainly doesn't correlate with the "owner's" ability to "defend" it. This is due to the fundamental contradiction that "intellectual property" tries to establish: it wants all the the zero unit-cost and distribution benefits of "ethereal goods," with all the asset-like benefits of physical goods. It wants it both ways.
Notice that all the details always get brushed away, we assume we have great patent clerks making sure only "novel inventions" get awarded patents. It assumes that patent clerks are even capable of understanding the patent in question (they're not, the vast majority are new grads [2]). We assume the copyright office is property staffed (it isn't [3]) We assume the intricacies of abstract items like "APIs" can be property understood by both judge and jury in order to reach the right verdict in the theoretically obvious cases (also turns out that most people are not familiar with these concepts).
How could this not be expensive? You essentially need to create "property lore" in every case that is tried. Any wish for the system to be faster would necessarily also mean less correct verdicts. There's no magic "intellectual property dude" that could resolve all this stuff. Copyright law says that math can't be copyrighted, yet we can copyright code. Patent law says life can't be patented, yet our system plainly allows copyrighting bacteria. Why? Because a lawyer held of a tube of clear liquid and said "does this seem like life to you?" The landmark Supreme Court case was decided 5-4 [4], and all of a sudden a thing that should obviously not be copyrightable by anyone that understands the science was decided it was. There's no "hidden true rules" that if just followed, would make this system efficient. It is, by design, a system that makes things up as it goes along.
As mentioned in other comments, at best you could just flip burden to the other party, which doesn't make the system less expensive, it just shifts the default party that has to initially burden the cost. Arguably this is basically what we have with patents. Patents are incredibly "inventor friendly". You can get your perpetual motion machine patented easy-peasy. In fact, there is so much "respect" for "ideas" as "real things", that you can patent things you never made and have no intention of making. You can then sue companies that actually make the thing you "described first". Every case is a new baby being presented to King Solomon to cut in half.
In other words, an inexpensive system would at minimum require universal understanding and agreement on supremely intricate technical details of every field it aims to serve, which isn't just implausible, it is arguably impossible by definition since the whole point of intellectual property is to cover the newest developments in the field.
1. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/canada-can-fight-us-tari...
2. https://tolmasky.com/2012/08/29/patents-and-juries/
3. https://www.wired.com/story/us-copyright-office-chaos-doge/
4. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/447/303/
While I don't entirely disagree with you. You have to understand why the courts exist at all. To govern working class citizens. Laws are written by the powerful and wealthy - always has been - to control the working class (everyone else).
You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)
> In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years.
When did we start being a just society would you say? WWI? The Civil Rights Act? Unless you really stretch things, saying that justice declined in the last 50 years - even if true - means that justice "peaked" for a short period of maybe a generation. I suspect if you actually lived in that era[1] you wouldn't think that though so this whole framing is based on false nostalgia for a time you never experienced.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
> When did we start being a just society would you say?
I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
It was a very small start, it only protected nobles from the king, but it's generally considered to be the start.
If that's the standard, it's ridiculous to say we stopped being a just society in the last 50 years.
Magna Carta didn't make us a just society, it was the start of making us a just society.
Being a just society is not a boolean. We never got 100% there. Nor is it along a single dimension -- you could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white.
> you could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white.
"Just" can't mean "in my favor" unless your also say that monarchy was very just, for the king.
Justice includes equality before the law. Without equality there can't be justice.
> could argue we were more just 50 years ago, as long as you were white
Well that is certainly one take. I really don't see how you can argue that position in good faith but I won't spend energy to refute it since you didn't actually argue it at all beyond making the supposition.
> I think most historians would agree that it started with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215.
Ahahaha, this is the most anglocentric thing I've heard in a while. That's not remotely the case, and it's certainly not something an historian would say.
"Justice" is not a scalar. It is a matrix, at best.
In some parts of America, and in some aspects, "justice" was still clearly increasing up until the second Trump presidency. This is especially true for the treatment of various marginalized groups (especially queer people, where it's quite obvious that "justice" for them increased markedly with the Obergefell v Hodges decision in 2015, and continued to improve in many ways after that).
In other areas and ways, it peaked before 9/11 and has dropped a great deal since.
In still others, it's been on a long slow decline since some time in the latter part of the 20th century.
And this is part of why some people are so angry these days: they see "justice" decreasing for them, while it increases for other people—including some of the people they've always considered to be beneath them—and they wrongly conclude that it's a zero-sum game, and they need to reduce justice for those other people in order to bring it back for them.
Disenfranchisement. A powerful cause to be angry about.
Probably 50s-70s? The golden age of capitalism oddly enough. Among other things taxation maintained a more even wealth distribution during this time in many western countries. Combined with a record large generation that had few children and parents that dies in wars (almost everyone working), this lead to a surplus. When there is a surplus the overlords are generous. Now that generation is old and dependent on the handful of children they had. There is no longer a surplus. There is hope that the technologies we are creating could bring enough productivity gains to return to surplus conditions, but the population decline that will have to overcome is extreme. IP laws aren't encouraging these productivity gains like we need them to, so we should ignore them. The west deciding to ignore chinese IP won't be the thing that starts the war, and it isn't like china ever respected the IP of the west. We should be buying up all the tooling we need to painfully bootstrap automated manufacturing ourselves and reverse engineer it.
Just going off my own experience. While violent crime has diminished, other crimes are going on in plain sight with prudence from the courts. Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there. I remember when "debtor's prison" was illegal. Now it's not. So you can brush it under a rug, claim things are better, claim we are more just than we used to be, but I never claimed that we ever were 100% just. Only that we used to be more just than we are today.
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/states-unfairly-burdening-incar...
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/amer...
https://news.gallup.com/poll/653897/americans-pass-judgment-...
https://judicature.duke.edu/articles/the-withering-of-public...
https://www.idea.int/blog/how-independent-us-supreme-court-u...
Debtors prison is illegal in the US. You can’t be imprisoned for your debts. Are you suggesting sentences are being extended based on unpaid fees?
They are. Debtors prison is illegal with one exception - if you already went to prison due to a crime and then completed your sentence, many states will charge you for the full cost of your prison stay (often upwards of thousands of dollars). And since a lot of sentences involve some amount of parole after the prison sentence, you’ll be sent back to prison under a parole violation if you fail to pay back the fees by the due date.
(source: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/stee...)
This is a better link that directly talks about "pay-to-stay" fees (prison reimbursement). Your link mostly talks about courte fees.
https://endpaytostay.org/pdf/pay-to-stay-report-20250622.pdf
Ah yes, good point
Wow, that’s fucked up.
It's the only way to create career criminals now... The private prisons need career criminals to justify their existence. Career criminals become career criminals because they can't earn their way to an honest living (outside of mental health issues) because of the debts they owe. It's a vicious cycle. They want repeat offender by the time they turn 24. Statistically, that means they'll be in and out of the system for life.
> Because privatized prisons are a thing in the US, they need product... You'll be charged $4/day - $80/day while you're there.
"I hereby inform you under powers entrusted to me under Section 47, Paragraph 7 of Council Order Number 438476, that Mr. Buttle, Archibald, residing at 412 North Tower, Shangri La Towers, has been invited to assist the Ministry of Information with certain enquiries, the nature of which may be ascertained on completion of application form BZ/ST/486/C fourteen days within this date, and that he is liable to certain obligations as specified in Council Order 173497, including financial restitutions which may or may not be incurred if Information Retrieval procedures beyond those incorporated in Article 7 subsections 8, 10 & 32 are required to elicit information leading to permanent arrest notification of which will he served with the time period of 5 working days as stipulated by law. In that instance the detainee will be debited without further notice through central banking procedures without prejudice until and unless at such a time when re-imbursement procedures may be instituted by you or third parties on completion of a re-imbursement form RB/CZ/907/X..."
Ugh... That's not exactly the "Shangri La" the world knows.
Terry Gilliam knew what he was doing when he wrote "Brazil".
Arguably justice in general started declining with the invention of the typewriter, and injustice accelerated with the invention of the word processor and will get far worse with LLMs. The cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law. Personally I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.
> I'd like to require that laws be written out by hand by the lawmaker(s) proposing them (NOT their staffers), and read aloud by them before a vote.
I could really get behind this sort of rate-limiting. It would also make the thinktank-written legislation a little less appealing for the lawmakers, as they'd still need to write everything out.
That limits the rate of change of the law, not its total size.
In medieval Iceland, the lawspeaker -- the leader of the parliament -- had to recite the law from memory every three years (one third in each year).
> Arguably
I'd like to see you support that argument.
Implicitly, the argument is that, when "cost and time of litigation scales like n^2 where n is the textual length of the law," justice for litigants declined when sheer access to the necessary legal funds and time began to outweigh other costs and benefits as a factor in determining pursuit of justice. Maybe it's not self-evident, but I don't think direct quantifiable evidence of justice is necessarily available, so what qualitative evidence would be capable of confirming support?
My counterargument would be that before the typewriter literacy rates were much worse than they are now. So while it's true that laws were simpler, interpreting those laws was still out of reach for many at the bottom of the economic ladder. It would be interesting to try to compare legal complexity with the percentage of society that has a sufficient reading comprehension to meaningfully interact with those laws across various eras.
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.
> 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.
Yeah and nevermind everything else. Thanks for the laugh.
Strawman
"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.
> we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years
How could I guess you are not black?
That's a whole other can of worms... For them, it's been more like 500 years. The user danaris said it best I think, it depends on who you are. While some groups have had their justice increased, others have seen theirs decrease.
> Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy
How do you think the wealthy resolve dusputes among themselves? You obviously have never lived in a truly lawless society
> 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.
Can you produce a single capitalist society which worked for the working class instead of the capitalist 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.
Wealth and power aren’t entirely the same.
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 don't even care much about cost, but the Bambu Lab printers are simply better. I have been selling my Prusas (MK3S+ and XL), because they are just too much of a hassle. Prusa has fallen behind in R&D, the Bambu Lab printers work better, are more automated, have more nicely engineered features (having to babysit my XL and wipe the dripping filament off the print heads was such a disappointment).
And yes, I have had to fix both brands. The repairability of the Prusa is largely a myth, you still need to order replacement parts from Prusa, just as with other brands.
I wish Prusa would catch up with their R&D.
It cannot be overstated how critical good defaults and “just works” are for any kind of mass-market product.
Knobs and toggles to allow enthusiasts to dial in everything perfectly aren’t a bad thing. You don’t need make your product a featureless orb. That said, users shouldn’t need to tinker around with any of them to get up and running or for basic use.
This is where Bambu excels. More involved printers are simply not interesting for many people outside of the 3D printing sphere, even if they’d become enthusiasts after buying a printer. They need a “gateway drug” of a printer that’s dead simple to use and get good results out of to even consider buying one. After that they might go down the rabbithole and seek out more technical options, but jumping straight to tinkerville is just too far of a leap for most.
I got into 3D printing a year ago and decided on the Bambu. I started with a P1P to see if I'd like it, got an AMS, got an enclosure in the span of about 9 months. Would I have saved money if I got all of that at once? Of course. But I didn't know if I'd like 3D printing. The P1P worked so well and so easily, it was a "gateway" and did suck me in.
Prusa is good enough for me. I owned both Bambu and Prusa latest generation printers. Both products got their shares of downtime so from my perspective either are pretty interchangable.
Case in point, the AMS. The Bambu system is so clean. It sits on top of the printer even if you don't have an enclosure. The Prusa system requires you to lay the spools out on runners on the table, taking up a ton of desk space.
It’s not better in every way. For long term reliability and ability to repair and upgrade, Prusa is far superior.
If your hobby is 3d printERS sure (and more power to you), but for many people (me included) the hobby is 3d printING
The point is not that Prusas need constant repair. The point is that they are reliable workhorses and repairable and usually also long-term-upgradeable.
But you get better results from the Bambu. I care about the product of the manufacturing more than I care about the tools.
That depends on what you’re doing. For many things Prusa printers produce higher quality prints.
> For many things Prusa printers produce higher quality prints.
I have yet to have this happen, despite a lot of trying. The Bambu just works and the results are better. The Prusa requires constant recalibration and tuning, and still produces an inferior looking product. I'd love to be proven wrong here.
It's probably the case that somebody with a ton of experience can squeeze better results out of a Prusa ... but that kind of proves my point.
My Prusa just always works. I spend virtually zero time doing maintenance or any kind of tuning.
If you’re spending that much time fiddling with it, sounds like you either have much a much better eye for print quality than I do or you got a dud.
It makes a big difference if you're painting the prints - things that look okay out of the printer will turn into a disaster once paint brings out all the details.
People are getting great quality out of the Bambus now - basically a slight tier below Resin, without any of the health issues that require PPE.
https://youtu.be/R8fuNDTQJCY?t=725
(Old video, state of the art has advanced since. Also, the issue with his other printer turned out to be a simple maintenance item (dirty pulley) the video maker skipped over in Bambu's basic troubleshooting guide.)
If you want to print warhammer miniatures or similar the Prusa core 1 is equivalent to a Bambu X1. And it’s the same price.
We are a version behind and the Mk4 is supposed to be better. I think that would be a fairer comparison to the Bambu?
I’m currently working on an upgrade to 3.5, which should at least give me better speed.
You’re 2 essentially 2 versions behind. The Core One is basically equivalent to the X1C and it’s the same price. $300 cheaper if you buy the kit instead of the assembled version.
Cool, but that's not why people buy things. I don't buy a bike for the pleasure of getting to repair it when I inevitably eat shit on a gravel road.
While you're busy ordering parts for your Prusa and taking it apart, people just buy another A1 or P1P for basically nothing. While you're spending 5 hours trying to stabilise your printing plate and ensuring your nozzle isn't vomiting out super melted <weird filament you got>, the bambulabs go haha printing goes brrr thanks for feeding me shale oil it'll work great. If you're 3d printing enough that your printer breaks, you are 100% making enough money to just eat the costs of another printer.
Are you confusing Prusa with older Enders? If you buy assembled, they just work like any other modern printer. In fact they're known for long-term reliability. If there's any detraction, it's on the basis of printing speed, price, and availability, but not on fragility.
Prusa isn't like that. It just works. I've been printing years without any issue or repair.
You don't care how expensive and complicated it is to repair and maintain your mountain bike (especially if you plan to eat gravel a lot)? And your take on machines is that you better throw away a bunch of working 3D printers and replace them instead of upgrading the old ones and adding new ones as needed? Hope you have a lot of money to burn in your personal and business life. ;)
> You don't care how expensive and complicated it is to repair and maintain your mountain bike (especially if you plan to eat gravel a lot)?
I have 3 bicycles at the moment and use one as my main way of buying groceries.
My ideal bicycle ownership experience is: I change the brake fluid every few years, I spray the chain whenever I remember to, I change tires and brake pads when they wear out, and I never, ever have to do any other maintenance.
I don't care about the bicycle itself, I care about what the bicycle lets me do.
What's your point? As you basically yourself, there is a need for a bit of maintenance on machinery because it's not really possible to design that away completely. That is, unsurprisingly, the case with bikes, Prusas, Bambus and pretty much all other machines.
Another user made the point: maybe you care about 3D printERS. The vast majority of people care about the printed end result, and buying more printers in the case of massive failure (which is already rare) makes more sense. If you're 3D printing for fun at home, a Bambu will basically never break.
Spending 3 days tracking down the parts for a Prusa, taking it apart, fixing it, realising some settings have gone to shit, fixing it? I hope you have a lot of time to burn in your personal and business life :)
As mentioned in my parent comment, I've made purchase decisions for FDM desktop printers since before Prusa (as a company and product) was around and I've been responsible for 3D printers from a lot of different manufacturers over the years. I'm not attached to any particular company or anything like that.
If I needed more "quality" (in the sense of less visible layer lines) than what comes out of a modern Bambu, Prusa (or some other modern FDM printers), I would use another manufacturing process instead of FDM printing. And no idea where you are in the world but I'm in Europe where I can get Prusa parts from different vendors very quickly and reliably and most of them (including Prusa themselves) have processes in place for B2B and public sector transactions which can be important for professional life as well.
Again: I'm not saying that Bambu printers are not very good in many ways. As I said in my parent comment: I have one. Doesn't change my other points.
Okay, but that is a complete misrepresentation of Prusa machines. You can buy a Prusa today and it'll spit out prints like any other modern printer. And this has been the case for a long time now. Only a small minority of people actually tinker with their machines. It seem like you're attacking a complete projection.
But why are you using the MK3S+ as a comparison point, instead of an MK4/S or Core One?
Because I, unlike many people here apparently, possess a finite quantity of money.
Yeah but you’re comparing the cost to a current gen Prusa and the performance to a last gen Prusa.
You need to pick one generation to compare both.
he was comparing what he had. If you sent him the latest prusa printer, i bet he will compare it for you.
> 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.
Then maybe don’t phrase it like this. And also acknowledge that it’s a nonsense comparison. People that don’t know Prusa model numbers will just assume the OP is talking about comparable products.
“I really want to like Macs, but the new Lenovo I got for work is better and costs half as much as the 5 year old Mac I have in my basement. Why is the west so incompetent?”
Let me clarify. I paid $325 for a used MK3S+ and that seems to be the going rate. The printers at the Makerspace are A1 and A1 minis. The former cost $399 or less on sale, and the latter definitely under $300 always. So yes, the comparison seems fair.
1. You said the Bambu costs half as much when it actually costs more. $399 vs $325
2. I wouldn’t pay more than $200 for a MK3S+ because it’s now 4 generations out of date. Used markets are often overpriced for rapidly advancing technology because most sellers are basing their pricing on what they paid originally not what the item is worth today.
Many times it’s just not worth the hassle for people to sell for what they are actually going to get, so you see a ton of overpriced items just sitting there not selling.
But also I do care about ease of use. I imagine that someone who wants to run their printer for many thousands of hours or who is going to do a lot of tinkering might pay more for a used Prusa than I would.
If we’re talking new comparable printers out today. The Core One and the X1C. They have very similar print quality. The Prusa is $50 cheaper, and the Prusa has many additional benefits.
Chinese government subsidies aside, mass produced 3D printers are always going to enjoy the economies of scale that are difficult to replicate with kits. Prusa printers are awesome pieces of engineering, but sometimes you can just get equally good results for a fraction of the price, in a much more user-friendly "plug and play" fashion, once you have a million of them rolling out of a factory instead of 10,000 kits full of 3D printed parts.
If you ever need to fix a Bambu printer, your opinion may change.
I thought I could fix AMS mainboard by re-soldering connectors, so reached out to support and they helped me find which connectors I needed to buy. Unfortunately, there was more damage, that could be fixed by re-soldering them, so I simply replaced the mainboard and it was easy.
I can't speak for the enclosed models but the A1's self-diagnosis feature and troubleshooting wiki make most repairs and maintenance pretty easy.
I get the feeling that it is not actually the tech involved in the printers that distinguishes Bambu from Prusa, I think it's more about the supply chain and the distribution network. If I go to Prusa right now to order a core one printer from the US it tells me this: Estimated lead time 1–2 weeks
That means it's not even going to ship, from Europe, until then... And guess what? The shipping can range anywhere from 60$ 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.
You could also buy from PrintedSolid, which is a US company that Prusa bought. Looks like they have a free shipping deal, but the lead time is similar for the Core One. Maybe when they catch up with demand, they’ll keep it in stock in the US? I don’t see a lead time for the Mk4.
https://www.printedsolid.com/collections/3d-printers
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.
The Chinese stuff is now more often than not better. You cannot be the world's manufacturer for 30 years and not get good at making stuff.
I always think it is amusing that some people make the mistake of thinking that the Chinese can only make cheap crap(forgetting all their cell phones and apple laptops come from there).
The American market only wants to buy cheap crap so that is what is made and sent. Usually though the skills involved in making something cut-rate are just as applicable to making something top notch.
American manufacturing skills have atrophied as it has moved to a service economy while as you say the Chinese have been boosting manufacturing for 30 years.
I was thinking a snarky thought reading another comment in the chain: "DJI and Anker aren't Chinese brands, because they're good and they have brand reputation".
"Chinese" in my ape brain is Harbor Freight junk, or cheap houseware from Amazon with names like "KRLFOCGY".
Honestly, even harbor freight has some pretty good tools these days. They do have disposable level crap, but even one level above that is quite serviceable.
One thing I've noticed and have also seen on Project Farm YT tool reviews is that Harbor Freight tiers tend to be by country: lowest end is often from mainland China but the next higher tier is from Taiwan.
Some of their icon tools literally beat snap-on
I honestly believe Harbor Freight toolboxes are the best value on the market
I think it makes more sense to separate "cheap" from "crap". US/EU never valued East Asian labor at equal value. Rather than complaining, East Asia just "let them have it" and it wrecked industrial base for both in the long run.
I mean, it doesn't make sense that typical guidance units for missiles are more expensive than DJI drones. Everyone thinks Chinese products got a little more expensive lately, so they must have quit doing cheap part of cheap and crap, and it's just my gut feeling, but, I would be not so sure about that.
Maybe America needs a planned economy and minority ”re-education” camps to boost production.
Or maybe just better accounting for the total lifecycle and disposal of products. If a company had to pay a bond to cover the long term impact of their shit products I bet we'd see higher quality goods.
Good news everyone!
It's very common to have multiple chinese brands competing against each other, throwing out better products every year... with western companies maybe having one or two products.
See something like Roomba vs. Xiaomi/Roborock/Deebot/Ecovacs/etc.
This is a real example how western IP stagnates western economy and it's making it not competitive - the IP law makes it easy for incumbents to kill of iteration and competition.
It shouldn't be a surprise to people that quality isn't there if you buy a nameless thing at the cheapest possible price, regardless of where it's made.
On the other hand, China has major brands in many markets. DJI drones, Anker chargers and cords, Lenovo computers, Polestar cars. TCL TVs and Haier appliances (which I believe also owns the GE consumer brand) are also very common. Roborock vacuums seem to be considered a better value than Roomba now.
It's an interesting counterpoint to the old cliche about paying for brands. Clearly buying on price alone is foolish, as is not considering the reputation of the maker of a product.
It's the exact same thing that happened with Japanese cars. Believe it or not, Japanese autos used to be considered cheap junk in the 70s and early 80s.
Same thing with Germany in the 19th century: "inferior copies of English designs". Those who don't know history will be forced to repeat past mistakes.
I've recently been putting together a large aquarium build for the first time in ~15 years, and it's really shocking how good and how cheap the Chinese stuff is now. Of particular note is lighting, where the price/W on non-Chinese equipment is 4-10x the Chinese equivalent.
> a proper "Engrish" instruction manual
At what point do the instruction manuals stop catering to Engrish and start focusing on 汉字?
Recently I've bought a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress and its box and manual are 100% in Chinese. Google Translate took care of it.
Why did I buy a Xiaomi beard trimmer on AliExpress? It looks like all western brands decided to keep using NiMH batteries on their designs, and I really don't like my trimmers dying in the middle of a cut and me, now with a half-shaved beard, having to wait 12 hours for it to recharge. Xiaomi did something very revolutionary: used a Li-Ion battery.
Interesting. I never cared about what my Japanese beard trimmer uses as battery, because whenever it dies on me (which is long after prominently lighting a red LED), it works instantly fine connected to the wall to let me finish my cut, and can take however long it wants to recharge after that ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
You see, some Philips MBA decided to pinch 0.0001 pennies and forgo installing a red LED to warn the user the battery is drained, and a diode to allow it to run from the wall.
Happy to give some profit to their competitor.
I quite honestly fear this day. (But for other reasons, eg we might have to go to china for top conferences, universities, jobs, etc.).
It's already here. All the best cheap microcontrollers have datasheets written purely in Chinese. Most Westerners don't use them because the datasheets are written purely in Chinese, and therefore, Western products with cheap microcontrollers use inferior ones.
I myself have been preparing for that day, learning simplified Mandarin and trying to expose myself to Chinese online presence. :)
I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare, but they are getting closer, and if that ever properly happens, I'm quite ready, and if not, at least I get a whole new language out of it and a better understanding of a huge culture that felt a lot more out of reach before.
For context, I'm from Russia, so maybe it's easier for me to trade one foreign hegemony for another than for many others..
> I'm not sure that China will ever "overtake" the US in global technology mindshare
Is that adequately measured from the English side of the internet? I honestly don't know. I don't participate in Chinese technology communities online and have zero basis to measure any amount of tech mindshare that it has. I do know that a number of English based tech forums are entirely dependent on a select few microcontrollers for their builds. Surely on the Chinese side of things there are discussions going on about who is building the next cheapest microcontrollers and how they achieve it?
I do know that absolutely nothing that we have in the "West" can compare to what hardware hackers can accomplish in Shenzhen thanks to the overwhelming amount of electronics knowledge and availability in the area. I have to wonder how much of that mindshare "we" actually have.
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.
1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBItmykqu0I
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.
Military and government buy locally produced things, for a good reason. This allows some industries to re-shore.
Retail customers sometimes buy something not based on price and quality alone, but due to fashion and other such considerations. This works, but only when people have enough discretionary income to spend on such self-expression. Quite many people can't afford the luxury.
China will simply spend 1/10 of the effort to copy it and produce it for less. What is your recourse here?
Tariffs?
Great, so your country will probably suffer inflation. Otherwise, your neighboring country can spend the same amount to get 10x more resources (think GPUs).
California Forever is a weird network state I wouldn't wish to be a part of.
> 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.
True, but that hasn't stopped big companies from not open sourcing the crown jewels, just for good measure.
Apple post 2011 has never open sourced their UI toolkits, Google has never open sourced their search engine, etc.
The code for both of these is largely a liability. You cannot market a competitive offering in the OS or search spaces with code alone.
It's so much of a liability that Google and Apple don't dare release it, even 27+ years and 14+ years after the original release.
> 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.
I was thinking along the lines of, for example, a mobile phone company that controls the worlds most popular open source smart phone operating system. In theory, since they are guiding the development of the mobile OS, they should be the first to be able to release hardware that takes advantage of the newest versions of the software. They could tailor their hardware to perfectly fit the future of the software.
That software reality you describe is not too far off. Not with LLMs alone, but definitely seen the software copy machines accelerate. Any novel idea launched on an app store that sees any traction or attention will be flooded with close imitations in weeks.
This was already reality before LLMs. If you put a successful game on any app store, expect Chinese and Korean clones of it within 2 weeks.
I'm sorry, but isn't this a job for tariffs? Tariffs are how you impose an artificial cost on some exporter who is using an unfair subsidy, whether slave labor, bad environmental regulation, non-enforcement of the intellectual property system of the importing country, etc... all the way down to simple direct subsidy and willingness to take a loss in order to ruin the importing country's domestic industry.
The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets."
Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"
Tariffs only work if you have alternatives you can buy. China is the only reasonable source of procurement on the vast majority of goods in the world.
> 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
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
What problem do you think needs fixing?
Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
> Dependence on foreign power with potentially misaligned goal? Collapse of manufacturing sector, leading to rise in poverty?
Note that this has been the reality of countries in the Third World who aligned themselves with the US, a foreign power whose interests were misaligned with theirs.
The US is now having a taste of their own medicine.
Now? The lower and middle class in the US has been dealing with this for decades.
Not just the third world. Plenty of first-world countries too.
There is no misaligned goal. China isn’t out to destroy the US.
It’s more jealousy of being overpowered. It’s sad but I think this is ultimately the brutal truth we have to accept. There’s no other logical outlook on this. Literally if left to its own devices China isn’t interested in the war.
The US is out to do everything to stop Chinas ascendency to become the new world power. And of course both sides as a result will increase military presence but neither side wants to engage in war.
Why have they built innovative Taiwan invasion barges if they do not want war?
Building weapons to sink American carriers and boats and having a limited nuclear arsenal can be seen as trying to prevent the US from being able to blockade China from it's food and energy imports.
But there is no possible way to wave away the literal Taiwan invasion barges and the planning they signal. That's not something you build unless you plan on invading your island neighbor.
They want Taiwan. That's for sure. But they don't want war. War is a last resort action they will go to, to get Taiwan.
But war with the US? They don't want it and are trying to avoid it at all costs.
Taiwan is none of the US's business right? The war here is in actuality really just the US starting it. The US in the end will have to make a choice here. Do we fuck with China and Taiwan or do we not?
So in short. They want Taiwan. War can happen because the US is trying to start war. So the barges you see are in preperation for that.
Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country".
Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought.
>Do you mean they don't "want war with the US"? Because right now you seem to be saying that China "doesn't want war, they just want to annex another sovereign country".
From Chinas point of view it's not another sovereign country. But from the US pov, it's a pawn they can use to fuck with China as much as possible to stop the ascendency to power. Also the US doesn't recognize Taiwan as a sovereign country. They never fucking did.
>Likewise, I wouldn't describe having defensive allies as "trying to start war". That's starting to sound like the Russian "we're only bombing them because they didn't immediately surrender, so it's their fault" school of thought.
Taiwan was never an ally. I'm Taiwanese. I know. The USA doesn't give a flying fuck about Taiwan. Like I said the UN and the US never recognized Taiwan as a sovereign country and the US has NOT promised to back Taiwan in the event of a take over.
Two things America cares about: Technology and Power. So right now you're busy extracting OUR technology by making us build unprofitable chip factories on your soil AND you're refusing to allow China to have that technology as well. It is WELL KNOWN among taiwanese people that the US factories are fucking useless from a profit perspective.
Either way. War is not possible. If China and the US go to war, rest assured if the China starts losing, they're going to prevent loss by slaughtering everyone in DC with a nuclear bomb. The losing country in it's desperation will turn to nukes. Even the US can do that. Imagine Chinese troops at the doorstep of the whitehouse, what will trump do? Nuke half of China that's what.
So war technically won't happen. Nobody in actuallity wants it. It's all sabre rattling.
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.
> and puts China in an excellent position to rug pull American society if they want
Those nations that were close allies of the US before 2025 are watching American society "rug pull" itself straight to hell right now with little to no effort at all from China.
The people of those nations are watching that, but they are unaware that they stand on the same rug. But their leaders at least understand that.
> Being entirely dependent on Chinese manufacturing to make anything.
I'm sorry, it's very hard to take this sort of concern seriously.
The express goal of US's take on neoliberalism was to dump all manufacturing onto countries like China while abusing IP to prevent anyone else, China included, from ever being able to compete.
Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul?
The US needs to put on their big boy pants and figure out ways to compete in the same terms that everyone else had to endure, just like the whole world was forced to learn how to deal with that. If someone else has the IP you need, pay them. Or do you honestly expect that arbitrary rules are only acceptable if they clearly benefit you alone?
> Now that the rules that the US abused to stifle innovation are being used by someone else to protect their own investment, you suddenly cry foul?
I don’t know about the person you replied to, but I think a lot of us have watched US factories closing down and moving to other counties in the last couple decades and it’s just been a constantly disappointing train wreck. Auto manufacturing moving to Mexico and Canada, various factories shutting down because they can’t compete with foreign prices or volume, and politicians who happily didn’t care beyond lip service - the only reason it matters to any politician now is because trump brought attention to it (though accidentally) with the stupid tariff business.
The people who actually could’ve done something have sat here for the last few decades and been largely inactive other than giving deals to Big Tech to open data centers while making empty promises about “bringing jobs back” because no one was offering the kind of kickbacks that Bezos and Musk can throw around, and now they’re only making any stink because it looks better than not.
Sounds like modern neoliberalism, and it's proponents, are the big mistake here to me, and those shortsighted enough to offshore work of all sorts to countries that aren't close allies should get a big spanking.
Regardless of whether or not it's "fair" or "right" (not that our adversaries do any more than lip service to those concepts anyways), we've got to do something rather than just lay down and take it. If nothing else, there are a lot of people that need to answer as to why if you want all these labor and environmental laws and so on, why it's ok to buy and do things somewhere that's not aligned with those. If you wouldn't subject you and yours to something, it should be illegal to cheat and make someone else do it. "Comparative advantage" is bullshit excuses to offload labor and environmental abuse because it's poor vulnerable brown people somewhere else and I need my cheap shit now.
> 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.
> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.
I mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.
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.
edit: grammar
> 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.
Some people want a hobby. some people want a tool to use.
One must admire China’s pivot from 30 years of essentially ignoring IP and patent law to the detriment of Western companies, to now weaponizing IP and patent law against the rest of the world.
American industry also copied plenty from Britain and Germany during its industrialization in 19th century. Patents didn't really apply to foreign IP.
Sure, but they apply the moment you start selling back to the country that issued the patent. At least in theory.
They even copied lawfare techniques from American corporations, lol.
It will be "interesting" where this takes us. If the American government decides to just ignore Chinese patents then we could see the Berne convention become a paper tiger (or even more of one than it already is)
I hope that's the outcome. Down with intellectual property!
Probably more that IP laws and their practical implementation need to be fixed. I have a hard time seeing how what you suggest won't inevitably benefit big, powerful, consolidated and influential players at the expense of the small, inovative ones, further slowing down the pace of innovation. Of course an even more obvious "fix" would be to outlaw "big, powerful, consolidated and influential players", oh, wait!
If you read into how/why Hollywood film industry was created, it isn't something new.
Interesting, I didn't know.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_Picture_Patents_Compa...
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.
Or criticze the west allowing patent law to stagnate and regress innovation and their economies.
Capitalism, at least the American version of it, has a rich history of ignoring property rights, labor laws and ethics, regulations, etc. If anything, China has, and is, out-Westernizing the Western countries.
I really love takes like this. Talk about China as an emerging power in the 21st century while excusing them using tactics from the 19th. 10/10
I don't think China is necessarily being excused, but even immoral actions can draw admiration, due to the sheer complexity and brazeness, especially considering that on paper, the groups these actions are being done to are not groups of toddlers, they're equality aggressive countries themselves, historically.
Hi! Josef here! I was just recently sharing a little update on socials, here is a copy:
Since I posted my “OHW is dead” article, you’ve been asking me about “that patent”. I didn’t want you to miss the forest (thousands of filings since 2020) just because of one tree. But let’s take a look now. In this case: the MMU multiplexer (we open sourced it 9 years ago). Anycubic (another IDG Capital-backed company) used the tactic of filing in China for an easy initial grant: CN 222407171 U > DE 20 2024 100 001 U1 > US 2025/0144881 A1. The playbook: file a Chinese utility model (10-year patent, same protections, lower examination, already granted) claim that priority in Germany (again as a utility model, already granted) file in the US. Cheap to file, but expensive and time-consuming to fight. I already wrote why prior art isn’t a magic wand that solves it immediately in my article ⤵ And there are many more, we just found a new juicy one!
Edit: Emojis stripped from the original, tried to fix it a bit ;-)
All of Open Source needs a sunlit patent pool, a searchable database of documented inventions AND all of the follow on ideas around them. This could provide a way to force patent examiners to do their jobs and allow the Open Source Community to crowd source invention bombing the proprietary world.
How does one lookup these patents? They need more exposure so they can be refuted.
I work in a different industry, power tools. Somehow the USPTO allowed Milwaukee to patent a circ saw that spins at a certain rpm...
The things that get through the patent office are braindead. Patents are just weaponized legal minefields now. They've totally lost their original intent.
I recall a container of multimeters seized at the border because they were the wrong color of yellow...
I may have bought an American meter once, but it was a fluke. Never again.
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.
> Great! Here is a few million go make AI.
So how is this different from the US? It’s VC’s making the choices not the gov - seems little different. Maybe scale?
> They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.
The chinese economy seems like proof this is a valid strategy that pays off in aggregate. Yet when gov here attempts any kind of economic development policy it seems largely unpopular.
> you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money
So like the american defense industry then?
VC's gauge what the market wants, the Chinese government is one person who decides what he wants.
One of these is grossly inefficient compared to the other, despite the final outcome looking similar from some angles.
Do you genuinely believe dictator-for-life\\esc\\esc president Xi Jinping is picking projects personally?
And if the problem is just efficiency, that’s not really a moral failing. It’s just an optimization issue.
I’m not defending the chinese system because i think it’s good - i’m saying it’s not substantially different from the american system. A group of rich oligarchs and a couple semi-randomly selected smart+lucky sociopaths get to pick industries that get flooded with cash based on how much money they think they will make or if they will stroke their ego - not based on if they will be good for the planet or the people on it.
I’d actually prefer a world where anybody who wanted to start a business was given a shot and money to make it happen based on if people want to work on it. Not blessed oligarchs, but the actual people who will build the thing or use the thing.
"Capitalism good, but state capitalism bad".
Not only are US VCs dumping billions in shitty Bluetooth connected dog collars and other kinds of crap, apparently according to you because that's "what the market wants", it's also an incredibly stupid reading of how the Chinese government works.
They target specific industries that are important, according to them, like solar panels, batteries, cars, etc. They then dump billions into a bunch of companies, and see which ones come out alive and on top.
As it stands, it's been pretty accurate for many things, and has made them market leaders on many, many things. But sure, jerk off the VC model, after all YC thinks the market wants... AIs and ERPs. Woo.
I'm failing to see where our descriptions diverge. You aren't acknowledging is that China has unbelievable waste and crushing debt from it (provincial debt, because they typically finance these projects).
Of course the system is great for getting projects build and advancing. China has a massive workforce to fund it's money hose. It's awful for doing it efficiently, because there is no incentive to be efficient when you never have to pay the creditor back.
Can't tell if this post is against VC system or just China?
Yes
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.
I'm not sure "economic incentives" are what most people classify as a "planned economy", unless you want to take the broadest, most expansive possible understanding of that term. All Western nations would have planned economies under such a definition given the existence of tax incentives and such.
"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?
That's how planned economies worked under "proper" communism in the Soviet Union or pre-Deng and how we ended up with stories about factories only baking giant screws to meet weight quotas to the switch to tiny screws to meet quantity quotas while no medium-sized screws people actually needed for produced.
Two distinct words night be useful to distinguish between planned without any market feedback and heavy industrial policy like we see in China now. In fact the CCP recently voiced their impatience with Cuba refusing to introduce market-oriented reforms.
fair enough —- I need to read up more on the usage, but I find it surprising for “planned economy” to imply the former
The CIA has it's own venture capital arm (In-Q-Tel) for the same reason, it helped fund Google, Palantir and Anduril.
I mean they are 2nd largest GDP economy with "world factory" title
some words you said can be true of course but its clearly working out for them
There are some pretty big cracks underneath the surface. But yes they certainly have been successful at drawing in the manufacturing at the very least, even if it's ultimately not very sustainable.
"There are some pretty big cracks underneath the surface"
they are just as vulnerable as western counterpart has, I can assure you that just media narrative that make it overblown. Yes western can sanction them and hurt them but they also hurt western economy in the process
I'm not referring to sanctions or tariffs. I'm referring to inefficient resource allocation, debt, unsustainably low margins, companies not making any profit, etc.
but its just trade off, they know what they are doing
in return of macro and focused economic growth in key strategic areas. in the long run they would win
CCP has many criticsm, but waste and ineffecient isnt one of them
Not IP related, but I built a Voron printer a while ago, which is sort of the last word in DIY printers. It's not so much a printer as a parts list and set of instructions, but something that's not lost on me is that most of the core components are Chinese parts.
I don't just mean screws and bearings (though they are too), you might install a board like this [0] which is a Chinese designed board I'd describe as open-ish. You get the firmware and schematics, but not a BOM or board layout. But that doesn't really matter, because nobody is going to make this board themselves anyways, you're going to buy it assembled, from China. There are other boards, but they are more expensive.
The majority of Voron builds use Chinese hotends. There are a lot of custom "for Voron" kits and components being made and sold there. Can you find a PEI-coated spring steel bed that isn't made in China? So while it's definitely more open than a Bambu printer, it's not really any less dependent on China.
I guess it would be technically possible to do a "no China" build, which would be an interesting (but expensive) project.
0 - https://github.com/bigtreetech/BIGTREETECH-OCTOPUS-V1.0
I bought my Voron Trident as a kit (from a Chinese company) and it is wonderful. As you say, there is an almost complete dependence on components made in China, but at least I can swap out / fix / upgrade parts as much as I like. I've also been able to make use of the schematics on the controller boards to troubleshoot issues myself and other people were having.
Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is "mine" and I don't need to worry about some company suddenly taking features and capabilities out from under my feet as Bambu has done. For anyone that feels strongly about this kind of thing, dive in and build a Voron.
Agreed! I love my Trident. This is the best hobby I have taken up in a long time. So fulfilling. Especially now that I'm learning freecad. Getting started can be expensive. There is an awesome community on discord that loves to help, and there are lots of small businesses that sell every part you can think of, custom mods from github, and if you email them they will respond promptly and personally. 10/10
+1 for FreeCAD. It has come a long way with the release of 1.0 Yeah it is still well behind the big players, but it can do what I need it to do as a hobbyist and there are lots of nice improvements like the new transform tool in the weekly releases. Some of the folks on the FreeCAD Discord actually suggest treating FreeCAD as a rolling release and using the weeklies rather than sit on 1.0 until 1.1 comes out.
I also appreciate those folks that model stuff in FreeCAD and share their models along with the .stl files on Thingiverse or Printables. It is really a good way to discover new ways of using the program.
I agree, we have Bambus at work, and they are an outright pain to fix compared to my Voron. And things do break. On our new H2D, we had some filment get jammed in the extruder. Fixing it basically entails taking the entire front of the toolhead apart, dealing with fragile custom-pcb ribbon cables, and trying to not get the grease from the greasy parts on the other parts.
On the Vorons, everything is just behind an M3 screw or ten.
I was thinking the same but got a prusa kit instead. Have you use or built a prusa before - how do they compare? At some point I’ll want two printers and was thinking a voron or similar would be perfect because I could print parts for it now.
I think the beauty of voron is that if you lost access to Chinese parts tomorrow you could source replacements elsewhere. Some would be difficult at first, like PCBs, but most like stepper motors are commodity parts that are easily replaced
Their business model might be dead, I don't know. But the latest Prusa printers are as far as I know not really open - I can't download the schematics for free and make a clone, can I? And also a truely open schematic that I could download that way wouldn't be affected by patents, as long as I'm not selling it. Granted, commercial development with open core might be in trouble.
But first, that is not a technical nor a business problem, that sounds like a political problem. Prusa is literally the leading european name in the 3D-printing industry. Surely they can get an appointment with some government officials, who are concerned about manufacturing capabilities and future technologies - who pull some strings, and then every patent clerk will receive a memo to double check the relevant patents when someone tries to register them.
Second, Chinese patents have a different weight than EU/US patents. As he writes, they are a dime a dozen. Probably not worth caring about, unless they are targeting the Chinese market. And if they are, the best defense would probably to register some patents their themselves.
>schematic that I could download that way wouldn't be affected by patents, as long as I'm not selling it
not true, there's no personal use exemption for patents
There effectively is a common law exemption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_exemption
the research exemption, at least in the us, is /very/ limited
China won’t enforce the patent of a foreign company against a domestic one. If anything, filing a Chinese patent assists copying and clones, because there’s less reverse engineering to do.
Wouldn’t Prusa abandoning open hardware (for some components) be a prominent example showing that open hardware is dying?
If the US cared about remaining competitive with China, the government would attack this. Example approaches:
a) Smallish hammer: disallow priority based on Chinese patents.
b) Big hammer: if anyone wants to manufacture anything in the US and sell to the US market, give an automatic patent workaround. For example, there could be compulsory licensing, at enforced and genuinely reasonable prices, for all patents, foreign and domestic. If someone wanted to build an SLS printer or an e-ink display here ten years ago, they should have been allowed to while paying a small amount (small enough that the whole enterprise remained profitable) to the respective patent holders. Submarine patents should be completely inapplicable: if I opt to buy compulsory licenses, there should be a limited period for any patent holders to announce themselves, and then the patent holders could fight over the (capped) royalties while I continue to manufacture and sell the product.
c) b, with the system built in a way that works for open source too. I should be able to publish open source things with zero risk regardless of patents. I should be able to sell them and other people should be able to deploy them on their own under terms like (b) that make it economical to do so.
Requiring an annual patent maintenance tax proportional to pre-declared fair licensing fee will ensure fairness for everyone. Including foreign patents. So whichever jurisdiction, patent holders want to retain the rights, can pay the tax annually. We can even come up with a public domain threshold as well. If 1000 people / company paid your pre-declared licensing fee, it becomes public domain. And no more per device license fee. 1 Patent, 1 Fee, 1 Annual Tax.
Same for copyrights.
I think I agree with you.
That being said, I have doubts anything will change because I have a feeling that this system is continuing to "work as designed".
These failings are exploitable and since the US government is somewhat bought and paid for, this is how it works. The intent might be to keep it this way.
I run a company in this space...
First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.
The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/
There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.
> if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.
The Chinese market is notorious for not respecting patents, though, so clearly that isn't working.
I recall reading 10+ years ago that Chinese economists were calling for stronger IP laws in China to accelerate their technical progress. Maybe the government listened.
This matches the economic literature [1] about the historical development of other industrialized nations as well, including the US. The theory is: when a country is starting to industrialize, they prefer weak IP rights to reduce friction in copying and learning rapidly ("knowledge diffusion".) However, when their industries mature, develop a strong technical base, and start competing by pushing the state of the art through their own inventions, they tend to prefer strong IP rights to protect their investments in R&D.
It is pretty clear China has reached that stage.
[1] There is a lot more out there, but this is what I could find offhand: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/jid.3844?ms...
If you can find prior art to invalidate the nemesis system held by Warner Bros, that would be a great way to get some free press for your services.
At least for and via gamers.
I do think there needs to be reforms about non-practicing entities holding large patent portfolios. Maybe we should have some kind of FRAND (or FRAND-like) requirements for their portfolios.
I gave the e-ink example quite intentionally. The patents were held by a practicing entity. You could buy their mediocre implementation of their excellent underlying invention at an outrageous price and probably not with the specs you wanted.
I’m all for rewarding inventors like this for their inventions. I do not think that the reward should include any sort of ability to stifle use and further development of the invention.
The law should make it possible to build, sell, and profit from a better e-ink product at a lower price. The law should make it possible to sell things that use H.265 at a credible price without needing to be involved in the mess of figuring out who owns what patent. If patent holders, practicing or otherwise, want to sue each other, fine, but I don’t think there should be any requirement for the companies building and selling products to be parties to those legal messes at all.
As far as I know, radio in the US actually mostly works this way. To broadcast a copyrighted song, you pay a fee, and that’s it.
A genuine Question. Is open hardware even possible at some point? The advances in quality and speed are nothing short but impressive. I started 3d printing stuff in my basement one year ago (Ender V3 Plus). With the quality and speed improvements, comes technology which gets more complex every year. Companies spend millions to archive this. Why would they share it? I remember building drones in my basement (still on my wall) with open source software on the flight controllers. Now I can get a drone from DJI for less money with more features, in a smaller from factor, longer flight time, pre build and under 249g. Ofc this comes at the cost of repairability, control and trust. However I can still buy the hardware I used years ago. If I wanted to, I can build a drone by myself. I guess the same will happen to 3d printers.
> Is open hardware even possible at some point?
It already is. And its been chaotic and amazing at the same time.
We already have open source:
5DoF 3d printers with slicers
Fixed wing and quad/hexa/octocopters
Medical drug fabrication (Four Thieves)
Electrochemical synthesis lab
Open source flow batteries
Stops and starts of industrial tooling (open source ecology)
I'm going to say something that is becoming less and less controversial: copyrights and patents are the real drag here. Individuals can get patents, but can't actually enforce. So they end as weapons as companies go after each other.
Copyright is also often intertwined into patents, so that if a thing isn't covered by a patent, copyright (with firmware) takes over. Then the DMCA and anti-circumvention shit.
The other problem here in the USA is almost impossible to source parts directly, or small fab labs that can do operations.
I was looking for a 5mm thick 500x500mm aluminum plate to be cut. Waterjet, plasma, whatever. I wanted it slightly undercut. I made blueprints in DXF and pdf. I contacted 2 waterjet companies, no response. Contacted a welding company with plasma table. No response. Down the list, no response.
As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
Did you try SendCutSend? They are in the US and this type of thing is their main line of business.
I wasn't aware of them.
I did the thing I knew worked, and ordered from China. Got here in 2 weeks, and was reasonably priced.
And I didn't have to faff around with damned inch measurements. All the American shops demanded inches... Then again, they also never responded.
>As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.
Trying to make a thing and not sourcing stuff internationally is almost impossible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
I think "sourcing internationally" is one thing and avoiding China (or any single country for that matter) is another. The current administration puts a lot of effort on being independent from everyone else. I think that approach is misguided. We have allies and we need them anyways. Unlike the Soviet Union, China has 3x the population of the US. If we want to have weight on the international stage, we need our allies. If we can source pieces from multiple countries and ideally from allies, it's IMO a very minor issue. Always needing pieces that only come from a single country, especially one that's not a liberal democracy, is a much bigger issue.
That said, I think Chinese manufacturing has a huge advantage from factories being close to each other. Getting your PCB for prototyping in a few hours instead of 10 days is a huge advantage.
That wasn't really the problem I had.
I'm also not a Sinophobe. I've ordered plenty from China. I even have a XiaoHongShu account.
As an inventor, one thing that greatly speeds up making stuff is a rapid order and getting parts. And in my case, I literally needed a rectangular sheet of aluminum. I did all the CAD work, submitted to local companies who could do it, and not a peep. I would have paid the American premium of getting it made locally.
I'm also not the only person with this problem. I know others who wanted to hire a welder for a 2 hour job. Even went to the Union hall. Nobody. Nada. And the guy was also part of the IBEW as well. Doesn't matter if you're paying.
And again, this was over a metal plate. No powder coating. No special treatment. Nothing.
I know its a very boomerish thing to say, but its like companies in the USA really don't want to work. My thing would have been small. But I would have brought more small fabrication jobs, and informed local makers that they could do this. But no.
"I know its a very boomerish thing to say, but its like companies in the USA really don't want to work. My thing would have been small"
This rings truer than it should. We had a locksmith out to give us an estimate to install several high-security locks that I can only assume would have been fairly good business. Never heard back from them. We didn't bother following up with them either because if they can't even bother writing up the estimate, how can I trust their work?
I wonder if it's a lack of competition in part based on a labor shortage and tight occupational licensing
You could get that for $75 to $150 (depending on lead time and whether you want 5052 or 6061) from SendCutSend or OshCut (both US-based), as long as you're willing to use 3/16 inch (4.7 mm) plate instead of 5 mm. They'll also bend it for you if you want.
But at a higher level you're right: availability of fabrication services in the U.S. is pretty poor, and most shops are optimized for a few larger orders, not small mix orders like yours.
maybe you're just very unlucky because there are a number of places that do this right from their website ( another commenter mentioned sendcutsend as just one example ).
Open hardware for 3D printers is actually thriving. There's a whole fleet of community designed hardware, with most innovations to consumer 3D printing still originating in the DIY community.
Multiple manufacturers have direct contact with community members to produce custom hardware at a small but affordable scale, and keeping up with rapid iterations and multiple hardware improvements throughout the year.
Some of the most cutting edge as well as niche 3D printing hardware available to consumers are being sold on small webshops operating out of someone's garage.
If anything, we're in a golden age right now. 3D printing in 2025 is a very exciting place to be.
As a person who chose to buy an Elegoo Centauri Carbon rather than upgrade his Ordbot Quantum w/ a heated bed and enclosure and to then try to re-design it to use a CoreXY motion system, I would agree that is exactly the path which we are on --- the new printer came in at a lower price than just the initial parts order for heated bed and enclosure, let alone a different motion system. All of the printers which I wanted (Positron, Prusa Core One) or was considering (Bambu Labs P1S) were over twice or almost twice the price of the ECC.
That Elegoo seems to be supporting open standards: https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/elegoo-launches-aut... was one thing which allowed me to justify placing that order.
They also seem to have major bugs, maybe even some serious security issues: https://www.reddit.com/r/elegoo/comments/1mbhnmn/centauri_ca...
That's why I've only been printing to mine using a USB stick and it's not on my network.
> Is open hardware even possible at some point?
Think about this question for a second and you'll realize that it's rooted in consumerism. We always want 'quality and speed', but most of all, convenience and apparent low cost (that 'apparent' part is important). What if the product wasn't cheap or the best you could get? What if the product requires more attention than being just a consumer? Conventional wisdom says that they'd be dead on arrival. But consumerism also comes with consumer exploitation.
There are numerous examples of this today. People yearn for dump large LCD panels (cheaper ones, not the ad panels or large monitors) instead of the sluggish, invasive, ad-ridden, irreparable and annoying smart TVs that we have today. Configurable modular laptops and phones like the Framework and Fairphone are enjoying a comeback today after decades of soldered-on components (even the battery), individually paired modules, glued on casings (instead of the convenient screwed on ones), horrendously costly repairs and depressingly short service life. The (paper) printer market is so rife with exploitation that their CEOs consider their customers as 'investments' that are lossy if they don't buy ink cartridges on subscription! Similar story in the automotive sector. People annoyed by full touch screen control panels, heated seats on subscription, parts that cannot be serviced by anyone else.. I could go on for hours.
It's very tempting to give up the reparable and open hardware in favor of mass produced better performing products on account of the cost, effort and time needed to deal with the former. But as their market dries up, the inevitable enshittification of the latter sets in. In pursuit of the continued satisfaction of the shareholders, it's no longer enough for the producers to take hefty margins on each unit you purchase. They move to squeezing every last penny off of you by seeking rent on products that shouldn't be under subscriptions in the first place. Eventually, you end up spending more than if you were using the dumb devices. And then predictably like clockwork, people start lamenting about the feature creep, loss of serviceability, loss of quality and greed.
It's at this point that dumb devices market open up again. The market is small and products are costlier owing to the low scale of production. But they grow a dedicated customer base and healthy revenues that improve over time. So with this hindsight, how about we stick with the open and reparable hardware? If their market doesn't crash, their costs wont rise either. This long term strategic decision can help consumers protect their rights and their savings. But that never happens. This is one scam that the world falls for again and again and again, no matter how many times it plays out.
Stuff like this is sad, especially looking at the costs involved.
It just shows the stark contrast: China is interested in building and being competitive (through unruly means as well as legitimate ones) while the US is a 'lawfare society' prioritizing paperwork and bureaucracy and not moving to help actual physical industries that matter.
We don't need more of our economy relying on lawyers and paper pushers. We need builders and innovators back at the forefront. China gets this.
This could have been an interesting take from anyone but Prusa. While they've earned themselves a great deal of goodwill from past contributions to the ecosystem, they're a failing company pivoting to dark patterns in an attempt to cling to relevance. It's heart breaking to see they still haven't been able to take a good hard look at themselves, and understand their own role in why they are scrambling.
Blog posts like these might be heralding the beginning of the end for Prusa.
And with Prusa, falls non-Chinese 3D printing.
what dark patterns?
As someone who is interested in owning a 3D printer someday and is leaning towards Prusa, I'm very interested in what dark patterns you're alleging.
Please elaborate
Your comment is essentially just an ad hominem that doesn't react to the content of the OP, or enumerate any of its claims. You are claiming to know better, but not substantiating anyhing. It's FUD, and the worst kind of comment, because it doesn't take the debate seriously.
Even if the patents are only valid in China, this is going to hurt western companies a lot. If you're manufacturing a product in China, you'll need to either:
1. Pay the patent trolls, giving them power and hurting your margins
2. Move manufacturing to a more expensive, less competitive country
In the long run, you could argue that point 2 will lead to domestic manufacturing which everyone wants. But unless you can find a way to make these companies actually competitive (e.g. tariffs on chinese printers), I think the more likely scenario is these hamstrung companies will wither and go out of business.
Citation from blog: > The fact you hold a prior art in your hand, doesn’t mean much. The patent will still prevent you from importing/selling etc of the “infringing” stuff.
Could you please explain this to me? Let's say, they (Chinese) patent some complex part of my open-hw 3D printer, how this prevents me from importing parts of my 3D printer from other countries? Let's say from China. Company, which originally patent trolled me, must sue me first, no? And they care about patents? Since when?
Suppose you created the original prior art and want to get your original design manufactured on China. The Chinese manufacturer might the best in the world and cheapest source but unwilling to defy the Chinese patent.
Your tiny order isn’t worth their whole business, but if you did the original design that feels patently* unfair to you.
* sorry, couldn’t help myself
Having spent my whole career in the manufacturing tech world after starting in the maker world (I started HackPgh), I love Open Hardware, but find it not a great fit beyond boards (Arduino, RPi, etc.).
I think the core issue is one of how expensive / complex the iteration cycle is, with even sophisticated circuit boards being possible to make on a hobbyist budget, but sophisticated 3D printers and other complex machine tools quickly get beyond what a single person's budget / shop can really support the development vs. mass produced closed machines.
Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
I've been asking: "When was the last time a new hardware dev product got >50% market share throughout industry?", and I think the answer is SolidWorks in ~1995 making affordable(ish) 3D CAD software.
This means all hardware dev tools have lagged, not just open source ones.
My take is that we need more non VC funding (gov't / foundation) of the basic science and early R&D, as VCs are forcing these companies to commercialize too quickly, and the tech doesn't get there, as operations is hard enough, let alone with half-baked tech. This happened to my last company Plethora, doing automated CAM + rapid CNC.
I did a podcast series on this:
https://manufacturinghappyhour.com/112-accelerating-the-pace...
> Add to this that even the extremely well funded hardware startups: MakerBot, FormLabs, DesktopMetal, OnShape, etc. have all either totally failed to create better tech at all, or have been quickly commodified without a major impact to the hardware development process.
They simply succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money, and then especially stop investing in software, which is where Bambu have their edge, as many of their improvements are software related.
i.e. if you spend upfront in software you can create an improved experience with the same parts for every subsequent unit. The Chinese have actually internalized this lesson, while in the west we have forgotten it.
Re: "succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money"
I don't find that true of any of the companies I mentioned at least. They all were/are going hard on development, but the tech problems were just really hard compared to funding, and they never made any major breakthroughs on capability.
Chinese companies have been great at going from 1 to n in the 3D printing space with a lot of cost, reliability, etc. refinements, but I haven't seen a transformative technology from them yet either (re: comment on ~1995 SolidWorks being the last one).
Reminds me of cellular phones / I hope that one corporation doesn’t lock down the 3d printing industry in a similar way to cell phones.
We really have two types of smartphones Android based and iOS Apple. The patents surrounding wireless radio transmission and cellular connectivity esssentially make it impossible for any competition outside of mega corporations.
The cost is so high that likely only Microsoft could attempt (again) such a move or maybe Amazon or Space X.
“ Extensive Patent Portfolio: Motorola has a large number of patents related to cellular technology, with over 1,900 patent families considered essential to 3G, 4G, and 5G standards, according to Lenovo. Strategic Acquisition: Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2011 was largely driven by the desire to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio to defend Android. Licensing Agreements: Motorola has entered into cross-licensing agreements with other companies, such as Sharp, to share their respective wireless communication technologies. Standard-Essential Patents (SEPs): Motorola holds SEPs related to mobile phone signal standards, obligating them to license these patents to competitors on fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory terms. Patent Disputes: Motorola has been involved in patent infringement lawsuits, including cases against companies like Hytera and Apple, regarding their cellular technology patents. ”
This post unfortunately isn’t drawing the necessary distinctions between utility models, published applications, and issued patents. And it isn’t focusing on the claims. Patent law is complicated and it is easy to draw the wrong inferences.
You can follow the prosecution of the US application here: https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/applications/18608960
TFA didn't really make the problem clear to me. I think it something like this, but I'm not sure. Can anybody clarify?
Problem (?): We can't produce open hardware for things that others have patented. Chinese companies (and maybe others) are patenting lots of things, including things we might have ourselves developed and intended to keep open, so it makes it difficult and/or expensive for us to continue developing.
Is that it?
Fortunately patents are very time limited - and so all those will expire in a decade or so and then you can make whatever.
If it only was that easy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening
I am still waiting for video encoders and decoders patents to go away so we could have easy open source implementations that are royalty free, not patent incumbed to be easily available in open source applications that could be also commercial. We don't have any decent easy to go ones since Theora.
what kind of business can afford to sit around for 20 years waiting for a patent to expire?
@Prusa. I want your company to survive. We have Prusa printers and our own self-made high-speed printers.
I use the Prusa's all the time. They just work. Not the fastest, but that's not a problem. When we need fast we use our own brushless servo-driven stationary table beast.
Build a good MK3/4 style 350 x 350 x 350~500 printer and I will likely buy it. Not interested in the other stuff. Don't even care about multi-material. We use 3D printers for design validation and to explore concepts. Don't need the complexity at all. Don't need crazy speed. Just a good solid printer that works reliably and I don't have to think about. This isn't a hobby, it's a tool. I want it on the network and don't need (can't have) external connectivity (ITAR).
I very recently was in the market for a 3d printer and was interested in making a voron or something diy, but even ordering parts from china it would've cost about double just getting a pre built with better software presets, less room for error, and about the same specs from a Chinese company. It's hard for me to comprehend how diy buying parts individually from AliExpress can be more expensive before shipping,but I guess that's what economics of scale get you.
> But around the year 2020 we registered the first mention of 3D printing as a strategic industry by the Chinese government. We know that now, after a few years of research. We first realized something is off when the price of the parts is higher than the sale price of a complete machine in some cases. That is what sparked our interest and research into the subsidies. They exist, and are very efficient https://rhg.com/research/far-from-normal-an-augmented-assess.... Our industry, desktop 3D printing, faces a bleak future. Comparable to the automotive sector as if only one high volume car brand, say Audi, remained outside of China. That’s it. An inch away from complete dependency on China in an vital piece of tech, the one absolutely critical for creation of new IP.
It seems like the real problem here is that China is able to identify strategic industries, subsidize them, and see the subsidies result in increased production and lower prices, while Western countries aren't. I'm not sure if Prusa themselves can do anything about it, but unless the West gets its shit together and decides to actually try to compete, it seems like eventually every advanced manufacturing industry will be mainly Chinese.
I do not understand the connection between the patent concerns in the article and open-source 3D printing. In particular, the patent issues seem to be the case for all non-Chinese 3D printer companies, whether open source or not. I am not sure how sharing your designs makes this worse (I suppose with the original drawings it's a bit easier to write a patent in bad faith - but certainly not necessary). Something like a defensive patent grant might make a lot of sense (see Opus, AV1 etc) but that's also independent of whether the implementation is open source or not.
As someone that had open-hardware printers, they suck. They were fun to play with but not really ready for every day use.
So perhaps a bad thing for the hardware side, but as a consumer/user I want a smooth experience.
That is hardly a function of the printers being Open Hardware. There are lots of unreliable commercial printers as well as fiddly open ones. However, the most reliable ones in the desktop space have mostly been open - like the old Ultimakers or the Prusa MK series.
Prusa's printers have a reputation for being easy to use, but cost more than the Chinese competition.
Your comment is ignorant nonsense.
This is very much a bad faith argument without any specifics. I found Prusa to be good enough. Do you have any examples of open hardware printers that were evaluated that did not meet the bar?
Regardless the topic is about open hardware being squeezed using shady tactics. It means leas competition, less innovation. Rules to kick such players should be easy to enforce as opposed to required to pay quite a lot for such an action.
I have a good friend who’s in the “hi end desktop cnc” bizness (with some very cheap models). Asked why he doesn’t do 3D printers (he designed plenty) and he told me the market is SO competitive and products so cheap it’s impossible to compete.
Designing a controller for his machines and as much as I would love to put the thing as OH, I don’t even think of it.
His company:
https://www.badog.ch/
Wow ~$17,000 for a CNC router? You could buy a used Haas/professional mill for that much.
It's time that prusa gets outside pressure their printers stagnated in innovation and got more expensive. They don't even have machines in the entry/starter category anymore. Why should anyone buy from you if he gets a better experience for less. Especially now that they started to abandon their own core values just have a look at their new offerings they are the opposite for what they plead here. Less open.
That’s a misframing of the situation explained in the post.
Prusa printers stagnated in innovation due to patents filed, making it more difficult to add features. Still, they did expand into SLA and CoreXY.
Prusa printers got more expensive because most of the expensive components come from China, which raised prices and gave subsidies to Chinese manufacturers. That is a de facto export tariff.
They do have entry-level printers, like the Prusa Mini. Of course, it does cost twice that of a Chinese-made clone, but that is because of the aforementioned subsidies.
”Less open” is just plain wrong, almost maliciously so. Prusa offers free printable models of all parts in their entire range of printers. Their firmware is open source, and their PrusaSlicer software is open source. How much more open can you get?
The Core One makes your whole last sentence obsolete...
What do you mean?
It’s listed very first on this page: https://www.prusa3d.com/page/open-source-at-prusa-research_2...
Loads of printable parts on this one...
What is your point? They should open-source components not made by them?
this is an article about patent trolling and government involvement, not innovation or competition on price
Why do they feel the need to talk about it? Because their $1000 (which was recently reduced in price even) bedslinger is outclassed by a $349 Bambu Lab A1, and they have lost their position as the printer to buy.
What are you talking about? They're talking about it because it offers an insight into significant reasons WHY they can't match Bambu Lab on price.
They couldn't match Creality on price either, but for a time, Prusa was still the printer with the best quality. As in many industries, there was dependence on the idea that non-Chinese products supposedly had better quality, so you were willing to pay the higher prices. However, in 3D printing, and in other industries, that barrier is falling.
Obviously state support can lead to "unfair" price advantages, but in the example of the A1, even at an equivalent price, the A1 still holds the advantage (larger print bed and additional functionality, for example). This isn't the single-dimensional disadvantage that Josef Prusa is making it out to be.
It's deflection.
Getting government money to develop products without needing to ever be profitable is a pretty huge hack.
Exactly. Bambu really showed how the overall user experience can be, while prusa etc. persist in the enthusiast niche, which isn't as big as it was now that alternatives are available.
IANAL, but seems that what you need is Defensible Publication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defensive_publication to create reliable prior art
This is an important and significant article.
200% tax relief on R&D was news to me (i.e. you get paid to do R&D), and indicative of what's going on.
For most people this is just fine - your goals were not to build a 3d printer it was to build something that just happens to be build able on a 3d printer. That is the something you are building is the goal, not building a 3d printer. If the goal isn't building a 3d printer then buying a 3d printer that someone else has already debugged and made to work is the better way to get to what you really want to do in the first place.
In a way this is good. 3d printing is neat, but it got too much hype which was taken away from other useful things makers should also have experience in. More makers should think of injection molding when doing plastic parts. Many plastic parts makers are making would be better as metal done on lathes and milling machines (or if you want to have fun shapers and planers - both obsolete but still a lot of fun if time/money isn't important). Wood working has never really lost popularity, but it should be mentioned as a good option for makers. There are also cloth options - sew, knit, spin, tat (my favorite). There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Finally along those lines, for some just drawing something up in CAD and sending it off to someone else to make is a good option. FreeCAD has come a long way finally has reached 1.0, or you can pay for one of the commercial options - some of them are reasonable for makers though read the fine print.
> Many plastic parts makers are making would be better as metal done on lathes and milling machines
I'd love to, but I'm not getting those into my apartment.
The hobby sized machines would fit into your apartment. Sure I can do things on my big machines that you couldn't, but there are plenty of things my south bend heavy 10 cannot do.
Which ones do you have in mind? Enclosed "desktop" mills, like Nomad 3 - that I can understand (although that one is pricey, and I can't can't even find what it would cost to get where I live).
Regular mills and lathes would basically turn the room where it's located into a shop, with chips flying everywhere, so you better have a spare room. Noise might also be a problem. Even moving them is a project by itself. Tall ask for a hobbyist.
Sieg. Or any machine from little machine shop. You need to build a plastic chip guard before using it in your apartment but many people do.
or check out the work clickspring has done with tiny homemade tools.
> There are plenty of other ways to build something other than 3d print.
Yes but the fewest come at the price and versatility as 3D printing. Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement. Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
> Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement
You can make everything in your basement, just like you can make a 3d printer in your basement, and for similar prices. Almost nobody does it, but that doesn't mean it can't be done.
> Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...
Skill is developed. You can do woodworking with just a sharp rock you find, no need for any more tools. Most people in woodworking choose to trade money for time and buy a lot of tools, but you can decide how far you want to go.
Time is the real constraint for everything of course. However that is my original point - if your goal isn't building a 3d printer (a fine goal) then trading money for time and buying the tools (which might or might not be a 3d printer) is probably you best bet. Assuming you have money to buy a 3d printer of course, but if you don't than a sharp rock and woodworking is probably your best hobby just because it is what you can afford.
As it happens with FOSS anything, that is not what the general public cares about, rather getting something easily at a store and fulfills their needs, which aren't how the thing works, rather as a tool for their actual work.
You have limited time. That year needed to build and debug a 3d printer (if you are single a year would be way to long, but for those with kids that is way too short) is a year that you can't spend on whatever your real hobby is. If you real hobby is 3d printers then that is great, but if not you shouldn't. I work on FOSS projects, but most of what I have installed on my system is a per-packaged distro from someone else who made it work (I have FreeBSD, Ubuntu, and Arch - each slightly different) because I don't have time to do linux/BSD from scratch even though I could. I have built gcc, but most of the time I just use the pre-packaged gcc so I can get on building the project I'm interested in.
i've never own a prusa printer, they are too expensive for me. I know it's great, it's reliable, but 3d printing is just a hobby to me after all. That's why i have to cope with less reliable solutions from Anycubic and Ender.
Now I own a bambulab. They are as cheap as the one from Anycubic, but much more reliable and easier to setup. I honestly don't know how can they make it so cheap, even my a1 mini, cost less than $250, has wifi, a camera for timeplase. Back in the day all you can get is a controller board with monochrome LCD running 8 bit mcu.
The westerner had a big head start, but they became greedy. Ultimaker could be the today Bambulab if they had spent more on RnD, and tried to bring their tech to broader market.
How to make the EU patent reform even more unaffordable for small players
https://ffii.org/unified-patent-court-is-100x-more-expensive...
Meanwhile the fastest 3D printer available is open-everything and can be 3D printed: https://www.printables.com/model/572689-the-100-v11-the-fast...
the t250 is out, faster and better
they're cc-by-nc, though, which is not really open source
The world would be a better place if we just completely abolished the patent system. There is no need to come up with convoluted new schemes, just delete it, done. The resulting progress will be incredible.
The real issue is that we allow patents at all.
Given the lopsided cost that courts bring to the table, patents only help the big players- since only they canafford to play.
I invented something I ttruly think could change the world. Went to a patent attorney. He said basically - create a patent, wait till someone unsuspectingly builds a product with the same basic idea, and then sue the pans off them. If you try to develop it yourself, the patent will not help - the chinese will copy it and laugh, and the americans will copy it, modify it, and then sue you because they can push more patents than you can defend yourself against. In the best case, they may offer to settle for a small fee if you give them all your IP for free...
I have yet to see anything good from patents, but over the years I have seen just how much they prevent anything new from coming to the world.
You know why IP is so strongly enforced? Because the US has been throwing all its strength behind it. This is why many countries around the world adopted heavy handed IP rights, because they came with a carrot (cheap loans, investment from the US) and a stick (sanctions). Now that the US positions itself as an adversary to other democratic countries I give it 5 years for these IP laws to stick. Everyone kinda hopes it's just Trump that lost his mind and next US govt will go back to normalcy. I doubt this very much. Once it becomes clear Trunp's symucessor is exactly the same well see US IP stop being enforced.
This has a disadvantage of no protection for genuine innovation, but who are we kidding? There is none anyway where it matters most (China). So why do we handicap ourselves following these stupid laws while the Chinese just break them and the US... Well in the US whoever has most money for lawyers wins.
For open source/hardware to thrive Ip laws have to be abolished or at least changed a lot.
It was dead when I saw Joseph’s face on my Prusa Mini boot screen
You can’t be serious…
Uh yeah? Prusa Mini has his face as boot screen. Cannot find any ref’s online sadly (I sold the printer). Edit 1: speaking from a Prusa perspective I guess..
Edit 2: wait, i misunderstood ‘you cant be serious’? Not sure but what I tried to address was a cult of personality. Thats not something I feel fitting in this whole context.
Better printers came along, were not "open", but they were easier to use and maintain especially for first-time hobbyists and even for print farms.
If someone could reform patent law in such a way that it could be done in one country without jeopardising its interests, how could this be done?
LANAI, but maybe some kind of free market global license auction would better incentivize invention and reward prior art. Perhaps even outcompete the current authorities.
Clearly stovepiping the generation of IP monopolies and laundering them across borders and through unrelated court systems is a captured perverse incentive structure.
In my humble opinion, if a work is a community project it should stay open regardless of some small feature tweaks, and any kind of commercial revenue should be used to support the original authors as it literally costs people nothing as a tax deductible donation.
The key word here is "Should", as different places have different cultural values regarding intellectual property. Some see bad faith verbatim cloning as lucrative business opportunities (it rarely is), and creatives as a natural resource to be exploited (unfortunately they often are.)
Notably, a large part of the community quietly financially supports this cloning practice, and rarely follow their lofty ideals when purchasing.
Commercial opportunities are naturally degenerating in a saturated market, and businesses that did innovate their own unique products owe people nothing.
Note, competing with free is a bad business model, and the faster cloners fail the better. Prusa was boosted by the rep-rap project, and has spent decades rehashing the same core designs. It is not a sustainable growth strategy. =3
China learnt patent trolling. Damn
Did whole 3d printing boom started because some of the patents expired?
unrelated to the topic but theme of website is so horendous to read
The author decided to use Open Sans, which is a quite narrow font, and font weight 350, so my browser (and, I suspect, yours) renders it with "Open Sans Light" at a fixed 300 weight. That is hard to read with that gray #707070 over white.
I don't know Tailwind so perhaps it is not easy to fix.
Yeah,thank God for reader mode, as I can't bloody see a thing, sat here on a beach as I am right now.
While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under, the final point of the article (discussing patent related legal barriers on existing open source innovation becoming a main strategy of large industry players) is a very important one to keep in mind for people on this site in the hardware startup space:
"This is a story from 3D printing, but all the areas with heavy open hardware development are in Made in China 2025 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025 and its successors. Make sure you keep an eye on the filings around your expertise, it is incomparably much easier to do something now than later."
> While I'd lean more towards plain ol' capitalism as the reason for small market players going under
He seems to point pretty directly to Chinese subsidies allowing those printers to be sold under cost. That’s not capitalism.
Amazon operated under cost for years to capture the market, how is this any different?
Also partially subsidized by the government, who charged their mom-and-pop brick and mortar competitors sales tax while Amazon avoided subjecting their customers to sales tax for many years. That, plus Amazon's ability to operate at a seemingly perpetual loss, was absolutely predatory.
And the government sat on its hands and our representatives loved all the Prime boxes stacked at their doorstep. It has ensh#ttified entire industries that once depended upon retail as their interface with customers.
I think what you meant to say is "that is not an enforced fair and free market" which is much different than capitalism.
The free-market folks talk about something that works in theory as an ideal, but has never actually been put into practice.
It is. Maybe not the capitalism you like.
Not much different that using ChatGPT/any commercial LLM. They are not really profitable. They want to capture the market.
Private companies spending (and potentially wasting) money investors voluntarily gave them because they think it may lead to a big payoff down the road is capitalism.
Companies doing the "same thing" with government handouts (where the ultimate source of the money had no say in the matter) is not.
It's like the difference between companies that hire workers and those that use slave labor. They may have otherwise identical business models, but the later are operating at an unfair advantage.
I don't really see difference.
If we would know the true motivation of the government, then we could make a difference, but until we don't know it exactly, then there really isn't.
It is entirely possible that that government is giving money against shares or future profits.
It gets problematic and different if, for example, let's say the motivation is to use it as political leverage or even installing backdoors and collect user data.
How's it not capitalism? If your definition of capitalism requires governments to either not exist or not act to improve the conditions of their subjects (including companies), you have a definition of capitalism where basically none existing or only failed states have a capitalist system.
Well they quite literally steal everything you push out. Anyone who’s done it out in the wide open knows this reality. Sometimes they will have the copy out faster than you. What’s the point? And customers do not care at all. I heard it so many times. People lack moral compass because they grow up in environments where you’re rewarded for stealing and cheating.
Yet another example of how intellectual property has done vastly more harm than good to intellectual pursuits.
3d printing isn't dead. The policies and programs that encourage it's adoption with lower cost are.
But my bet is on clever people figuring out and systematizing things to reduce the current high cost items.
The article's assertion is specifically "open hardware" 3d printing, facing patent challenges [ other parties patenting designs released as "open" to the community ] especially in China, open hardware designers can't get their work manufactured in China ( in this very example, but similarly in any other country where the patents are filed ) or imported/exported because they become Infringing materials of the patents filed by other parties who have copied their designs.
Open Hardware designers are having to become international patent experts, which is more expensive than releasing the designs to the community for free.
The claim is about open hardware, not 3d printing in general. And the claimed problem is that the clever cost reduction is Chinese state subsidies.
Prisoner's dilemna world of so clever top-down Chinese strategizing on top of a 996 vs. Tang-ping aka. "lie down flat and get over the beatings" society. Maybe it's time for China to adopt a long term view about where this is all going? They seem to pride themselves on that.