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Comment by mottosso | Hacker News Reader

I can see what you mean but on the other hand; are they really, though?

If they hadn't come up with the technology and written the patents in the first place, we wouldn't even be here talking about it.

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Patent held back the development of 3D printers, and accessibility of 3D printing in general for everyone. I now see weird and clumsy workaround to avoid patent lawsuits for things like conveyor belts as well lack of certain commercial goods such as heated chamber.

Just because someone is an innovator doesn't mean they are for continual innovations or for the spread of innovations or like the idea of people building on their works.

A lot of this stuff would have been invented anyway. We still would have had 3D printers without these patent holders.

In all likelihood, they did the initial research with public funding or built on such research. Since the 1980s academia has been a get rich scheme where the public funds research and then the professors go to the private sector to make money.

I think the inventors should be rewarded, but it seems misguided to do it by making them have to exploit an exclusive hold on their invention which blockades progress. Why not just give them prize money? You could set objective standards whereby a new invention that gets produced over X quantity by any party gets Y prize money.

You can come up with technology without patenting it though. If there were no patents then presumably companies would find other ways to make money from inventions, for example by being the best at producing them or improving them more frequently.

Consider Linux, a bunch of companies have made bank from that.

But what are we talking about though? We're talking about how this technology is unavailable for nearly all usage, and prohibitively expensive for any actual use. It effectively doesn't exist.

True, but there should be mandatory tech licensing at least so they can't just suffocate progress.

Why? It’s the payoff of a limited monopoly that justifies the investment in the research. Without that incentive progress might be even further restricted.

good answer

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