[HN Gopher] A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by ...
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A crucial idea for silicon PV cells was excluded by a patent for 20
years
Author : pfdietz
Score : 97 points
Date : 2021-07-24 14:39 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (theconversation.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (theconversation.com)
| elcdodedocle wrote:
| You know why release a product to the market that lasts longer
| when you can just hold the patent and make shitty panels that
| have to be replaced every so often? Forget the competitors.
| Forgive the cynicism but this was clearly a 20 year long win-win
| for the industry. Long live the big wheel industrial complex. F
| the consumer.
|
| *and the environment.
| petra wrote:
| Any ideas by how much does this increase cell lifetime?
| murkle wrote:
| Supposedly it's been licensed (2019)
|
| https://www.jasolar.com.cn/index.php?m=content&c=index&a=sho...
| murkle wrote:
| ... and available https://en.longi-
| solar.com/home/products/modules.html
|
| review: https://www.cleanenergyreviews.info/blog/longi-solar-
| panels-...
| msandford wrote:
| I don't love the language. It was patented. It could have been
| licensed no? The patent holder refused licensing at any price?
| bArray wrote:
| An alternative idea to the ones mentioned here already: Perhaps
| they simply didn't want to give away the fact that gallium
| doping is an idea worth holding onto. By letting the patent
| timeout they save themselves tonnes of licensing money in the
| future, whilst also offering a reason for customers to upgrade.
|
| More cynically, they may have preferred the fact that the
| panels would degrade over time, driving sales. Now that the
| patent is expiring, they either dope with gallium or lose
| customers to their competitors.
| clarkevans wrote:
| Perhaps one manufacturer had obtained an exclusive license,
| preventing the rest of the industry from using this technology?
| Scoundreller wrote:
| _Usually_ when you sign an exclusive license, you also have
| the ability to sub-license /assign it.
|
| Creditors/investors don't like backing something if the asset
| disappears if the business itself doesn't work out.
| pfdietz wrote:
| It was a completely obvious idea that, when the patent expired,
| was immediately widely adopted. It's clear in this case that
| the patent retarded progress rather than promoting it.
| evgen wrote:
| Everything is obvious once you know the secret. This went
| under patent protection in 2000, which is decades into the
| hunt for PV improvements and decades into gallium doping
| silicon substrate (which started in the 50s at the dawn of
| transistors.) Papers from the early 2000s talk about this
| improvement and about open questions regarding the cell
| lifetime and mixing gallium and germanium ratios, so it does
| not appear to be as obvious as you suggest.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _Everything is obvious once you know the secret._
|
| Man, I hate this argument. A secret is a secret _because_
| it 's not obvious. If something is naturally likely to be
| invented by the first person who happens to encounter the
| problem it solves, it's not a "secret."
|
| That seems to have been what happened here. Society does
| not benefit from granting a government-enforced 20-year
| monopoly on things like this. In fact, the cost in terms of
| wasted energy is incalculable. Patents wall off entire
| areas of R&D in many instances; we literally don't know
| what they cost us to grant.
| evgen wrote:
| Since both gallium doping and PV panels predate this
| patent application by several decades I think that it is
| incredibly ignorant to think that this was obvious. Like
| a magic trick, once you know the secret it appears
| obvious, but until someone shows you or tells you how it
| works you have no chance of figuring it out. This whole
| 'anyone would have eventually figured it out' argument is
| the equivalent of saying 'draw the rest of the damn owl';
| if it could have been done as easily as you suggest then
| it would have been done earlier.
|
| Gallium (as GaAs) was being used in solar cells in the
| mid 60s. A quick search finds papers from the late 70s
| describing different effects of boron and gallium doping
| of silicon for solar cells to extend the life of
| satellites (the effect of the patent in question is to
| extend the working lifetime of panels so that solar
| radiation does not damage the panel.) So apparently this
| was so obvious that the first person who happened to
| encounter it missed it. It was then missed over and over
| and over again for at least 20 years and possibly 35.
|
| Yeah, definitely something "likely to be invented by the
| first person who happens to encounter the problem it
| solves"...
| amelius wrote:
| But did the applicants of the patent show a working model?
| Or did they just patent a bunch of possible improvements in
| the hope that one of them would lead to a breakthrough?
| evgen wrote:
| If you read the patent [1], you would see that a lot of
| the claims are around the process and environment that is
| necessary to get the proper doping. In particular, it
| seems to involve some rather specific pressure control
| within the crucible as well as control of the amount of
| oxygen in the crucible by using argon as a buffer gas.
| This patent is less about the use of gallium to dope the
| silicon as it is about a specific and precise
| manufacturing process that is necessary to prevent the
| whole ingot from having too much resistance or having a
| lifetime worse than a boron-doped silicon ingot.
|
| [1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US6815605B1/en
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| Random thought to throw out. Value patents based on the
| amount of work required to come up with them. So
| patenting some random shower thought is worth what you
| put into it. And what you can recover in a lawsuit is
| also tied to that.
|
| "Yeah we violated your 'something but on the internet
| patent' Here's a $50 Home Depot card."
| folli wrote:
| How will you objectively measure "amount of work required
| to come up with them"? That sounds rather infeasible.
| amelius wrote:
| The same way the government funds any kind of project.
|
| Contractor says: we can do this for $X.
|
| Government says yes or no to the project.
|
| You do the same for patent applications.
|
| It's basically answering the question "how much is this
| technology worth to society?" If they don't pay for it,
| then the technology will end up as a trade secret.
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| How do we measure the value of anything objectively.
|
| But there is a world of difference between, 100's of
| people working for a decade on a problem kind of patents.
| And someone sitting on their couch for an afternoon
| patents. You seriously want to protect the former. And
| not really the latter.
| beervirus wrote:
| Well in that case surely someone would have challenged the
| patent and got it invalidated.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| I don't see how this works out economically. Having the
| patent invalidated is a public good. Fighting a patent in
| court is expensive and risky. Why should any particular
| company fight a patent for the benefit of its competitors,
| and against some decently-well-funded conglomerate, when
| it's already trying to make it in a competitive field?
| fnord77 wrote:
| if it was obvious, why wasn't it obvious until the patent?
| analog31 wrote:
| I'm not a lawyer, but have been involved in IP issues. What
| I've learned is that obviousness is phenomenally difficult to
| prove.
| pfdietz wrote:
| I'm not talking about proving it in court, I'm asking you
| to consider it in your own mind. When the problem with
| boron doping was realized, how long do you think it would
| have taken everyone to go down that column of the periodic
| table and use gallium instead? It's not like there was a
| huge selection of elements to chose from.
| petra wrote:
| Maybe they were the first to discover the problem?
| wallacoloo wrote:
| Possibly, but I'd like to pose a relevant question: had
| they discovered it and then chosen to keep quiet, how
| long would it have been before someone else discovered it
| independently?
|
| Answer: _definitely_ less than 20 years. So why then
| should the first group to discover this be given 20 years
| of exclusivity?
|
| People claim that this promise of exclusivity drives the
| research. On the other hand, why pour money into research
| if there's a strong chance that my competitor will beat
| me to the punch and then forbid me from making use of the
| equivalent outcome that my own research yields (and of
| the in-house talent I developed along the way)?
| pfdietz wrote:
| If you look at the references in the patent this doesn't
| appear to be the case.
| wpietri wrote:
| I really don't think obviousness is obvious.
|
| Just looking at the field of software process, there are
| things I've been doing for 20 years that sure seem
| obvious to me and that I thought would be obvious to
| everybody else in short order. But here we are and the
| dominant process approach has gone from "chaotic
| waterfall" to "chaotic waterfall with Scrum jargon and
| modestly shorter delivery cycles".
| Animats wrote:
| The patent holder, Shin-Etsu Chemical, did license the
| technology. They licensed it to to JA Solar, Longi and Trina
| Solar, all large solar panel makers in China. JA Solar panels
| have had gallium doping since Q3 2020.[1]
|
| The article somehow doesn't mention that.
|
| JA mentions gallium, but they seem to consider the weather-
| tightness of the surface film to be a bigger factor in
| lifespan.
|
| [1]
| http://taiyangnews.info/technology/taiyangnews-500w-conferen...
| rtkwe wrote:
| 2020Q3 is after the patent expired in May 2020.
| Tostino wrote:
| Yeah real good argument for patents not impeding progress
| with no tangible societal benefit...
| philips wrote:
| Are there any groups attempting patent reform in an organized
| way?
| aerodog wrote:
| Aren't patents, per the constitution, to promote the progress of
| science? How can they act to do the opposite?
| bserge wrote:
| I guess if you patent something and then never use and/or sell
| it, it will just sit there, protected by law, like a valuable
| piece of land full of weeds and shrubs in the middle of a city.
| nwah1 wrote:
| Land titles and patents both have similar characteristics and
| both could be taxed by value to discourage idle use.
|
| The key for both is that the government is providing
| exclusive security of tenure over some natural opportunity in
| order to facilitate production. But if people take the
| opportunity but don't do anything with it, whether for
| speculation or laziness, they are excluding others. That
| would only be acceptable if they have paid the community for
| that right to do so.
| [deleted]
| setr wrote:
| The primary mechanism patents provide is the open publishing
| and explanation of the technologies/mechanisms/etc involved.
| The goal is to extract research from the depths of company
| archives and promote iteration on existing technologies without
| outright cloning them. In return, you get a guaranteed monopoly
| on your technology for X years, and protection from theft after
| your open-publishing.
|
| This system has failed in a number of ways.
|
| 1. The rate of technological evolution was significantly
| slower, and a time-limited monopoly was less impactful, in
| previous history. The industrial revolution covers some 100
| year period. The digital revolution covers about 40. Things get
| obsoleted much faster these days, to the point that a 20-year
| monopoly is literally the whole lifetime of the technology
|
| 2. Patents have been granted too easily for too little (largely
| because there's no repercussion for filing, and re-filing, dumb
| patents) allowing for extremely broad interpretations, and a
| single technology incorporating hundreds of different patents
| (eg h265)
|
| 3. Because there's so many of them, and they're often so
| vaguely defined, I'm fairly certain almost no one actually
| reads them to learn how to implement something, or improve on
| the design. I'm also fairly certain that reading patents is a
| great way to "poison" yourself -- if it can be shown you read
| the parent at some point, and then violated it, it's a trivial
| lawsuit.
| [deleted]
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Publishing open-access academic papers or providing royalty
| free patents is progress.
|
| Otherwise, patents are to protect profits companies must recoup
| for their R&D spending.
| pydry wrote:
| Because while the justification was more efficient innovation,
| their actual intended purpose was to create another form of
| property that could be capitalized.
| xvilka wrote:
| Same story as with fractal compression algorithms. Patents
| shouldn't last that long.
| mchusma wrote:
| I think they should be more expensive too. The government
| shouldn't give a monopoly for cheap. Maybe $100k fee for first
| 5 years, with the ability to pay something like $1m to extend
| another 5 years would be long enough. Maybe $10M for another 5
| years, and $100M for another 5 years.
| ford_o wrote:
| Just pay a fixed % gross income to the patent owner.
| nextweek2 wrote:
| You're forgetting about the small inventor. If I'm sitting in
| my garage and come up with a cool idea that takes me 5 years
| of knocking on doors to get funded, then I'll get screwed by
| your approach.
| bkor wrote:
| > You're forgetting about the small inventor.
|
| How often will that happen? The existing system seems to
| massively favour keeping existing big companies big. A
| small inventor can easily ignored. Meaning, there's quite a
| difference between being right and ensuring a company does
| the right thing.
|
| Some products (e.g. mobile phones) are covered by hundreds
| of patents. A small inventor having a huge benefit from
| patents? It maybe happens, but I really doubt the benefits
| outweighs the clear damage that patents are having.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Get a loan, patent and sell your idea, pay a loan. If you
| can't sell your idea, may be it should not be patented.
| unchocked wrote:
| Honestly I'm okay with that.
| riskable wrote:
| Small inventor already can't afford a patent. Let's say the
| small inventor spent the large amount of money for lawyers
| and patent searches and got a patent... How will they
| defend it when litigating a patent _starts_ at around $1
| million?
|
| What this means is that any practical implementation of an
| idea _needs_ to be a multi-million dollar idea in order to
| be worth patenting. Otherwise you 're just wasting money.
| new299 wrote:
| Small inventors absolutely can afford to patent. A
| provisional patent for a small entity is $150. A full pro
| se application is something like $1500 IIRC.
|
| The point is that with a patent, the small inventor can
| go on to raise further funds to exploit and defend the
| patent if necessary.
|
| I'm not defending the patent system, but saying it's too
| expensive doesn't make much sense.
| lostapathy wrote:
| In some ways, I think we need a way to file a defensive
| patent, especially for a small player. So if you are a
| small firm, you can patent something and ensure that a
| big fish can't also patent it and run you out of
| business, but without obligation (and maybe without
| rights to) enforce it if someone else uses your idea.
|
| I.e., a patent that protects you against a later filer,
| but that's it.
| icebraining wrote:
| In theory, just publishing the invention means it'll
| become prior art and prevent its patenting. Supposedly
| the US patent examiners will review places like
| https://www.priorartarchive.org/ before issuing a new
| patent.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, if small inventors can not afford it (what is
| approximately correct), then it should just not exist. We
| don't need more government-enforced restrictions on small
| enterprises, we need less of them.
| wbl wrote:
| There was no reason solar cell makers couldn't license the patent
| from the owner.
| lambdasquirrel wrote:
| It seems a bit presumptuous that in an industry with many, many
| actors, that it seems that the vast majority did not license
| the patent?
| drivingmenuts wrote:
| It's a big industry now, but 20 years ago? Back then, it was
| a bunch of smaller companies, probably none large enough on
| their own to afford the royalties or they were working with
| their own tech to bypass IP requirements.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Such a claim is naive. While I know nothing about this specific
| patent of the Japanese company Shin-Etsu, when a patent is
| owned by a very large manufacturer like this, they very seldom
| want to make money by licensing the patent but they use it to
| exclude any competitors.
|
| This is done by either refusing to license the patent, or more
| likely by requesting royalties so large that the products made
| by any other company could not be cheaper than their own.
|
| There are many examples of patents which had never been
| implemented in any product before the day when they expired.
|
| In this case, Shin-Etsu would have probably been willing to
| supply Ga-doped silicon wafers to PV cell manufacturers, but
| only at prices too high in comparison with the current prices
| of the PV panels, so such wafers have never seen any
| significant use.
| Scoundreller wrote:
| Maybe there were a few (enough?) out there that will pay
| stupid high prices for a slightly better PV.
|
| E.g. satellite manufacturers? Military? Remote installations?
|
| If they sold a consumer version, then they're at risk of
| losing that business to shuckers (like 'external' HDs that
| are cheaper than bare units).
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| If there had been, we would have seen them.
| wbl wrote:
| Not license and not produce ones of their own?
| fn-mote wrote:
| PV = photovoltaic
|
| If the title read "silicon solar cells" it would be clearer to
| the layperson (like me).
|
| Many of us read the comments to decide if the article is worth
| reading, so it helps.
| riffraff wrote:
| For a non native speaker it's hard to connect P with the F
| sound in photovoltaic, so this title was extra confusing for
| me.
| a1369209993 wrote:
| > it's hard to connect P with the F sound in photovoltaic
|
| Strictly speaking, it ought to be "PhV" (compare "PhD"), but
| no one does that for some reason.
| LightBearer wrote:
| Ah, capitalism working at it's FINEST!!!!!! /s
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