3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: !functionalprint@kbin.social or !functionalprint@fedia.io
There are CAD communities available at: !cad@lemmy.world or !freecad@lemmy.ml
Rules
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No bigotry - including racism, sexism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, or xenophobia. Code of Conduct.
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Be respectful, especially when disagreeing. Everyone should feel welcome here.
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No porn (NSFW prints are acceptable but must be marked NSFW)
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No Ads / Spamming / Guerrilla Marketing
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Do not create links to reddit
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If you see an issue please flag it
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No guns
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No injury gore posts
If you need an easy way to host pictures, https://catbox.moe/ may be an option. Be ethical about what you post and donate if you are able or use this a lot. It is just an individual hosting content, not a company. The image embedding syntax for Lemmy is 
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Patents do provide some value. If there were no patents than companies would make their technological development a a secret and not share the work with the world.
The patent systems exchanges knowledge and technology development for a temporary monopoly on the technology. It means a company can publish the ingredients to medicines, methods of manufacturing etc. if they didn’t have the patent system they would keep these secret and if a business folded this knowledge would be lost.
And we would be free to reverse engineer and lift their stuff without people defending their right restrict us because otherwise they wouldn't make it.
The vast majority of serious innovation - not just incremental improvements like this patent represents - is done on public resources, not private. The patent system allows corporations to swoop in, monopolise the patents and keep us from free access to knowledge.
The patent system explicitly provides free access to knowledge. The patent is the knowledge that would be kept secret otherwise.
You would still have monopolies, except things like the ingredients to medicines would be unknown.
I don't see it that way. The systems we have in place now are the alternative to just sharing. The secret-keeping monopolistic behaviour of capitalists is preserved by things like the patent system, because they lend the appearance of legitimacy to an illegitimate system.
If you want to see the horror of the patent system, you juat have to look at the millions it killed in the pandemic.
The covid vaccine was developed by public and private researchers and paid for by the state, with a promise it would be made open source to allow anyone to manufacture it and hasten the end of the pandemic.
Bill Gates was one of the fucking vampires who blocked the open sourcing efforts, so poor countries couldn't manufacture it, allowing the pandemic to run unchecked in those places and of course mutate and inevitably make its way back to wealthier countries for yet another outbreak that actually makes our news because it affects us. The patents killed people.
These companies were funded to do it. There's no way they wouldn't have worked on the vaccine otherwise. The pandemic showed us what governments can do when a crisis actually threatens the status quo and they're forced to do the bare minimum of solving a problem. We didn't need patents for it, just the will.