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.
Is this really a good faith argument you are making? If I could figure out how someone did something I am not allowed to do it for 30 years. They are not hiding this technology, it has been independently invented by multiple people. It is not unique enough to be able to 'hide' from society.
The second somebody makes a product available it can be reverse engineered. There are no secrets with mechanical objects or, in this case, an intuitice slicing method
Not all patents are good. But a patent system is good. It could be better but the general concept is not flawed like the person I was responding to suggests.
The physical object isn’t what is patented in this case. It is the method to create the object that has a patent. One that can’t be reversed engineered as it isn’t part of the final product. You could only reverse engineer it if the process was not novel or not obvious to anyone knowledgeable in the field. If both of these conditions are true then the patent should not have been granted.
Patents are not inherently bad. This is a bad patent. Patent laws don’t have to be changed, because this patent shouldn’t have been granted. The issue is ineffective patent reviews, not patents. Getting rid of patents is not a good idea. If you think it is you probably don’t have a good enough grasp on what a patent is.
You can make something if you figure out how they did it because it was obvious. In this case the patent isn’t valid. If you have to develop a solution then the patent is probably valid. The patent is a reward for developing and sharing the solution publically.
If you still don’t grasp why patents are useful. It may be helpful to think of it like open source software. The patent is the code base that is freely accessible to everyone. This preserves the knowledge and lets others build on it. However, to incentivise people to make their code open source you provide protections that stop others from selling the same code you developed.
The incentive mechanism is why far more businesses produce patents than produce open source code.
If you remove patents businesses stop funding internal r and d overnight. It increase the risk and reduces the reward.
You're just repeating the justification for patents with zero skepticism and apparently no awareness of how they actually get used.
Hell, I said the following to you a day before you made this comment, and you haven't replied. Are you happy to just ignore the counter arguments then?
Edit: the fact both this comment and the other one just got downvoted with no reply would indicate they are in fact not interested.