The article might disagree. See the subsection, "The importance of tacit knowledge". OTOH, if that tacit knowledge is indeed so critical then there's less risk (e.g. regarding future investment incentives) to narrowing patent protections. OTOOH, ASML's supply chain is deep and complex, and the patent portfolio is presumably similarly diffuse, which makes it difficult to analyze or even, short of a complete patent regime overhaul, identify which patents to open up to accelerate adoption.

ASML's supply chain is deep and complex - and secret. But if it were F/OSS (just imagine it) from sand to chip, that complexity would have a wider scope of human attention applied to it.

What is happening with ASML now, once happened with the wheel.

Think about that.

Patents are supposed to be the antidote to industrial secrets. Of course, it doesn't really work out that way because in addition to patent writers hiding the ball or strategically layering patents and secrecy, things like tacit knowledge and organization play a huge role in exploring, building, and applying solutions. FOSS doesn't really help with the tacit stuff. It's partly why it's so difficult for projects to survive after the original authors move on. With software that's not necessarily immediately fatal as long as the software works well and is easy enough to tweak around the edges to keep it compiling and interfacing well, qualities which FOSS is meant to foster and preserve. But outside software, and especially in the industrial sphere, the loss of that tacit knowledge and organization is often immediately fatal. You can't just copy stuff, you have to rebuild all that tacit knowledge and process. Often times, like in software, the resulting product that nominally achieves the same results is built around an entirely different technical approach.

.. all the more reason to support approaches which reduce dependency on an elite group of knowledge-holders.

A wider scope of attention yes. I'm not convinced there would be nearly as many multi-billion dollar research projects.

Or you could have nobody bother to invest in things like this because of no reward, or they become closely guarded trade secrets of which the Elves keep and nobody else is even allowed to know they exist.

"no reward" is weak, because of course you wouldn't make a wheel, say, unless you intended to roll somewhere.

You're basically saying "ASML's entire production line is worthless unless it is rare and coveted", which is .. obviously not true .. because of course the output is immensely useful.

The world needs more chipfabs, not less. A properly scaled chipfab in places like Broome or Santiago, or .. indeed in orbit .. would go a long way to sorting out the worlds fires.

The thing stopping us, is the international, imperial system of patents and intellectual 'property', which make nation states subservient to each other on the basis of ideas.

The ideas could be spreading far and wide, but we humans are keeping them in our cage, in which the only reward is having other cages to extract wealth from ..

And if you had done that 10 years ago we wouldn’t hve EUV at all. You’re proposing ending future development to make today’s products cheaper.

That's a great way to lower the cost of the current generation of the tech while ensuring there is no next generation of the tech.

I don't think that makes any sense whatsoever.

If everyone could make these machines, there'd be more of these machines.

There are so many examples of this out there, already, that I find this specious "no next generation" argument to be either simply coming from bias, or ignorance.

For sure, we only care about Taiwan because there is one Taiwan. End patents: no more Taiwan problem.

> If everyone could make these machines, there'd be more of these machines.

My post is in violent agreement with this, for this generation of machines.

ASML spends ~$5B annually on R&D with the expectation that they will be able to make ~30% net profit in the future. If you remove patent protection, there will be more competition and obviously profit margins will fall.

I want to rephrase that for emphasis. The point of aa-jv's post was that we would get cheaper chips by invalidating IP. Cheaper chips means lower margins (because you have not lowered input prices). Lower margins was the explicit goal, so to the extent that the changes in IP law work, you will get lower margins for companies like ASML.

At that point, you have a field of companies looking at (say) 10% net returns, still needing to invest billions of new capital into R&D every year. Worse: no patents means that Company A could spend $5B on R&D and Company B could spend $0, and both of them could reap the benefits of that $5B by Company A. So it's not even necessarily clear that the industry would see much net innovation.

Are we even certain there are companies who would enter this capital-intensive business assuming IP was free? Compulsory licensing is a thing, but I am not aware of that even being something that has been requested.