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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
This is actually already a part of the patent system, but not in the way you're thinking. If a contractor says publicly, "We can frotz quibbins with a turgut for $X," that counts as putting turgut-based quibbin-frotzing "on sale". This means that ⓐ nobody else can patent turgut-based quibbin-frotzing thereafter, and ⓑ the contractor themself only has a year to file a patent on turgut-based quibbin-frotzing from the date of that notice. This is called the "on-sale bar".
The idea is that patents are only supposed to be granted for novel, nonobvious things. If nobody had ever realized that turguts would be advantageous for frotzing quibbins, then you're an inventor if you figured out how to do it, and you can get a government-granted monopoly. But presumably if you're offering to sell someone a turgut-based quibbin-frotzing product, even if you haven't actually built it yet, you must be pretty sure it's workable and worthwhile. And now anybody else can go ahead and start frotzing the quibbins with a turgut now that you've pointed out how, and although the patent law gives you a bit of a grace period to patent it, it doesn't give you unlimited leeway.
If it turns out that the turgut has to be freebled first, then you (or anybody else) might be able to patent the freebling part at any later date, since that wasn't in the original offer to sell. But only if the need for freebling wouldn't be obvious to one skilled in the art.
So, basically, patents are intended for things that are not known to be possible until someone figures out how to do them. Lemelson got away with some pretty shameless exploitation of the loopholes in these criteria, a lot of which are now closed.
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.
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.
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"...
