3-D Printing's Legal Morass

http://www.wired.com/design/2012/05/3-d-printing-patent-law/

by ColinWright • 14 years ago

64 58 14 years ago

iwwr• 14 years ago

This may be a storm in a teacup. 3D printing doesn't make sense for mass manufacturing, nor in the possible future lest for at least one order of magnitude increase in speed and cost of raw materials. We're still talking of hours to build a small figurine and $50/kg in material prices. If we move out of plastic and into metal, the process is again 100 times slower (or very energy intensive) and the machines are priced in multiples of $100K.

jeffool• 14 years ago

I get what you're saying, but if the tech is left untouched, any advancement gained in a few decades time will likely be less impressive than a few decades of commercial and niche amateur interest. No one is saying let's shut down factories yet. (I don't think.)

Wilya• 14 years ago

I agree. "Photocopying" an object is still way more expensive than buying it.

The price of machines, especially for plastic printing, can and will probably go down (1000$ seems high, I think the small ones are more in the 400/500 range right now). The price of material ? I don't see that happening.

Anderkent2• 14 years ago

That depends what kind of object it is. Take the example of warhammer figurines - these things are incredibly expensive and cheap to manufacture.

bradleyland2• 14 years ago

This is dangerous thinking, IMO. Look at where we are with other media (music and movies).

Years ago, the same thinking was applied to music and movies. "Well, this isn't a big problem, because duplicating the content is expensive and time consuming." The technology advanced, and now copying digital goods is very nearly free from a time and money standpoint. Should we wait for things to get as sideways as they are with music and movies before we put some weight behind reform?

smacktoward• 14 years ago

The difference is that music and movies can be translated into digital format, which makes copying effectively free. 3D printing is physical, not digital. Every copy you make will require raw materials and will cause wear and tear on the printer. That creates costs.

Those costs will probably come down over time, of course, but nowhere near as fast as the cost of digital duplication has. The price of plastic doesn't obey Moore's Law.

yardie• 14 years ago

Except physical goods have a real cost associated to it. This is how Microsoft got to be one of the richest companies on the planet and IBM and Apple did not. The per unit profit of one license of Windows is infinitely higher than selling beige box PCs.

Yes, compared to content, duplicating physical goods is expensive.

debacle2• 14 years ago

Long term, it's going to be cheaper to ship raw materials and print toys on demand in the stores.

The amount of resources we waste and pollute on packaging today is an atrocity, and 3D printing will go a long way to destroying that.

brohee3• 14 years ago

Cost wise, between buying a plastic figurine off the Internet and printing it, printing is already competitive (possibly more expensive to manufacture but you save shipping and handling).

Printing a figurine is also faster than getting it delivered, or even than going to a brick and mortar shop unless it's really close.

So for decorative stuff 3D printing is already there (if the design is printable and if you can live with limited choices in material), but the real revolution will be when you can print replacement parts to fight planned obsolescence, entire industries may crumble.

enjalot• 14 years ago

You miss probably the major disruption that 3D printing brings to manufacturing, it turns it into a software problem. We've seen what happens when something is reduced to bits that can be manipulated by software, and now we are going to watch it happen to the physical world.

What happens when you don't just torrent a model to print, but you distribute your job to hundreds of printers? We have all seen what happens when you network a bunch of cheaper and lower quality things relative to a monolithic system, and I can see this happening with digital fabrication as well.

alexqgb• 14 years ago

A fine example of a headline editor stating one thing ("morass!") and the author stating another ("probably no morass right now, but in a corrupt congress, that could change.")

debacle2• 14 years ago

It is a legal morass, we just are only on the edges of it now.

The 3D printing battle will be bloodier than the digital copying battle, precisely because there is much more to lose.

planetguy• 14 years ago

I have my doubts. I think there's more money in selling copyrighted content than in selling the fairly narrow range of products that can be produced with a 3D printer.

Looking around the room right now, the number of objects here that could be cranked out with any 3D printer is pretty darn small. For those that could, I doubt it would be any cheaper for me to 3D-print the darn thing, even if I already had the 3D printer, than it was for me to buy the real mass-produced deal.

The article's example of "little figurines" is the only example I can think of, and the little figurine industry isn't large compared to music or movies.

zephjc• 14 years ago

If you view 3D printing as a baby-step to Trek-like replicator technology^, then you may see that its more of a moral imperative that 3D printing technology become as cheap and elaborate as possible, as quickly as possible.

The only bottleneck to providing material objects for free or next to free should be in finding raw materials that can be printed out, and as a start, there's lots of that filling up the world's landfills.

Where sharing music and movies was pretty much zero real gain for file-sharers (you can live without the latest Lady Gaga album or Transformer movie), having access to super cheap working replicas of things like refrigerators, water purifiers, clothing, house-building materials, etc., can dramatically affect countless lives, especially in developing countries.

The rug absolutely must be pulled out from under the feet of the manner in which material objects are created and distributed, hopefully diminishing the number of have-nots in the world.

^ Not necessarily real energy->matter conversion, but something nearly as cheap and elaborate.

vecinu2• 14 years ago

> The rug absolutely must be pulled out from under the feet of the manner in which material objects are created and distributed, hopefully diminishing the number of have-nots in the world.

I don't necessarily agree with this statement. I believe that even though overpopulation IS a pressing issue at the moment, its effects aren't as devastating because half of the world's population does not have access to a lot of materials.

If everyone in developing nations suddenly manufactured their own parts, we would see a huge strain on non-renewable resources really quickly.

I'm still curious if we have enough copper available to keep up with the demand for housing, electrical components and all the wires we are using to power our devices.

ktizo3• 14 years ago

see a huge strain on non-renewable resources

With a plastic chipper, feedstock extruder and a suitably stocked waste dump, this becomes less of an issue.

brohee3• 14 years ago

"If everyone in developing nations suddenly manufactured their own parts, we would see a huge strain on non-renewable resources really quickly."

The plastic darling of 3D printing is PLA, which is as renewable as it get, and as non polluting as it gets.

crusso2• 14 years ago

> If you view 3D printing as a baby-step to Trek-like replicator technology^, then you may see that its more of a moral imperative that 3D printing technology become as cheap and elaborate as possible, as quickly as possible.

Nah, that's faith-speak. We don't have any idea if this technology will go much further beyond what is currently possible. This could be the "flying car" of the next 100 years that never fulfills its promise.

While you declare it a "moral imperative" and we bend all laws and societal rules to accomodate it, what suffers? What great technologies and solutions are killed because you (and other true believers) have decided that this is the thing we should all worship and sacrifice everything to achieve? What of our liberties go away because you have a vision?

3D printing is very cool and I see great things coming from it, but it's not Star Trek. It's not Star Wars. It's not the Matrix. It is what it is and we'll see where it goes. In the meantime, my interest is in protecting the free market principles that have consistently created the greatest good for the most people. That means respecting some level of Intellectual Property rights in other markets and not just steam-rolling some game-making company because a guy with a 3D printer wants to use this humanity-saving tool to print out some versions of legally trademarked action figures.

Bjartr• 14 years ago

>This could be the "flying car" of the next 100 years that never fulfills its promise.

Although I understand your point here, I thought I'd point out that this is a weak analogy because the problem with the flying car isn't that it's not technologically possible (it is, relatively trivially these days in fact) the problem is that it's a stupid idea. People have bad enough accidents when dealing with the two dimensions on a road, there's no way to make the technology safe enough to achieve the kind of market penetration the traditional automobile has. Without that the market forces for scaling the infrastructure necessary to produce and maintain such a 'fleet' don't exist.

>While you declare it a "moral imperative" and we bend all laws and societal rules to accommodate it, what suffers?

Those that want to continue to rely on a market model that is obsoleted by shifting the means of productions to individuals.

>What great technologies and solutions are killed

Those that are not pursued because there is not enough money in them under the new system. As opposed to those that are not pursued because there is not enough money in them in the existing system.

>What of our liberties go away because you have a vision?

The ability to make a bet that your creative work will be a success without the danger of someone in a better position to make money from the idea doing so. In fact we are already seeing the beginnings of a return to the modes of commerce prior to intellectual property laws such as an artisan being commissioned ahead of time to produce something by way of tools like Kickstarter which finally attempt to solve the discrepancy between our ability to produce and distribute and our ability to communicate.

>my interest is in protecting the free market principles that have consistently created the greatest good for the most people

My interest is in creating even greater good for even more people. Now, I'm not so arrogant to claim I know these new modes of commerce are better outright, I'm just saying that we don't actually know and we should give them their fair shot. Why should we settle when we could do even better?

wow did I get off topic and start ranting or what?

polshaw• 14 years ago

    > flying car...

Flying cars have always been bogus. Why spend much more energy on hovering a little above the ground, when we already have a well developed land-road network?? And if you want to get from A to B without the road network.. well, we have had flying vehicles to do that for a long time. The fact that, say, a helicopter doesn't meet the criteria for a flying car almost implicitly recognises that travelling along the ground is, at least some times, preferable.

As for 3D printing, it is going to have growing pains (anything with moving parts is going to require assembly, at least for the forseeable future), but it will surely go far.

jerf• 14 years ago

"super cheap working replicas of things like refrigerators, water purifiers, clothing, house-building materials,"

For the most part, the point is to prevent the laws from changing for these, rather than fixing current law. There is already no reason why you can't print those things. There are some reasons you can't just copy existing things, but in the end that's not a problem anyhow because we probably need to significantly modify the designs to account for being easily printable anyhow. Raw copying is just a bootstrapping note.

Though I suppose the next generation of "X, but on a computer" patent will be "X, but printed via 3D printer".

gaius• 14 years ago

Right, but in Star Trek, you don't replicate a kettle. You replicate tea, Earl Grey, hot.

iamwil• 14 years ago

"The only bottleneck to providing material objects for free or next to free should be in finding raw materials that can be printed out, and as a start, there's lots of that filling up the world's landfills."

Just to let you know, for desktop 3D printers like makerbot, you can print in either ABS or PLA. PLA is biodegradable and made from corn starch (iirc). While ABS (the plastic that legos are made from) smells like death when you melt it, PLA smells like popcorn. It doesn't have as wide as adoption as ABS at the moment since it's a little bit harder to work with. It tends to gunk up your extruder.

rprospero• 14 years ago

I'd argue that 3D printing isn't a baby step along that road. The road points toward the replicator, but it hits a dead end long before you get there. You still run into a basic materials problem.

For instance, you mention 3D printing up a refrigerator. You'll still need some sort of compressor gas for the actual cooling sections. You're also not going to be able to print the permanent magnets for your compressor motor. The 3D printer will help you make the doors and shelves, but the parts that actually make the refrigerator worthwhile have material properties that you can't simply print out.

You also mention clothes. Now, this is a possibility, if you're willing to clothe people in plastic shirts and pants. Effective, but highly uncomfortable and they're going to get pretty sweaty, especially in the developing countries where you want to do this. Now, if we want cloth clothes, things suddenly become much more difficult. First, the printer will still need plain fabric for input. Thus, all the machine is saving us is the cost of dying, cutting, and sewing the fabric. Considering that the jobs of cutting and sewing fabric have been shipped out to developing nations precisely because they have so much cheap expertise in those areas, it's not likely that a 3D printer is going to change much there. To put it differently, how would access to a 3D printer change things that their current access to a sewing machine hasn't?

Don't get me wrong. I love 3D printing and can't wait to own my own. There's a lot of neat stuff that can be done with these. However, it will ultimately be a joint approach. Third world amputees won't be printing off prosthetic limbs. They'll be printing off adapter cups that connect to a mass manufactured limbs. There's just too much material science for most things to just be printed.

ctdonath2• 14 years ago

We've been thru all these battles before. Look for the viable/profitable solutions already achieved.

How long to "iTunes Match" for MakerBot et al? 3D-scan all your stuff, your rough scan is "matched" to an existing high-res model on an all-licensing-settled server, so you can download and "print" all the copies you want for private use.

reustle• 14 years ago

> so you can buy, download and "print".

If we're already scanning it, why not just replicate the original?

grabeh7• 14 years ago

I believe in the same way as iTunes Match works, you would be legitimising your own creations to ensure that they were free from potential infringement actions.

grabeh7• 14 years ago

The article suggests that it is preferable to have an action under patent infringement rather than under copyright infringement because patents expire.

I think this is a gross over-simplification of the matter as if I were advising a manufacturer I would prefer to go down the route of copyright infringement as it would be a cheaper option than full-scale patent litigation.

Although this would be with the slight caveat that copyright infringement requires evidence of actual copying and will not succeed if independent creation can be shown.

I think it essentially still boils down to whether copying in this instance has actually taken place. In the instant case, I would love to see a comparison of the Games Workshop creations and the third party's creations. My guess is the third party works were inspired by GW rather than being substantially the same. In any event, it seems heavy handed of GW.

I would say overall that patent references are a red herring. In the instant case, GW will not hold a patent over each of the models of course. The focus on 3-D printing is interesting, but again it boils down to whether copying has taken place.

I would also add that under UK law, this would also be potentially dealt with under design rights law where protection is far more limited. In fact, because of mass production nature of the models, a claim would have to based on design right law rather than copyright, as they would not qualify as sculptures in my view.

mellis• 14 years ago

For more details, see "It Will Be Awesome if They Don't Screw it Up: 3D Printing" by Michael Weinberg: http://www.publicknowledge.org/it-will-be-awesome-if-they-do...

brohee3• 14 years ago

Also "Rule 34" by Charles Stross is a pretty good novel about some of the consequences of personal 3D printing being pushed underground by regulation.

GenericAlias• 14 years ago

Don't forget "Makers" by Cory Doctorow, which discusses some of the legal implications of personal 3D printing as both an attraction and as a way of cheaply producing a variety of things. http://craphound.com/makers/download/

Sukotto• 14 years ago

Also Cory Doctorow's 2007 short story "Printcrime"

http://craphound.com/?p=573

mistercow4• 14 years ago

I get depressed whenever I read about these people who get bitten by the DMCA and then don't do the 5 minutes of internet research needed to figure out how to fight it.

It sounds to me like this guy had a clear case of DMCA abuse. If he designed the models himself, from scratch, then the best claim Games Workshop could have against him would be trademark infringement, and that's not what the DMCA is for. Therefore, all he has to do is send Thingiverse a counter-notification and, unless Games Workshop files a lawsuit (which they almost certainly won't), Thingiverse will restore the content in 14 days (they are required to do this in order to receive safe harbor protection under the DMCA).

Chilling Effects even has a page for automatically generating these counter-notifications, so there's really no excuse for not protecting yourself from abuse: http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca/counter512.pdf

Anderkent2• 14 years ago

Except you're a single person and they're this scary huge corporation. If they do sue, what are you going to do? Not many are willing to take that risk.

mistercow4• 14 years ago

But see, that's the same boat we were in before we had the DMCA. It's a problem that there's a two-week blackout on your stuff if someone files a takedown notice, but it does protect you from being sued right off the bat. In other words, if he's unwilling to risk filing the counter-notice, then without the DMCA, he wouldn't (or shouldn't) have been willing to risk uploading the models at all.

But to answer your rhetorical question, if they do sue, you contact groups like the EFF and ask for help. (Better yet, contact them before filing the counter-notification). They would likely be happy to work to establish a good precedent in a novel situation like this.

grabeh7• 14 years ago

I think it would be useful to see the his models and relevant GW models side-by-side to assess whether any similarities are present. He has obviously had sight of GW models which would allow GW to argue a form of copying has taken place.

Also, contrast this story with the outcry over EA's alleged copying of GW models albeit digitally.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/s4s7f/tank_in_new_cc...

mistercow4• 14 years ago

Oh I definitely agree. I am assuming that he has a legitimate complaint for the sake of argument, because if he doesn't, then this is just the DMCA doing exactly what it's supposed to.

nl• 14 years ago

You probably should read the article. Even if there were similarities it wouldn't matter.

Physical objects can be protected by (normal) patents, which protect physical functionality or design patents[1]. Even if GW did have a design patent (which is fairly rare) then it would only protect against identical copies. The standard of proof for design patent violation is that the new object could be mistaken as the original (not "has some similar features"), so provided they weren't copies of GW models then he was probably safe.

The article says "so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank", which sounds to me like he was on very safe grounds.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

zemo• 14 years ago

the article fails to mention the food industry, despite the fact that the French Culinary Institute is very publicly developing food printers. You can imagine how Nabisco will feel when you can download the plans to print out Oreos in your own home.

HeyLaughingBoy• 14 years ago

How do they feel knowing that I can bake them at home right now? http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/oreo-cookies-recipe/index...

ktizo3• 14 years ago

I think of this as more of Patent Law's 3d Printing Morass.

3-D Printing's Legal Morass

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