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Form1 3D Printer and Kickstarter Get Sued For Patent Infringment
An anonymous reader writes "3D Systems, one of the big fish in 3D printer manufacturing, filed a suit against Formlabs's hugely popular Form1 printer put forth on Kickstarter. The crowdfunding effort has amassed close to 3M US Dollars, of an initial 100K requested. 3D Systems accuses Formlabs and Kickstarter of knowingly infringing one of its still valid blanket patents on stereolithography and cross-sectional printing of 3D objects. The company is probably going to go for the kill, as one can deduce from the demands on their complaint."
In "The State of Community Fabrication" presentation at HOPE9, Far McKon noted that no one had yet filed a patent lawsuit against a 3D printing company, but it looks like his fears have come true.
After all, why take time and energy creating better products when you can just set your lawyers on the competition.
These startups must me punished for their hubris.
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
In "The State of Community Fabrication" presentation at HOPE9, Far McKon noted that no one had yet filed a patent lawsuit against a 3d printing company, but it looks like his fears have come true.
It's not really a surprise, but was probably only a matter of time. If there is money to be made, patents and lawsuits will be filed.
Now I know who I'll never buy anything from. Anything from 3D systems should be blacklisted. I wonder what they'd do if no one bought any of their stuff.
The patent in the link has the limitation: "the support structure selectively having different energy levels applied to it at at least the down-facing interfacing region than do the intermediate region and the object to thereby create weak points with less solidification in the solid state transformed liquid medium than the intermediate region and the three-dimensional object at at least the down-facing interfacing regions to facilitate ease of removal of the support structure from a completed three-dimensional object".
So if Form 1 software is tweaked not to do this, then it would not infringe. At the same time, by the filing of the lawsuit, 3D Systems may have done irreperable harm to Form 1. Counter suit anyone?
The Replicator 2 might take off in it's new target market if FORM1 get taken out of the equation before they get started. Lets hope so, Pettis is the personification of the open source/hacker spirit and it's only fair that he should replace Steve Jobs as the undisputed king of the hipsters.
The US have brought this onto themselves, now live with the patent mess and watch the US economy sue itself into oblivion and slowly self-destruct.
When I make something as simple as a dovetail box, when it's time to cut off the lid, I carefully do not cut the lid all the way off, leaving some uncut areas around the edges to hold the lid in place so that the saw blade doesn't bind.
The patent in question is for generating supports to hold a model in place as it's being printed --- if one does this same thing in a subtractive process, it's obvious that one would be able to in an additive process.
William
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
This is the new America! They don't need to sell stuff, just sue the people who do and take their money.
Seems as though the patent is legit. Although it's not nice of them to sue without talking to the From1 builders first. ... Or did they attempt to do that and got rejected? If so, it's their given right to start legal action.
Could Form1 licence the patent is the next question I'd ask.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I can see them going for the Kickstarter project, but going for Kickstarter itself?
Yea, great business model. Piss off nerds that use a HUGELY popular web site. [sarcasm]
as one can deduct from the demands
I have deduced that someone has made a typo.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The purpose of patents is to ensure that people can spend a lot of money on research, with some kind of general guarantee that it can pay off for them. Making support struts thinner at the point of contact doesn't really strike me as something that resulted from a protracted compaign of research, but rather an isolated flash of insight. Those flashes of insight aren't irrelevant; they're important to making things move forward. But they don't need to be patented; people will have them anyway. In order to encourage the progress of science and the useful arts, I think one really only needs to protect the things that require a great deal of effort to discover.
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Is it technically possible or feasible to put some sort of flavoring into the 3D printer plastic material?
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Even better, you can print in chocolate. Of course, that might not be a habit you would want to induce in "the lady", as GPP puts it.
I print my cock in 3d for the lady !!!!
She suck the plastic.
mmmmmm...so good plastic 3d cock.
not unsurprisingly enough this subject comes up just about every time 3d printing is discussed after hours. that or pussy.
anyhow, with objets(a firm) style jet printers you can print rubber-like parts(it uses a resin and uv.. but an inkjet style head, it's a pretty cool technique but sadly I suppose it's patent encumbered as well. also it's not very fast, but makes super nice models. ).
now excuse me while I go back to cutting up a figurine mesh model for making a butt-bowl(seriously, check thingiverse in a day or two) with my replicator(fdm style machine, like repraps and all cheap machines).
now, there probably was a reason why nobody had built a cheap sla machine before for sale. what sucks about the company suing form1 is that apparently they didn't even tell _what_ patent it is. maybe it's the orientation of the model? maybe it's heating the fluid or some shit like that which could be worked over. anyhow, they can go suck a fat one - the process isn't _that_ novel in principle once you got access to the resin.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
These guys suing Kickstarter makes about as much sense as Apple suing Wal-Mart for selling Samsung tablets and phones. Are we going to expect Wal-Mart, Best Buy and eBay to start doing patent checks on everything they put on their shelves or list on their site? If by some strange quirk this case moves forward with Kickstarter attached, that will be the legal expectation by precedent.
IANL, but in the complaint they may have already given Kickstarter cause to get removed. They mention Kickstarter's TOS and the judge should see that as a safe harbor establishment.
This may be a legit patent but I feel like it's a predatory move. 3DSystems do sell Makerbot as the 3DTouch, Prusa as the Botmill/Cube3D and Huxley as the RapMan. Suing some guys for doing better R&D work than them shows their hand as nothing but money whores. They aren't interested in building better tools at all. Form1, you have my support.
http://www.bitsfrombytes.com/usd/catalog/3dtouch [3DTouch: $4300USD vs Makerbot Replicator: $2000]
http://www.bitsfrombytes.com/usd/catalog/rapman-32-3d-printer-kit [RapMan: $2000 vs Huxley: obsolete]
http://cubify.com/cube/store.aspx [Cube3D: $1300 vs Prusa: ~$800]
Did I say money whores? Ok just getting that in there again because they are money whores.
Preface with typical IANAL and whatnot. But with Formlabs not actually shipping anything yet, the best they can do is a cease and desist, right? That could screw them, but as others have mentioned they can seemingly get around the unexpired patents. Litigation costs are another issue of course. It could easily kill the kickstarter-sourced funding.
This is the correct link for the patent at issue: http://www.google.com/patents/US5597520
If your theory is different from practice, then your theory is wrong.
Rep-rap and the like should not worry too much. IANAL but upon reading the patent claims (all of which expand on claim 1) the primary innovation seems to be curing the resin to a lesser degree to create weak points in the support structure. If you're extruding plastic from a nozzle this IMHO does not apply. So I looked at the Form1 website and indeed they are curing a resin to create solid objects. Bummer, cause that method is in may ways better than extruding melted plastic and only requires a single axis machine. Lithography != Extrusion/deposition.
To be honest, 3d systems is the microsoft of the 3d printing community, they've been buying everybody out, even the small guys who make diy printers, and buying up all the patents. I'm going to guess that Formlabs refused to be bought up into 3D systems borganism, so they're suing them.
3d systems also does other evil things like charging lots for ink(should I call it toner instead?) and punish you if you use any ink that isn't from them. This is especially troublesome when you're using specialty inks to make real parts where you need special properties like fire resistance, something that 3d systems more often than not doesn't offer. Lately they've been trying to push this new cartridge system that uses RFID to make sure you're only using their cartridges. Luckily, it's not catching on.
3d systems is universally hated by all in the 3d printing community.
This is why we can't have nice things.
The complaint clearly states they are filing suit based on the 520 patent.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
And IANAL, but it looks like the independent claims have a part that can be worked around; for example, copying or shifting data from one layer to the next.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
What the heck would kickstarter have to do with it?
If it's a patent violation, then it's a patent violation by the person who infringed on the patent. All kickstarter did was provide a venue for raising and delivering the funds.
This is like holding the Mint to blame for a bank heist.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It just occurred to me: might this be the very thing which is needed in order to repair the patent system? What if patent enforcement did require that the patent holder could demonstrate that they put great effort/expense into publicity?
Can anyone think of a downside? Sure, it's an expense and no one wants invention to be expensive, but it's got to be far less expense than independent parallel patent searches by the thousands/millions of people who work in an industry. And in addition to the orders of magnitude reduction in the number of people who do the work, there's also the fact that hiring the advertising media is far cheaper than hiring patent lawyers.
So on the whole, this would reduce the expenses that patents incur on an industry.
It wold work, too. Think back to the LZW patent for example (maybe this is a bad example, because it's a software patent, but bear with me). People used it in GIF because they didn't know better. Then Unisys wrote that letter to DDJ, and soon everyone knew and many people really did stop infringing the patent.
After that, someone might have still had excuses to keep using LZW, but ignorance really wasn't a credible excuse anymore. Publicity worked.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
The same will happen to the Ouya android based game console.
That $8M kickstarter money will be picked to the bone by IP vultures.
If you are a backer: there goes your money.
http://www.stolk.org/tlctc
Took long enough.
Now you will have to have DRMized hammers and screwdrivers to prevent someone from making something 'wrong'..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But this company is definitely not a patent troll, and it looks like they make great products:
http://www.3dsystems.com/personal-3d-printers
I think that they should try and settle with the startup and allow them to pay them a license fee for each printer sold. $50/printer and everyone is happy. They get to use the patent and everyone goes home happy. The guy heading the startup should just call the big company and see what they can work out.
Anything can be negotiated.
This is definitely not legal advice, it could make things way worse, and I am not a lawyer.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Since they only needed $100K, they can spend the rest on attorneys.
Just forget someone innovating when big companies discovered the power of patents. If IBM had done this 30 or 40 years ago, patenting everything, we would not have any personal computer, as any attempt would be destroyed like this one.
While my more liberal friends here have been fixated on "saving the planet" from "big oil", you've been overlooking the much more dangerous "big" (probably because it's such a big source of money to democrat politicians) ... "big law". The nation is flooded with lawyers, most of whom are eager to be the hired guns of big corporations and big government. As a profession, lawyers benefit from each and every loophole they insert into the legal code. Every time you cheer the lawyers as they perform some "do-gooder" thing you like, you are supporting their expanded power and the ever-expanding pool of precedents they set (which their buddies in the courts then treat as additional law). Most lawmakers are lawyers (though there's no requirement that we elect lawyers) and most judges are lawyers (though in most jurisdictions there's no legal requirement that they be). Wonder why every law written in the past 60+ years is so very complex? Complex == loopholes and a better chance a lawyer on either side can win; simple laws are unambiguous, require less legal assistance to the parties (fewer billable hours) and make it far more likely one part will quickly win a case and the other side will quickly lose it. By supporting the conversion of everything in life into a political matter (which invites in the lawyers, many of whom either are politicians or are "in bed with" politicians) or a legal matter (which invites-in the politicians, most of whom are lawyers) people build this beast and feed this beast. The beast seems so very lovable as long as it is going after the people/things you do not like... but the beast is amoral at best (completely self-serving and evil at worst) and has an appetite for power and money that can never be satisfied.
In this case, the lawyers are using patent law to help a big company whose stuff is mostly obvious (people have been building things in slices for centuries) go after a little guy with a patent (which is again rather obvious... using a computer to build things in slices + a few bells and whistles any college kid in the particular field, with some time and money, could have added) ...so-far this is not very unique, but stay tuned for the part that matters most... The real target is the very concept of kickstarter . If any big company can use big law to sue any crowd-source organizer over any patent that any project *might* infringe, then that's a way to throw a big wet blanket onto this whole "dangerous" crowd-source concept. WooHoo! Corporations and Lawyers rule!