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The Patents That Threaten 3-D Printing
An anonymous reader writes "We've watched patents slow down the smartphone and tablet markets. We've seen patent claims thrown against Linux, Android, and countless other software projects. Now, as 3-D printing becomes more capable and more affordable, it seems a number of patents threaten to do the same to the hobbyist and tinkerer crowd. Wired has highlighted some of the most dangerous ones, including: a patent on soluble print materials that support a structure while it's being printed; a ridiculously broad patent on distributed rapid prototyping, which could affect "every 3-D printing service that has launched in the past few years"; and an 18-year-old patent on 3-D printing using a powder and a binding material, held by MIT."
This comes up every now and then, and it honestly looks like the majority of 3d printing patents are legitimate, original inventions that the owners created.
Take the "soluble print materials that support a structure whie it's being printed"; that's genius, I would never have come up with that.
An intricate bureaucracy put in place to ensure that the invention and commercial realization of an idea shall be no less than twenty years apart.
Well, at least the MIT one is about to expire.
The same people that say patents are necessary seems to be like the same people who would argue that 1 or 2% increase in their taxes would cause them to stop working. Does anyone take this seriously?
I can see it perhaps in a few industries like the pharmaceutical industry but not for the last majority of fields.
An 18-year-old patent is "news"?
Blah blah blah patents bad blah blah blah. What do people come here for, information, or confirmation bias?
The wired article also admits as much (before drumming up the hysteria).
If you dig into PAIR on the broad patent for all 3D printing done over the web, for example (http://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, search for application 11/818,521 and go to "image file wrapper) the examiner and prospective patenter are engaged in a pretty intense fight over the obviousness of the application.
The distributed rapid prototyping one is absurdly broad and pretty obvious, but it's worth noting that it is still pending. The soluble materials one covers specific formulations, not the general concept of a "lost armature." Makerbot, on the other hand, appears to have successfully patented the conveyor belt.
Lawyers do seem to be crushing innovation in the USA. Do you think it's possible that innovation and the world's lead in technical developments will shift to places where inventors/creators/small start ups are less inhibited by patent /copyright etc laws, and new products get pushed out without so much risk of being crushed by established old organisations? I'm wondering if places where legal frameworks aren't so closely adhered to will take the lead in the near future and be tolerated by their national governments as a way of increasing their share of the world economy?
Can you patent a natural process? Swifts have been 3D printing for millennia (birds nest (soup)). Ditto Snails (shells), Bees (hives). Prior Art is all around us.
Patents are only applicable if you intend to commercialize the machine/invention. i.e. they regulate business only.
For other purposes patents are free to use. You can build literally every invention in the patent office without permission.
No, because China only copies others. A slowdown in Western innovation due to patents will not result in relocation. There just won't be much innovation.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
"No, because China only copies others..... There just won't be much innovation."
Wasn't this the claim made about Japan in USA and Europe in the 1950s and 1960s? that they just produced inferior copies of Western goods and competed by selling poorer quality copies at cheaper prices? e.g. in the camera and automotive industries?
The counter argument was that they learnt production methods and began to understand the desires of the USA/European market and then went on to improve quality and offer innovations, while Western companies were complacent and said "we know what our people want, we'll continue to make the same kind of autos / cameras etc.". I'd be interested in opinions from Detroit for example ("Motor City").
Judging by the teams of US "Ambassadors" being sent into Europe and I assume into Asia too all that may change.
Just patent a bunch of imaginary stuff and then claim ownership once someone actually makes a thing like that.
Good grief, do you even know what the word "only" means?
A correct usage of the term is: You only know about China from reading about how they've copied others.
But how much American innovation is in fact done by Chinese immigrants?
When one thing changes, other things change. China has about four times the capacity to innovate than the US does. It just finds it more profitable to perform that innovation in the US. For now.
Having just submitted my first provisional patent, one for an actual, physical device, these patents for "vague ideas of doing something" look more and more absurd every day. If you don't know how to do something, then you really haven't invented anything. I've got this idea of a car that runs on rainbows and happy thoughts. Here's a poorly drawn picture of a rainbow and a smiling person sitting in the car and the car is moving.
Civil disobedience.
Ignore the patent system. Chances are you're not going to get caught anyway. Same as piracy.
Is "with 3d printing" the next "on the internet?"
Like, can I get a patent for making a plastic spoon "with 3d printing?"
If I want a REALLY strong patent, I can have people design their personalized spoon "on the internet" which is then automatically made "with 3d printing."
My patent will be double-protected and bullet-proof!
This space available.
uhm.... pretty sure patents have a time limit...
Starting out, the US ripped-off quite a bit of IP and tech from Jolly Old, all of it justified by the Revolutionary War thing.
I recall reading that bulldozer wheels were rebuilt by wire-welding at least as far back as the 1960's.
As a (steel-track) bulldozer gets used, the dirt between the wheels and tracks causes the wheels to wear down and decrease in diameter. To fix the problem, there are automatic machines that slowly rotate the wheel while running a wire-feed welder back and forth across the worn-down surface. When the wheel's outer diameter has reached a point where it is slightly larger than necessary, the wheel is removed and machined back down to the proper diameter again.
Seems a hassle but apparently it is a lot cheaper than making a whole new wheel.
We've watched patents slow down the smartphone and tablet markets.
Wrong. part of the problem is that we haven't. We have seen an endless stream of stupid patents, huge lawsuits (apple v samsung), and still we buy and the market continues apace.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:World_Wide_Smartphone_Sales_Share.png
http://www.lessonspace.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Untitled.jpg
http://www.digitaltrends.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/pc-sales-cannibalized-by-tablets-chart-bill-shopes-goldman-sachs-2010.jpg
There is no government pressure to stop, and no market pressure from consumers to stop. I recently bought a smartphone -and- a tablet. A Samsung and a Kindle. Both companies own hoards of stupid patents. But so would anyone else I chose to purchase from, and I needed or strongly desired the devices. Even if there were a high percentage of consumers educated in this (there are not enough to sway any market), I doubt there was a single vendor in the chain of sale for either that does not have what we here would consider BS IP. For the phone it was Sprint and Samsung, for the tablet Walmart and Amazon. This isn't even considering the software vendors included with both purchases or added later.
So, all you anti regulation libertarians? Who steps in to fix that? Not the gov, its either paid off as it is now, asleep at the switch, or castrated and powerless (as libertarians would have it).
Silence is a state of mime.
Patents should work like trademarks: Use them or lose them. These sneak attacks long after the fact suck.
The problem is companies are more and more using broad range patents to control whole industries. That is NOT how patents are meant to be used. I don't want to see a limiting so much as a modification and redirection. Notice many of these patents are from the 90s and even 80s or before. Some of them are not based on a product so much as an antiscipation of a need to they file an offensive/defensive patent then they wait until alot of major companies are using the process and rack up big profits then they sue. Two simple cures, if they really do have a product give them three years to develop it so most of these troll patents would have expired. I'm talking patents on methods and other broad range patents like gestures and such. Also force them to file within 12 months of a competing product being release. That would kill off these massive lawsuits for 5 to 10 years of infringement before they even filed. Better yet force them to file a cease and desist and give the company 6 to 12 months to stop infringing then if the company fails to comply they can sue to day one. I'm guessing the vast majority of companies had no idea they were infringing and most would make the needed changes to avoid the lawsuit. The current system encourages greed by allowing the patent holder to wait years before filing against a company. This actually prevents the company from stopping the infringement since they aren't made aware of the problem. The system doesn't need to be scrapped it needs to be fixed and reasonable rules and limitations brought in.
It's been both 20 years from filing and 17 years from grant.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
I think were at a point of evolution where we need to ask why we have patents in the first place. At one point the patent was a protection "device" that gave a certain level of safety to a product. Now the patent seems to be more of a weapon in the court room used to stall progress and strangle inventions. So saying that gets me to my final point, why do we still have patents, why can't we just be inventive, creative and free to design, built and use what we want in a knowledge sharing environment. I would hate to see something like hobby 3D printing go the way of the dogs because some company's feel the massive ego they carry is more important then the ability to be creative.
a patent on soluble print materials - license it or come up with a different technique (using different chemicals for example) if you want to do that.
distributed rapid prototyping - don't use a web server. The diagnostics over a network interface is harder to work around. This does seem rather broad and non-inventive...
printing using a powder and a binding material - wait for it to expire. That shouldn't be hard since you only have to wait until 2012.
In fact, the nations that sweep away patent protection against the common good will streak ahead of the moribund USA and similar countries.
Patents approved by over-worked and under-paid examiners are usually worthless. They are just fodder for patent trolls and should be cancelled
The patent office is populated by idiots. Tech patents are almost always overly broad, ignore prior art, obvious, etc. We...get...it. So how long will we continue to be subjected to the interminable stream of stories and the even more predictable stream of comments?
I conceived of temporary support structures for self-replicating, universal assemblers to use while building an object atom-by-atom. The only difference is that my idea does not destroy the structures by dissolving them when they are no longer needed (for support or for nanobots to climb). Instead, my idea is to disassemble the structures piece by piece and be able to re-use the support structure material. I would use my same idea for 3D printing. I would ignore anyone's patent because I conceived of this idea in the 1990's. No one has to know what's going on in my basement anyway. How I would make my objects is nobody's business.
The patent system is just too slow for the way the world works now.
Technological progress is accelerating in many ways, and making things does not require a large manufacturing or team.
I feel that the patent lifetime should be much shorter to allow for this.
Also the patents should need to be much more unique.
Patent reform should be applied retroactively also. This is a stunner, but so many thigs from the past are so obvious now.
We need to be able to stimulate the economy with inventions where you want to actually make something physical or abstract from it and sell it.
The idea behind patents is legitimate--to protect inventors from getting screwed out of reaping the benefits of their inventions by some big faceless corporation that can afford to under-bid them and out-run them to market. The idea is that by giving the inventor a limited period of sole rights to produce the product of their invention, you give them more incentive to invent things that people can benefit from.
In practice though, this doesn't work, because the cost of registering all of the patents you need and then defending them against the corporations and their lawyers is so prohibitively high, that only another giant faceless corporation can afford to do it in the first place. Modern day inventors end up working directly for the very corporations that are ripping them off, by signing over their ideas to have them patented by the corporation instead, in exchange for a tiny bonus check, since they could never afford to go forward with cashing it in themselves.
Now patents are just their own thriving industry of innovation-stifling cash-farming litigation. Companies dump millions of dollars on trying to sneak stupid, overly-broad prior art patents past the patent office, so that they can make money suing people who actually innovate.
We need the patent system, but not as it is. Simply doing away with it would hurt innovation just as much as it presently hurts innovation with its abuse. It needs to be reformed to better protect inventors while allowing for an easier, lower cost of entry for truly innovative ideas, and preventing patent trolling by big companies.
Patents are in place to protect the original inventors and owners of said patent. THIS IS WHAT THEY ARE THERE FOR
But anytime something is threatened by a patent already in place that is being wholely or in portion by someone else later you guys throw a fit and rant and rave if the patent threatens something you are interested in or if the patent protects some big company.
Regardless of what it is if someone violates a patent then they should be held responsible regardless if it interefeares with something or helps a large corporation. But everyone here acts like they are certified patent attorneys and talk like they know how the law should work when you guys dont know squat, you just want to bitch and spew out uninformative and often wrong things about patents just because you have nothing else to do.
You guys seem to think that laws should be flexible and everything should work out to your satisfaction. If someone owns a patent and someone else infringes on it then thats pretty much end of the story. But again people get on here bitch about patent laws, bitch about when someone gets sued over it, bitch that the government doesnt do anything, relublicans line their pockets and whatever else insane and mindless dribble you come up. You read some headline and get all upset about it and bitch and whine but the reality is you dont know squat. You read some little headline and you dont know anything about patents or their laws.
I am 100% behind patent laws and do not question them. Are they perfect? No. Do problems occasionally come because of them? Yes. But nothing is perfect and considering the vast majority of patents do what they are meant to do I wont complain.
For gods sake if someone suddenly says "Apple stole my patent for the ipad and Im suing them" you all would line up behind that person even if they didnt have a shred of proof and rant about how apple is screwing the little guy. Even if that person didnt have a patent or anything you would join them just because they are against apple. Just like if say Intel sued someone for ripping off a patent they own you would hate in intel even if they are 100% in the right just because its a big company.
Not only with wire welding. There were processes in the 1960's which used fine metal powders sprayed out through an oxyacetylene flame.
It was called hard facing and there were machines build to controll the process programmatically.
A good operator could make replacment parts for many expensive and/or hard to find items.
First of all, if you think that China, Japan and Korea are some kind of patent-free zone, you are sadly mistaken. It is not unusual to see patents in all of those jurisdictions as well as the U.S., several European countries (GB, DE, FR principally), Australia and Israel.
Second, patents can protect significant investments. While pharmaceuticals are the most obvious case, there are many other areas where the case for investment does not survive if there are not patents on expensive-to-develop technology. First-mover advantage only goes so far these days.
And really, an 18-year-old MIT patent is a real problem? Sounds like a real breakthrough to me.
I have a 4D printer. Its very slow.
Let's see your patent for that, smarty-pants.
Have gnu, will travel.
No, because the USA would simply apply massive diplomatic and economic pressure to force those countries to bring their IP laws in line with those of America.
I'm not convinced there's anywhere you can go to get away from those established old organizations -- especially since it would appear that the diplomats take their marching orders from the corporations and let them write some of the proposals. Almost all of the IP treaties the US pushes on other countries have essentially been written by industry.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
It worries and worries about patents, but patents never actually end up being a real problem. Oh patents on 3d printers.. I might have problems! Oh, patents on GUI... I might have problems!
Take some prozac.
It's hard to take an article seriously when it quotes an expired patent as being a threat to technology development.
In fact the MIT patent is a boon because it outlines a technology that is now free for anyone to practice.
Every-one of these patents is as obvious as the need for a door knob on a conventional hinged door. A door knob is an obvious 'need' once the door itself is considered. Most of the patents complained about fall into the same category. ANYONE who just so happened to be 'first' in these given fields would spot obvious solutions.
A 3D printer is so clearly NOT a collection of clever inventions, but a system put together using very very obvious need-driven solutions.
The way in which the 'model' is 'printed' was always going to be drawn from a number of pre-existing 'industrial' techniques.
-cure a liquid resin or plastic layer by layer using a heating element or chemical spray
-deposit layers of powder, and cure each layer with a binding element
-spay layers of quick setting plastic
-use layers of paper, 'cured' with a chemical spray (this one I haven't seen used, but maybe because removing the surplus 'paper' afterwards is seen as difficult, although obviously the 'paper' used could be some water soluble material.
Now, I have to say that a class discussion with reasonably bright 12-year olds would throw up all the above methods and more. Why on Earth should any of these obvious methods receive a patent simply because some-one was first to build some kind of 3D printer?
The irony here is that (shills aside) we would all accept a complete 3D printer receiving patent protection for its specific system design if enough problems had been solved, but such patents don't exist because of the complication of patenting true engineering success (taking well known ideas, and finding a way to make them work together in a complex system).
Universities most certainly should NOT be allowed 'door knob' patents. Indeed, if universities cannot cure themselves of patenting the obvious, they should not be allowed any commercially exploited patents whatsoever.
Anyway, I'll still await the 'paper' layer inkjet 3D printer. Inkjet sprays 'glue' (just think how hi-rez that is), new layer of paper is placed on top, and a heated 'roller' cures this layer to the previous one. However, EVERYTHING I describe in this 'invention' are cheap, meaningless words without a whole raft of very specific solutions, but I'd still get a patent if I was first to describe this idea- and that is just disgusting.
They should have reasonable length. Coming up with an idea doesn't forbid others to come up with same one, and tendency of that happening increases with appropriate developments. Thus many genius methods become a self-evident norm, not only because we have (if we do) an example. Patents should become obsolete under certain conditions, like current topic ("everyone" does 3d printing these days, and such ideas doesn't require being a costly educated specialist anymore) and their huge lifetime is obsolete long ago, with increasing speeds of communication compared to when they first appeared. There's a difference between protecting the inventor and creating a cash cow, which in turn is bought by someone anyway.
This was unfortunately something that been was bound to come up sooner or later. Patents and other intellectual right is as old as the country, frankly was way protect people's inventions so they can profit on them. However our modern society is so far beyond that simply way of protecting inventions that now its haunting us. I do still believe we should protect people inventions, but not carried on forever. 3D Printing is gate way to new industrial age, but not immediately and frankly small guys making these break throughs are going get stomped.
Excellent point. The "ridiculously broad patent" referred to in the summary is not a patent at all, but is the '521 application you describe.
A patent application is not a patent, even though it hopes to be some day.
hi!
Dude man, patents haven't worked that way since before I was BORN!
That shit you're spouting? That's what the ignorant masses are told to make them think that patents are even slightly good.
Name even a single inventor in the past decade that has been unequivocally helped by patents, and I'll name another dozen that have been screwed over by them.
Even if there were to be lawsuits to stop commercial production of 3D printing tech, there's already 3D printers out there. And as the tech first started to be utilized by private citizens there were more than one project out there to help spread the tech to more and more people. You would purchase the parts to build a printer, and the first thing you'd print were the parts for another printer...
Take that paradigm and expand on it to today's much more robust tech, and you cant stop the growth. No patent enforcement can stop the expansion.
"But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it,..." - Nancy Pelosi
The smartphone market is moving slowly because of patents?
I'm curious, did pulling that one out of your ass hurt a lot or did you prestretch to pass it without issue?
Such an echo chamber.
It would certainly be a fascinating element of a new city state. I imagine many brilliant minds would want to live and work in a patent free system where they have access to all technologies and the work they do was broadly shared.
3D printing hugely benefits this as having a more nodular, simple manufacturing, sales and production base would seem to fix one of the larger problems faced by more socialist governments in the past.
This is obviously examined in Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age (I'd love some other texts with a similar notion).
It's unclear just how much benefit, say a car manufacturer, would gain by having access to all the technologies in every car but it would seem to be non-trivial.
The current system is so insane that the large companies simply avoid it by using broad cross licensing... which meshes pretty well into their oligopalist tendencies.
I think it's about time I cash in on that "fashioning materials into tangible items" patent I purchased from The Dutch East India Company.
I don't think anyone can get around the mathematics of a 3D printer that can replicate all of its own parts, as theorized by John von Neumann. If you try to regulate them of stifle them with patent allegations, all that will do is ensure that the illegal printers are the ones that are the most desirable, are the most flexible, have the best support, and are the most profitable.
Creating an imaginary regulatory network over a device that quite literally cannot be controlled any better than drugs or guns--and probably less well than those--will merely ensure that the proliferation of the devices approaches its ideal mathematical curve--completely outside of the law.
Everybody knows patents are good for... Awkward. Can't remember.
Privacy is terrorism.
One could build something that way using flour, an egg & milk or water concoction, and a paint brush. You can bake it to assist in bonding & solidification.