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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.
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.
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.
Here's a thought.
Say this guy invents some weird stuff made from calcium salts, petroleum jelly and aliphatic acids that you mold or whatever and you can make stuff with it. There is only one method this substance can be obtained and he patents it. All good until now.
Then there's this other guy who knows the ingredients (everyone knows the ingredients because they're easy to find out) and he knows the method but he can't sell the product because there's only one way to make the product and it's patented. But he has a brilliant idea: why not sell the people a device with a slot for each ingredient which then mixes the ingredients and applies patented method to obtain product. Better yet, he sells a customer some plastic to use in his 3d printer, an arduino and some motors to connect the printed parts to and he also sells the ingredient (which could very well be calcium salts, petroleum jelly and some aliphatic acids, stearic maybe??).
How can you argue that he is infringing on the patent if he only sells some plastic, an arduino board which you could program later with some software you download from this guy's website, and some "random" chemicals?
mov ax,4c00h
int 21h
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.
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
You personally haven't seen it, no. I've been in the smart phone game a long time (and hold many stupid patents - it wasn't my decision to file them) and patents certainly do slow innovation. You would probably be shocked to see what actually happens behind closed doors.
The reality of the situation is depressing. Sadly, I can so no more publicly.
My point was they may slow down innovation, but not the markets. It is the markets that drive companies so without market or government pressure the status quo remains.
Silence is a state of mime.
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.
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?
Yeah, sure. Why not claim that you are selling just a bunch of atoms which for some reason happen to be assembled in a way that closely resembles patented device? Let's see if this convinces a judge.
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.
I have a 4D printer. Its very slow.
Let's see your patent for that, smarty-pants.
Have gnu, will travel.
1. Party A sequences your genome, sends it to you.
2. Party B is a website that supplies free downloadable software that will read the file and score any tests you are interested in. Academic labs have been doing this for some tests for a while now already.
Neither part in isolation is protectable by patent. So long as there's no coordination between the two, once you have your genome sequenced all of your genetic tests (except for ones that require a new sample from a particular tissue, like the ones that are going to become common for cancer diagnostics) will be free for the rest of your life.
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'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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.