Makerbot's Replicator 2 is among the new cadre of highly capable, low-cost 3D printers fueling a 3D content boom. (Source: Makerbot)
Posted on 10/31/2012 7:20:42 PM PDT by null and void
The consumer 3D printing revolution is coming. That is, of course, if you fully buy into the potential of dozens of startups rolling out increasingly lower-cost 3D printer units along with a burgeoning community of 3D content tool providers, service bureaus, and even retail shops promising to push this technology to the next level.
Caught up in the enthusiasm, thousands, maybe even millions, of hobbyists, do-it-yourself entrepreneurs, and practicing engineers are experimenting with the new 3D print capabilities, churning out 3D designs for everything from coffee cups to iPhone covers to more serious engineered goods like furniture and industrial parts. They are actively sharing their 3D designs on communities like Thingiverse, Cubify.com, and Shapeways, and are anxiously anticipating a time when you find nearly anything you want modeled in 3D and effortlessly print out a copy on your home-based printer, no muss, no fuss, no expensive markup to cover manufacturing costs.
Makerbot's Replicator 2 is among the new cadre of highly capable, low-cost 3D printers fueling a 3D content boom. (Source: Makerbot)
Well, not so fast. There are huge intellectual property and digital rights issues at stake with this scenario. Remember when the music industry, fed up with all the free file-sharing on Napster, started cracking down on regular folks downloading and happily exchanging their copious libraries of free music? It makes sense that beyond the community of happy-to-share 3D enthusiasts will be an even larger pool of 3D content owners (think manufacturers of goods, perhaps) that will eventually call for similar copyright protections to protect what they view as their critical IP assets.
Enter Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and the head of Intellectual Ventures, a company promoting what it calls innovation marketplace services, including amassing a huge portfolio of patents. Apparently, Intellectual Ventures thinks there's opportunity in IP protection in the 3D printing market. It has recently been issued a patent by the US Patent & Trademark Office entitled "manufacturing control system," which appears to be technology that delivers on the idea of digital rights management for 3D printing. In addition to additive manufacturing, the patent includes use of digital files in extrusion, ejection, stamping, die casting, and other processes, essentially comprising the range of 3D printing technologies.
The broad patent reportedly covers a copy-protection system that creates a digital wrapper around the 3D design files used by 3D printers, ensuring that the proper permissions are in place and potential licensing fees paid up before the 3D model can be printed out. Of course, there's no guarantee that 3D manufacturers or 3D content tool providers will embrace this or any other digital rights management model. But I suppose it's a sign of market potential, perhaps even maturation, that people are starting to think about the harder issues, including how intellectual property protection applies to 3D printing. Let the games begin.
Tell me about it; I have half a dozen patents.
Buh bye!
Yep. The way to insure people do their best work is to make sure they never get paid.
I bet you think food should be free too.
Karl Marx would approve.
Exactly.
Not quite that simple, each generation of scan will lose some precision, on top of that, some parts will warp as they are built, and the designer will make the as-drawn part with the warp reversed to end up with a net accurate part.
Of course knowing that, and knowing what compensating shape to design in should be free, right?
first you have 3d scanner or the ability to use multiple photos to scan the object.
as to the defect you simply correct the defective product.
it is no different than a derivative patent issue. who gets the money for the fix?
that said it is just the ecconomic model.
The solution may be to simply do an ip tax on the raw “goop” material like canada taxes blank cds (or they tried at least)
IP was alwants to be temporary NEVER permanent the way it has been bastardized.
This also prevents the notion of the next itunes stores.
New ideals will have a limited financial life and then the free flow of ideas will take it further.
YES!
This is why Franklin set up the patent system the way he did.
You have to disclose the "secret sauce", to teach anyone with ordinary skill the method of implementing your idea to get a patent. Withholding crucial details voids the entire patent.
In exchange for teaching the entire universe how to build your invention, you get a temporary monopoly on the manufacture and sale of that idea.
It's a fair trade, you get to profit from your idea, and the whole world ultimately gets to use it for free.
There are some who seem to think that an inventor doesn't deserve any financial reward or incentive, but they, who contributed nothing to the idea, they deserve to use it for free.
300 lbs worth...
“One can copyright any fixed expression whether or not the thing is easily copied, and a copyright is enforceable in a court of law.”
I was not speaking of what can be done currently, but what led to the ability to enforce any kind of intellectual property rights in the first place. When every book had to be tediously copied by hand, the concept of a “copyright” was ridiculous and unnecessary. Only when it became feasible for them to be reproduced cheaply and easily, did the idea of a copyright become feasible or necessary. The same concept holds true for every other type of intellectual property right.
“The industry will self police in the end.”
Of course, they will try, and they will probably meet with some degree of success, for a while. Still, it’s inevitable that the capacity for technology to reproduce nearly anything easily will make any kind of limitations on such use unfeasible and obsolete, eventually. It’s just a question of how long it takes the technology to get to a point where it makes such retrograde efforts completely futile.
Federal courts, judicially and legislatively created standards. Government is needed to enforce laws, because IP is one area you don’t want to entrust to big business. The America Invents Act was a giveaway to big business, btw. As to people buying stuff outside the US, that violates US patent laws or with copyright, international law. IP thieves are thieves, and people who create should, for limited times, have their creations protected by force of law, which means government must be involved. I’m no fan of government, but like building roads and keeping a military, this is one of their vital functions.
Your solution is to try something that has already been proven to not work by the Canadians?
I've read plenty of your posts over the years. I know bloody well you are smarter than that!
Besides a tax will never manage to percolate back to the creators of the IP.
Better to have a system that PayPals a few cents (or a couple bucks depending on complexity) to the designer every time his design is used.
No one, with the exception of a couple "what's mine is mine and what's yours is mine too" types on this thread and elsewhere, objects to an artist getting his due.
Everyone objects to one gouging...
Thank God for that.
Believe it or not, it’s quite easy to enforce copyright laws not despite technology, but because of it. I am an IP attorney, and know of hat I speak. There will always be thieves of music and novels and art. There always has been and always will be. The trick is to keep the theft at a minimum. Good laws and industry cooperation are the best way to do that.
Believe it or not, it’s quite easy to enforce copyright laws not despite technology, but because of it. I am an IP attorney, and know of hat I speak. There will always be thieves of music and novels and art. There always has been and always will be. The trick is to keep the theft at a minimum. Good laws and industry cooperation are the best way to do that.
fYI, I am an IPAttorney and think taxing blank CDs should be a crime, and the legislative geniuses who thought that up kicked in the jimmies until they bleed from the nose. It could not pass in the US because it assumes, without due process, theft of IP. Canada is an IP thief IMO, and I’m half Canadian.
There are recent patents on thread shapes, a wedge ramped root that allows quick assembly and reduced stress concentration on a tightened bolt, and a "Fredsert" which allows robust threads to be inserted in softer material, come immediately to mind.
Perhaps those have zero value like all other new ideas?
Or would you prefer our troops be protected with armor bolted to Heli-Coils?
So, is the idea here to provide copy protection for 3D printing files? Or to control the use of a program through licensing and copyrights, like buying apps for a phone for example? From the way the article is written, it sounds like some one wants to put use controls on generic manufacturing processes (machining, rolling, stamping, welding, printing, etc.) verses just protecting IP content of a design.
I read it to mean protecting the IP of the design of a rapid prototype/3-D printer manufactured part, not controlling the manufacturing technique.
There’s already a whole herd of patents on the various 3-D printing techniques and materials formulations.
I bet that assumption is only made when they collect the tax.
I further bet that when it comes time to pay the various artists and creators of IP, the assumption is that none of the media was used to copy any of their property...
Even the best art gallery security systems can be cracked. Yet, most people do not think it’s okay for clever thieves to break into art galleries, and carry out whatever they want.
Theft is theft. Intellectual property is property. Whether the IP is music, videos, or engineering designs — the ease or difficulty of copying it, doesn’t alter that fact that unauthorized copying is theft.
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