3D Printer Patents-- what's going on?

Hey everybody. I've heard a lot of discussion recently about 3dp patents, and how they effect the community. I'm a bit confused, so I just wanted to throw some questions out here to clarify. First off, many people have argued that patents are dangerous to the open-source community, and Makerbot comes up a lot in these discussions. Is this because Makerbot patented their design(s), or because they were making moves towards this? Also, do any companies have patents for their versions of the technology, or is the entire community open-source? That sounds a bit too good to be true, but I guess anything's possible.

Lastly, what's the business with these original 3dp patents expiring? Why is this beneficial to the community? Does this also mean new patents by modern companies (such as Stratasys, or any of the other big guys) can take their place? If so, would this hurt the community?

Sorry for all the questions, but I'm very interested in this stuff and I can't seem to get this information anywhere else. Any help would be awesome.

Patents and "open source" are diametrically opposed ideas about how intellectual property should be handled. On the one hand, people who invent things often think they should be able to profit from all their hard work, and taking out a patent allows them to do that by giving them the right to go after people who infringe on their claims, the part of their device or whatever that makes them distinct and novel. In order to stake out these claims, though, they have to make them public.

The "open source" idea stems from the software industry, where programs quickly become difficult to manage if each little portion of their code is patented by someone, and it's impossible to modify it without dealing with all the different rights-holders, a process that's unwieldy at best. So programs like Linux were developed where the source code is published freely, and anybody who wants to is free to modify it. The GNU and Public Commons licensing schemes stem from this, and essentially repudiate the idea of patents or copyrights, giving people in general the right to copy, share, and build upon the work in question.

The recent expansion in the use and popularity of 3D printers coincided with the expiration of the original patents for the Stratasys FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) process, which led to the introduction of a huge number of basically similar machines at dramatically lower price points than previously, which spread their use to a larger segment of the market than could previously afford them, and the rapid expansion of the 3D printing "community". Makerbot was one of the companies that profited greatly from this, building upon the open-source Rep Rap project (dedicated to making self-replicating 3D printers) and starting Thingiverse, which invited designers to share their printable designs without compensation. The company was then acquired by Stratasys, which decided to file patents for some of the refinements they felt that Makerbot had introduced. This led to some discontent among the "community", with allegations being made that this was unfairly restricting intellectual property that should be shared freely. Meanwhile, Stratasys also commenced a patent-infringement lawsuit against Afinia, a company making a rather generic fused filament printer, claiming that they'd violated certain patents for features that were still protected and hadn't expired. (This case goes on, and while it's not over, Stratasys seems to be prevailing at this point).

So while the original patents on various 3D printing processes have started to expire, many have not, and new ones are filed all the time. Many companies in this space who have advanced the technology are, unsurprisingly, not willing to freely share their intellectual property with a host of rivals seeking to capitalize on their research and development efforts. If the "community" wants to enjoy the fruits of high technology, it will either have to wait until all these new patents expire, or develop alternatives that don't infringe on them and put them out under an open-source licensing scheme.

Andrew Werby
www.computersculpture.com