Let’s take a trip back in time, shall we? Not so far back that we witness the dawn of 3D printing, but not so far forward that we witness the mainstream explosion of the technology. How about August 06, 2008, 11:12AM? The location: the RepRap Forums, a thread titled “Patent Infringement (Stratasys)”. In this forum, you’ll be privy to RepRappers, talented and knowledgeable members of a community that is about to help spur the present 3D printing revolution, discussing the expiration of patents and the future of RepRap.
It all begins with user Joshua Merchant bringing up a relevant concern:
I’m interested in building a RepRap and using parts that I make as components in machines that I will use to manufacture products that I can sell for a profit.
I understand that Stratasys has a series of patents protecting their FDM techniques, and that the RepRap has a design similar to their machines. Everyone seems to be okay with this because most people here are interested in research and recreational/hobby use.
Joshua later asks, “Also, I’m curious as to whether the sale of Darwin kits by Bits From Bytes is infringement… maybe it doesn’t apply the same way because he’s in Europe? If that’s true, maybe I should move (either to a similar location, or, better yet, a place not part of the WTO).”
The members of the community then chime in with their thoughts and you begin to realize that you are seeing a slice of time preserved in html. Kyle Corbitt responds:
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. I don’t even play one on TV.
That being said, the Big One is patent 5121329, which covers the general concept of FDM. There isn’t really a way around that one. That is the one due to expire at the end of October of 2009. There are many other patents, but they are pretty much as a rule either more specialized (avoidable) or not applicable to RepRap. However, I haven’t read all of them, just scanned through the titles.
And I don’t think anyone ever claimed that FFF is new. In fact it was only relatively recently that I heard anyone call it that, as opposed to FDM.
Joshua, along with a few other RepRap members explain that they want to start businesses printing parts for others. Forrest Higgs, a judge of the Gada Uplift Prize, responds to Joshua’s endeavor:
I find it tremendously amusing that so many people building Reprap machines harbour the notion that somehow they’re going to be able to go commercial somehow, despite of the fact that by definition Reprap is a self-replicating, virally diffused technology.
I’ve been trying to come up with a way of getting an interesting industrial scale revenue stream out of reprap. It just doesn’t happen, for me anyway.
What Higgs didn’t anticipate in this comment were distributed networks, such as 3D Hubs, which utilizes a network of desktop 3D printers, including many RepRap-style machines, to produce goods. Despite Forrest’s pessimism, or, perhaps, farsighted idealism, members of the forum still feel as though they can make money from their devices. Take ErikDeBruijn, for instance:
Forrest, I am seriously evaluating ways to make money with the RepRap. My intention is to create a balanced situation. I’m getting a lot of ‘fun’ out of it, I’m learning a lot from making it, I gain unique production capacity, but I don’t want to consume my savings because I have a fascination about world changing technology (not enough resistance!). Given its potential, there has to be a balanced way. Currently I am using up my savings, I removed myself further from my company to be able to work more on this project. This is not ideal, but it will have to do for now.
I am aware of the effects that self replicating technology has, such as making profiting from the machine eventually impossible. I think this is true at a certain point, when there are quite a lot of RepRaps. Before that, there will be a scarcity of parts. But whether it’s RepRap parts or something entirely else is a matter of how things develop. With such a versatile machine you can find a market. Even if more people have such a machine, you can identify potential markets before they do. I also think about profit models to be able to support sustainable growth of RepRap, or stimulate adoption (subsidized, or via micro-credit) in under-developed countries.
If I spend as much time on my RepRap as I want to, it would be nice to have a revenue flow to be able to keep doing so. With my companies, I’ve always combined work that started as a hobby with profit. This ensures that you can keep doing your hobby.
Erik, if you’re unfamiliar with the name, was, at the time, a volunteer with the RepRap foundation and later went on to found one of the most popular desktop 3D printer companies worldwide, Ultimaker.
Kyle Corbitt predicts, in 2008, why such a technology has become so big, saying, “the majority (probably 80%) of the public at large has neither the time nor the inclination to build a modern workshop, even if it is easy, clean and small. To that segment of the population, RepRap will be important because it *is* their workshop. Unlike traditional machine tools RepRap should soon become easy to use and more generalized, and not require much expertise to operate.” What he misses is that a lot of the public, regardless of their need for such a workshop, are simply impressed by the technology and would buy a 3D printer simply moved by how cool it is.
User Edtharan points out another way that 3D printing might be used to make money, saying, “Think of this in terms of a RepRap. You might develop a ‘pattern’ (stl file) for a particular object. You might sell this stl file for $10 to $15 on an on line website. You might then have a market of millions for it. This is where the powr of the RepRap is for commercial use, not selling the end product, but selling the stl files.” To which Forrest responds with another funny piece of cynicism, “ROTFLMAO! Yeah, right. That will work for maybe two days till the stl file shows up on Pirate Bay. ”
Community members then discuss at length the possibility of using DRM with such .stl files suggested by Edtharan, ideas that have been explored, but bypassed by companies like FabSecure and Layer by Layer. Interspersed between strange conversations about the creation of scarcity are occasional divinations such as “individually fabbed shoes – a 3D-scanner and a reprap is the heart of any possible individualized RP-service” and other value-added services.
The idea of IP infringement never does come up again in this thread, in 2008. However, just after the thread dies off, a new post is added, saying, “In light of stratasys suing UP! Afinia today, asking the question do stratasys hold UK patents? thanks” Here, or elsewhere on the RepRap forums or wider Internet, it may be possible that we are witnessing a slice of history, in the present moment, that reveals some bit of what the future holds.
Source: RepRap Forums
