3DPrinting
3DPrinting is a place where makers of all skill levels and walks of life can learn about and discuss 3D printing and development of 3D printed parts and devices.
The r/functionalprint community is now located at: !functionalprint@kbin.social or !functionalprint@fedia.io
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Interesting. If they weren't patent trolls before, they certainly are now!
I wonder if this is all that's stopping this technique though? IANAL, but it sure seems like a slicer could release this and if stratasys tried to sue them, they might have a hard time given all these patent errors.
If I remember correctly the entire home 3D printing industry was held back by patents for decades. It was technically possible and feasible for much longer than we have commercially available 3D printers, but one or two businesses held all the patents and made it impossible to sell them cheap.
I'm starting to learn that patent trolling is a much bigger problem than we give it attention for.
The worst example I've heard so far is a US patent on fungi or mycelium as a plastic and styrofoam alternative. Think biking helmets or packaging material. That's almost like granting a patent for wood as a construction material. It's outrageous and seriously damaging progress across the globe because no one gets funding for something you can't sell in the US.
Being in this community has taught me that patents are stupid as fuck. Any time someone tries to bring up the topic, defending patents, I bring up how 3d printers could have been a thing when they were a kid. We were held back for 3 decades of progress because of a patent. Because of that we are essentially 3d printing like it's 1995 right now.
Without these patent trolls I truly believe we would all be able to be SLS sintering our own metal car parts at home. But instead we're still printing plastic toys
It's not Stratasys. They did the original patented work in 1996.
This is someone who in 2020, copied the Stratasys patent, submitted it as their own new work, and were granted it!
Unfortunately, the way patent suits work it could be enormously expensive to defend something like this, even when the patent is clearly bad.
You'd be arguing that the patent is invalid to start with, but the court would probably start from the position that you are actually infringing a valid patent (it was granted after all), and grant an injunction to prevent further harm ("stop giving people the software until we can work out if there is any merit to your claim that you aren't infringing"). You then need to put together a case to show the prior art, and you can bet that they'd contest every single point. This whole process could take years, and cost hundreds of thousands of dollars that you won't get back even if you win - there isn't really a provision to recover costs in patent cases because there is the assumption that every claim is made in good faith
In other words, one big aspect of patent reform needs to be fixing the patent office itself so that it hires patent examiners who are actually competent to evaluate the applications for prior art.
That's probably an impossible task - getting enough people who are experts in every possible field enough to judge novelty and innovativeness wouldn't be feasible.
An alternative is the way the Dutch assess patents - they don't, and grant them automatically on filing, but that means you remove the assumption that they are valid on their face if they get challenged
Probably better to make those submitting false patents pay a large fine.
Yeah, it seems like it's the fear of legal action that's stopping them, but this information might change that.