3D printing, in particular the low-cost kind, often means accepting the fact that your printed parts are often going to look kind of rough, with perceptible lines/bumps marking each layer that was printed to form the object. Smoothing is one…
Author: Paul Banwatt
Paul Banwatt is a lawyer at Gilbert's LLP in Toronto, Canada and drummer for the Rural Alberta Advantage
Is Off-Patent, Low-Cost 3D Printing Competition SLOWING Innovation?
There’s a post on 3ders today about how 3D printing impacts shoemakers Reebok and Puma. The general point of the post is that shoe manufacturers have been using 3D printing for a long time. But there’s a particularly interesting quote…
Prizes vs. Patents: 83-Year-Old Wins $40k for Low-Cost 3D Printing Solution
There’s an amazing story at Time about an 83-year-old inventor named Hugh Lyman who entered a Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation-affiliated entrepreneurial competition called the Desktop Factory Competition. The problem that Lyman set out to solve is the high cost of…
3D Printing Law: Trademarks – Why “FDM” isn’t for Everybody
In an earlier post, I explained why the expiry of patents related to Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM), initially patented by S. Scott Crump of Stratasys Inc. has helped lead to the recent explosion of 3D printers using that technology. So…
International Differences in the Legal Treatment of 3D Printing – Design Protections
Last week, three lawyers from the Irish law firm Arthur Cox wrote a great piece on the intellectual property law implications of 3D printing – from an Irish law perspective. But what stood out for me when reading this article…
IP and the ‘Manufacturing Renaissance’
Thanks to my colleague Salim Dharssi at Gilbert’s LLP for pointing me to this article by Neil Wilkof at IP Finance. Tying nicely into yesterday’s post, Wilkof questions the assumption that effective IP protection in the context of 3D printing…
Venture Beat: Copyright Can’t Keep Up with 3D Printing
Venture Beat has an article by Ricardo Bilton making the (increasingly popular) point that copyright law can’t and won’t keep up with the spread and development of low cost 3D printing. The law, through courts or legislation, just doesn’t move…
3D Printed Guns Get Closer
Yahoo has a post from Philip Bump of the Atlantic Wire arguing that legal approaches to stop 3D printed guns from proliferating are unlikely to stop those like Defense Distributed who have pledged to make them a reality. Defense Distributed…
Zittrain: Solve 3D IP Issues with DRM-style Measures
Bloomberg BNA has a recap of Harvard internet law Professor Jonathan Zittrain talking about 3D printers, which he sees as the future. Zittrain thinks many of the copying/counterfeiting legal issues people are worried about with 3D printers could be avoided…
(Paul’s) Post One, Part Two: Making Printers! And then Getting Sued! (3D Systems v. Formlabs)
This post is an adjunct to my inaugural post, in which I explained why the expiry of some of the original Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) patents is leading to a new wave of low-cost 3D…