There’s an interesting debate playing out at the New York Times about the role of patents in fast-moving innovative industries (like 3D printing…). Joe Nocera has an interview with famed U.S. Court of Appeals judge Richard Posner, in which Posner…
Author: Paul Banwatt
Paul Banwatt is a lawyer at Gilbert's LLP in Toronto, Canada and drummer for the Rural Alberta Advantage
Are Monsanto crops like 3D printed objects?
There’s a pretty interesting post at Policy Mic by Nate Abrams suggesting a similarity exists between the ongoing U.S. Supreme Court case of Bowman v. Monsanto and the 3D printing industry. In the Monsanto case the basic issue is whether…
(Paul’s) Post One, Part One: Patents and 3D Printing
(click here for part 2) Law in the Making is a mix of daily links, comments and stories, with regular posts that dig a little deeper. Here’s my first contribution to the latter endeavour – an attempt to start explaining…
Game of Thrones vs. Settlers of Catan
Yesterday’s post about nuPROTO’s troubles for making a 3D printed iPhone Throne Dock got me thinking about proprietary designs and interfaces (and how to double down on this blog’s newly minted nerd-factor). A couple of years ago, there was some…
HBO Blocks ‘Game of Thrones’ 3D Printed Iron iPhone Throne
A centerpiece of the popular HBO series Game of Thrones is the Iron Throne, a seat of power that several families are battling over. As a side note, I had an awesomely happy-geek moment in Toronto when I got to…
3D Printing in the President’s State of the Union Address!
If there was any question that 3D printing has officially arrived, it was answered in President Obama’s State of the Union Address which specifically called out the potential of the technology to restore manufacturing in America. From the President’s prepared…
3D Printing Guns…
When we started this blog I assumed that the two main things we would cover would be 1) patents and other impediments to making 3D printers, and 2) patents, trade-marks, copyrights and other IP protections that may be enforced against…
Aside
There’s a great short article on the BBC site teeing up some of the issues we’ll be discussing here at Law in the Making:
Thanks to 3D printers, budding counterfeiters could soon create parts or goods themselves. The problem for authorities is that copying physical objects is not always illegal. (link)
As the article notes, the problem is that, unlike most cases of music piracy, copying 3D objects is often not illegal at all. It’s a situation more akin to the invention of the printing press than the launch of Napster. Stay tuned!
3D Piracy
There’s an interesting article on Venture Beat about some pretty old-school piracy already being seen in the 3D printing world. Stealing design files? Call me when it’s the Death Star plans. From the article: What happens to designs when anyone…
Innovation and iRobot
Following on the last post about whether a lack of R&D will kill 3D printing, recently, iRobot filed a patent application for what is almost an ‘automatic espresso machine’ of 3D printing – a stab at a fully autonomous printer.…