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from the printster-will-be-the-new-napster dept.
Remember Napster or Grokster? Both services allowed users to share computer files – usually digital music – that infringed the copyrights for those songs.
Now imagine that, instead of music, you could download a physical object. Sounds like something from a sci-fi movie – push a button and there's the item! But that scenario is already becoming a reality. With a 3D printer, someone can download a computer file, called a computer-aided design (CAD) file, that instructs the printer to make a physical, three-dimensional object.
Because CAD files are digital, they can be shared across the internet on file-sharing services, just like movies and music. Just as digital media challenged the copyright system with rampant copyright infringement, the patent system likely will encounter widespread infringement of patented inventions through 3D printing. The problem is, however, that the patent system is even more ill-equipped to deal with this situation than copyright law was, posing a challenge to a key component of our innovation system.
If 3-D printing at home happened fast enough it would cut China off at the knees.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 08 2016, @07:22AM
Maybe our patent system deserves to be threatened.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by julian on Friday January 08 2016, @07:48AM
They've essentially already abrogated all of their responsibility to the courts. They grant just about any patent and then let the aggrieved parties sort it out through the legal system. This has led to a situation where companies must amass huge patent portfolios to blackmail the rest of the firms in their industry into accepting a sort of MAD stalemate. Apple and Samsung both have patents the other needs to use to do any business at all with phones, for example. So they mostly hold back, with perhaps some minor skirmishes every once in a while (and usually with proxy fights like cases over "trade dress", the infamous rounded rectangles). There's also quite a bit of cross-licensing deals.
The system does work out very well for one group: the lawyers.
(Score: 2) by davester666 on Friday January 08 2016, @09:57AM
No, We've got to harmonize with other countries to makes sure that copyright is extended to patented objects, so if you take a picture or a video of a patented object, you automatically are violating the copyright held by the patent owner.
Naturally, all camera makers are explicitly encouraging and aiding people in this mass-infringement of copyright, and must pay punitive damages for this willful aiding in infringing these copyrights, and must implement technology in every camera to automatically detect, track, and charge the photographer a fee set by the patent owner for every patented object in every photograph.
Because it's only fair.