Expiring patents were supposed to boost the 3D printing market. They haven’t.
At the end of January, a series of patents filed by Carl Deckard in the 1990s for selective laser sintering (SLS) — a high-quality 3D-printing technology — expired. With this technology back in play, people started to see big things for 3D printing coming up fast on the horizon.
And so in the latter part of 2013, a chorus of onlookers began predicting a coming explosion in 3D printing technologies. There was a near consensus about how great this was going to be. The Economist mused about the boom. Quartz intimated in July that it was good as a done deal. Techcrunch called the day the SLS patents expired “a great day for makers.”
The more accurate truth is, that while it is nice to have another piece of 3D-printing intellectual property available again to manufacturers, this is just one piece of the patent bank that the 3D-printing giants like Stratasys and 3D Systems have locked down, many of which were only filed recently. There’re so many 3D-printing patents keeping technology siloed inside the bigger companies that the Electronic Frontier Foundation has started its own effort to free the market.
Rutter uses the example of Stratasys’ Objet printers, which have several different heads and can print in up to 18 different materials. They can be used for industrial quality rapid prototyping. The individual printheads are mass produced and available, but the machine’s design is patented and strictly enforced.
But sadly for open source 3D printing enthusiasts — or happily for the big companies that control the technology — 2009 was the exception, not the rule. Not every expiring patent is going to explode the market open.
Read the full story here: http://pando.com/2014/06/06/expiring-patents-were-supposed-to-boost-the-3d-printing-market-they-havent/?curator=MediaREDEF