A sobering article by Josef Prusa
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This a killer of innovation 
That sucks!
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Maybe it’s time to buy a Prusa
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This is such a giant can of worms. We are a global economy, how is any company supposed to get a patent in every country to their IP if it is even their IP. Even then, you need to legally pursue every single offense or the patent is forfeit. By design, the garage inventor stands no chance in the patent system in the global economy.
I think about this stuff constantly.
The flip side of that is if everything is open, giant manufacturing could spin up any cool new viral / trending product and knock out the creator in a day. Or if you think even smaller, you make a cool widget and sell some on etsy, 10 other people will make the same exact thing the day you make enough sales to get noticed.
The ease of access to sophisticated machines is a blessing and a curse. Is this the forefront of the next era, industrial revolution, technological revolution, manufacturing revolution? It would be cool if everyone had a Star Trek replicator at home, but then what, we all become replicator installers and repair people?
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A long long time ago in a previous career, I saw a customer experiment with robotic taco making equipment. Yes, indeed.
The hope was that you could replace a restaurant full of teenagers with a machine.
And, mostly you could. But then you needed even more expensive field service robotics engineers to keep them running. Experiment abandoned.
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Given that there is almost no respect for IP in China (you can buy dupes of almost any IP product on Ali Express), it seems somewhat ironic that Chinese companies are flooding the patent office with their own IP applications (many of which seem to be ripoffs of either someone else’s IP or existing open source products).
The worst perpetrators of this are the consumers. Anyone who deliberately purchases a duplicate is supporting that behaviour.
I am in no way anti-China, but the patent laws that currently exist are no longer workable.
When Jo Prusa posted a copy of this article on Twitter, he was slammed by a number of “people” crying out that the Prusa product was twice as expensive as it should be, and that he’s a millionaire crying poor.
Looking at his business and the constant development and invention that comes from within, I suspect that this is not the case - he has a very large business and he’s plowing everything back into it, but he doesn’t have a government offering subsidies to deliberately put opponents of his business out of action.
He is facing a losing battle I fear, and we’ll all be sorry when he’s gone, and the price of our cheap Chinese printers suddenly increases!
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Oh I remember a time when theft of community ideas and weaponised patents were Made in America! (I’m looking at you Thingiverse and Makerbot/3D Systems)
The reliance on low cost components to the extent where they aren’t even produced anywhere else is definitely a problem.
Patent and copyright laws have been broken for years - only worth what you can afford to spend to defend it.
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Not a fan of Prusa. Dude claims he’s all for open source, but doesn’t have any products to back that up. Now he want’s a new license, that won’t protect his hardware anyway, cause you can’t license hardware design. You can patent it, but not license the hardware.
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Like, nearly all of them. You can reprint and modify all the parts, you can repair the printer yourself, he helped with the Prusawire project…
Obviously they have to make money somehow…
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Yeah, I’m afraid you’re very mistaken with that.
You’re aware that he was the one that designed that layout of bed slinger printer that so many other companies copied - because he kept it open source?
I get why it doesn’t make sense to keep open source when a company in another country can take your design, produce, sell and ship it for less than you can source the raw materials.
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Oh that’s right- they didn’t specify the screw threads in the M5 nuts so none of the other documentation counts! 
On the software front, not sure if you’ve heard of Prusa Slicer, but they have a dozen or so guys working full time just on that, just so a certain Chinese Company can copy it without attribution. I think Prusa is a punching bag.
Is anything in his article spurious?
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and if I’m not mistaken - the heated bed (when he was in his early teens he used to sell hand made heated beds)
EDIT - I was mistaken, apparently he didn’t invent the bed, but developed it for the rep rap project Build a 3D printer - Part 9: Heated bed | ezContents blog
More on that development process here.
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Where are the cad files to his printers? Not STLs, but the cad files? If he didn’t want people copying his designs he should have patented them, but he didn’t so others copy them. That’s how open source works. Should you attribute? Yea. Do they have to? Not according to their laws.
We are working on a new community license so
we are feeling more comfortable sharing as much as we used to
share again with minimal risk of exploitation.
Cause that’ll fix everything! Some new license that the Chinese won’t follow. I think people are just tired of paying over a thousand dollars for a mostly printed printer.
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Haters gonna hate I guess…
The point is not that others are copying, but they are copying without attribution AND patenting the work.
Which could partly explain why his company employs more than a thousand people and there’s still a wait list for product.
And Bugatti owners pay millions for cars with printed parts?
The notion that printed parts somehow make a product inferior does not hold up at all any longer.
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This does all boils down to prior art in the patent system is the most broken part of the patent system. It should be as easy as an email to that countries patent office to show proof of prior art. It should not involve lawyers in any way.
A new license would be amazing, but creative stuff has copyright, innovations have patents. I think it would be easier to try and improve the systems we already have since the current system is employed nearly worldwide. I do think the first step to that is some sort of worldwide system.
Could the first most simple step be some sort of submission of your new idea, basically just saying it has already been done, officially, do not issue a patent for this thing. If someone tries, you just submit your prior filed proof of existence. At that point, it is the patent seekers’ dollar to try and prove otherwise.
Obviously there are lots of other patent issues but proving an idea is being ripped off should be a easy thing to prove, and not involve lawyers.
From my point of view releasing some things fully open and some things NC (which is surely not enforceable in court). It would be dreamy to have some way to not have to pay for enforcing a patent yet retaining some sort of commercial ownership for a period of time and still allowing builds to build.
I am sure we are all guilty of enjoying the benefits of inexpensive patent infringing products, GT2 belts anyone?? But I think a lot of use have the same thought about it, how in the hell did they patent a gear tooth profile in this day and age?
There is no simple answer. Getting rid of the patent system globally means it would be significantly harder for large corporations to sink billions of dollars into R&D with no clear path to ROI.
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Looking for some examples I found this.
So now Design patent enters the conversation. For me this is a huge sticking point. The 3D Printer patent is expired. So at this point every company would have to try and file a design patent…which is an awful lot like a copyright which is much less expensive and easier to deal with. The line seems to be clear, if it is functional it can not use a copyright, but what about art installations that move???
Maybe the solution is get rid of design patents.
Once the patent for a “chair” expires, people can copyright their artistic style of chair. The copyright lifecycle is crazy though, artists life plus 70 years.
I dislike this topic because there is no right answer.
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Yes, no, right or fair for the little guy, especially monie talks. If you are small, it’s hard or impossible to combat. Once it’s in effect it easier but to claim originality is a real bear
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Prusa Slicer is a fork of Slic3r. Ooen source software is well defined and has a lot of legal grounds. Any derivative of Slic3r has to be open source. Bambu studio and Orca slicer also have to be open source because they forked software with strong licenses.
Prusa (the man and the company) bang the drum on open source and to their credit, they have been keeping their company more open source than any 3DP company. But I have two problems getting behind them:
- The problem with their bottom line is bambu labs. Being open source isn’t what is killing them. The genuine competition is killing them. Someone invested a crapton of money to get ahead and do the product development and marketing and it worked. I wish BL was open source. But I don’t think Prusa would be in any better position if they were closed source.
- Prusa is open source IMO. But the hardware they develop is not readily attainable. I wanted to build my MP3DP (the early ones) with their 3 zone heated bed but you could only buy one (for a long time) if you already owned their MK2. Anything that isn’t printed is difficult to source. No one is putting their control boards into other printers because they make no effort to make them available. It is a dishonest way to be open source. Meanwhile, Ryan is careful not to say “open source” but you can buy and build everything without him and he will help you debug it.
Prusa can be polarizing. I appreciate the emotions behind both sides of the argument and the truth is, if one of you had stepped on the other side of the line when you bought your first printer, you would be evalgelized the other way. You’re all reasonable and opinionated, but with different experiences. I am the same way. I was given a prusa printer, but I wouldn’t buy one. I hope this post helps people see common ground. But I may be toking the flames. Sorry.
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