Lmao, as an idiot trying to get a 20y/o stratysys running at work, I can see why they’re trying to sue.
Their machines are trash and wildly outdated, DRM spools locked into cases and disposable beds are GARBAGE.
Outdated? I’ve yet to see out of the box quality at 800€ like bambulab… DRM spools? You can use whatever you like with the printer. The spool just makes filament detection in the ams possible. Disposable beds? The printers come with reusable beds… The pattern beds are optional.
We have 3 Stratasys printers at work and yeah, you’re absolutely correct.
To add, their ‘professional’ slicer program “Insight” is the most user hostile piece of software I’ve ever laid my eyes on. Straight out of 1992 levels of awful. The workflow, the UI (if you can call it that), everything.
The other ‘user friendly’ slicer is “GrabCAD Print”, an Apple style piece of garbage. It lacks everything beyond basic functionality, yet lately they’ve been pumping it full of subscription locked features.
Honestly, fuck this company.
The old adage: Young companies innovate while old companies litigate.
Disposable what?!?!
Umm… Wow… Wtf?
Almost not surprising. Inventors and R&D businesses patent things all the time, then it takes a while to claim them. There was a guy in Australia who apparently invented WiFi (he calls it “wiffey”) and he successfully asserted his patent against WiFi manufacturers worldwide such that they paid him a couple pennies in royalties for every chip manufactured.
The saving grace is that patents only last for 20 years. After that, anyone can use the design, like Gillette’s double edged safety razor (which is why their modern razors are so silly and change every few years).
So far, it looks like only FDM is at risk here…
Which is most of hobbyist 3D printing. Resin printing has its issues, especially with strength
And sheer toxicity. You need fume vents and air quality monitoring for processing resin.
The the damn resin absorbing into your skin and curing the next time you’re in direct sunlight. Resin is super detailed, but I can’t say I particularly enjoy doing it.
That’s terrifying I haven’t even considered that. I like my FDM machine.
Eh, it isn’t so bad as long as you take precaution.
Wear gloves and a mask, and make sure to keep your tools separate.
I wonder how may people that have bought a $250 printer from Amazon are taking those precautions or even know they need to.
I’m not sure what qualifies as “hobbyist” in your book, but the vast majority of hobby-level printers I’ve interacted with over the last 5+ years are into MSLA more than FDM. 🤷🏽♂️
But it’s what anyone into miniatures uses due to much higher details
Miniatures ≠ most of the 3d printing market. Minis may be fine but the rest of the 3d printing space will be at risk and covers a great deal more use cases.
Daily reminder that IP law is fucking stupid.
And always about protecting the hegemony of the rich and powerful. Never the struggling artist/inventor just wanting to be paid for their work as the lobbyists and the politicians they own pretend every time they want to fuck over regular people some more.
The rich didn’t come up with the IP. It was the employees who did. They also want to get paid. Imagine someone stealing your ideas and then you losing your job over it.
B/S. The article states that this company bought the IP from Makerbot in 2013 so nobody working there was responsible for creating these patents. This is like when people claim that piracy hurts the people working on the set of a movie. It actually doesn’t because those people were already paid their wages while the billion dollar corporations are the ones who own the rights and profit off of sales with none of that going to the workers outside of their normal wage.
If there is no incentive to make profits on IP, nobody will hire people to develop the IP. Congrats, you made the rich lose their profits but you also made everyone lose their jobs.
Ah yes because nobody had jobs before IP law and nothing was invented.
IP law was invented when it became necessary to protect it. We no longer live in a cave but in a globalized and industrialized world economy.
Most value nowadays is IP. Producing goods is easy, everyone can do that now. Manufacturing is easy. Logistics is easy. Inventing stuff isn’t easy anymore! So in order to encourage innovation, we need to have incentives that protects your innovation and pays your bills. And since most innovation is IP, we need IP protection. Simple logic.
Your idealistic world view simply doesn’t work here.
No. We did it because IP is inherently anti competitive and we were very concerned with protecting monopolies. They were literally crown granted monopolies. Then they changed in the industrial era to be tools for the Robber Barons. And the corporations after that.
It has never been a mechanism that creates jobs. It’s entire purpose is to shut down competition, to kill jobs. It has never protected inventors. Just the people who can afford more lawyers to convince the court their design is legally distinct.
The economy? The economy would boom and we wouldn’t be worried about legally distinct rectangles between Apple and Samsung. (The true message of which is, “don’t you dare try to enter this market, you’ll get sued into the dirt.”)
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That’s like all of 3d printing, that’s pretty scary. If they win on all 5, seems like it’d kill consumer 3d printing entirely.
That seems geared only towards FDM printers, so SLA (resin) is still ok-ish? I do suppose those really big powder printers could also suffer.
So when do we have fun with the ip owners in moonbase alpha?
Why can they even patent stuff they didn’t invent?
Better lawyers. Patent law is so f’d up. Few understand it and those that do take advantage of it.
When I look at these patents all of them seem to be patenting others inventions from years ago. So I hope prior art wins.
Which would also strip them of each of those patents.
Stop! I can only get so erect.
Eastern District of Texas is extremely favorable to patent trolls. It’s not a coincidence that they filed the suit there.
I hope one day it will be illegal to shop for judges to shut down tech companies
I read the heated bed patent and it was about the way it’s built, so I’m not convinced it’s a general hot bed patent but something more small detail about how they are using it.
I suspect someone will need to do more research and this article is a knee jerk reaction
Patent trolls doing patent troll things. Stratasys no longer provides usable value to the enterprise market and they’re stagnating bad, their only hope is to start suppressing competition through overly broad, unrefined patents obviously tailored to provide a blanket market lockout.
They’ve done it before and they’ll do it again. Fuck Stratasys, uncompetitive monopolistic fucks.
I hope it gets tossed out of court considering companies have been freely using these patents for years and their just now going after someone because Bambu has been so much more successful than a lot of the cottage-type companies who’d previously been building most printers. You can’t simply wait for a big fish to decide to start enforcing your patent rights because by then it’s been used to much without any push back that you’ve effectively given up the rights.
There is certainly a lot of precedent for them not defending patents, especially those now expired.
Unfortunately this is the Texas circuit court so any kind of critical thinking or obvious precedent won’t matter, and the biggest corporation will win by default until appealed. We will just have to hopee Bambu has the resources to survive in the US market until then, as the court will likely force a stop sale injunction or large penalties on device sales.
You can lose trademarks if you knowingly don’t defend them but it’s pretty hard to lose a patent. Even it gets added to a standard you participate it just goes into FRAND.
I think I got the two mixed up then. Regardless (I’m probably preaching to the choir), this seems like a ridiculous lawsuit and I hope they get sent packing.
I’m not a big fan of these patents having been awarded and patent law needs serious overhaul. That said I think there is a good chance the lawsuit is successful. Three are a lot of patents in 3D printing that the open source community is just waiting for them to expire.
These patents seam trivial obvious ones. Hope they get knocked down during the case.
Good news is, you will never be able to stop hobbyist 3d printing.
Sorry patent trolls, you can’t make aluminum extrusion, stepper motors, an extruder, and a short circuit illegal.
The problem is that most people aren’t making RepRap printers from scratch, they’re buying kits which has everything included.
Bambu makes decent gear, I don’t think we want to have the only option being Chinese machines which always makes compromises to make it cheaper. And that’s coming from a person who uses Chinese printers.
I don’t think we want to have the only option being Chinese machines
When you shut everyone else down, they’re the only guys left with the freedom to do business.
Are there any American made printers?
a voron is american made depending on where you make it
Pretty much anything is American made depending on where you make it though
Isn’t Prusa expanding to the US or something? Thought I saw it somewhere.
