Open hardware desktop 3D printing is dead?

IP is just too strong. The terms are ridiculously long (especially for copyright), there are multiple workarounds for "fair use", such as DMCA, and patents on simple concepts like linked lists are not laughed out of the room.

All of this stuff needs to be weakened (and shortened). Part of the reason Chinese companies are able to iterate quickly on technology like 3d printers or drones is that it's possible to simply ignore this stifling IP regime until you actually need to start selling internationally.

It's telling that the article specifically calls out patents originating in China. It seems ridiculous to treat these as serious filings and not shredder fodder when the originating country happily allows their local industry to ignore western patents. The asymmetry here leads to obvious advantages for Chinese companies.

The driver of cost isn't paper or physical presence -- I'd be willing to print a few pages and show up downtown in my city where the court is much more if not for the real costs. It often costs hundreds of dollars to file in court (even for small claims in some states), which is a problem because misconduct under a few hundrs dollars is common. It is also almost always useful and often requied (such as when an LLC is a party) to hire lawyers. The law is so complex, and the court procedures too, that we need highly trained professionals to effectively represent people.

The model of paying these professionals from the salary of the average person who themself probably makes way less or from a cash strapped startup doesn't add up. Therefore, to fix the issue we either need to pay lawyers less, pay them from some other source (I'd like to see that in a court case either party can spend any amount on representation, but they must pay into a common pot that's split in half for the opposing party to hire their own representation of a similiar quality), or make them less needed (i.e., simplify and document law and court procedures then legalize pro se representation in all cases including LLCs such that anyone can effectively argue in court).

That would bring down the price of patent spam even more. The problem is the cost of protection relative to the cost of attack, you can't do much.

Patents just aren't necessary. When something is in the "air", sooner or later it will be invented because it will be obvious in the state of the art.

There's no need to grant monopoly privileges. Rather, I favor market governed subsidies and grants for innovators to recoup the cost of their effort. The government will play a role in setting up the market and running it. This will be more democratic as people will have a voice to reward inventors for their efforts.

I expect this to be complimentary to innovations that will already arise.

partial disagree, I think the issue is how the patent office abdicated any but the most superficial effort to validate patents onto the court system

> the US (especially) needs justice system reform with an eye toward making actions take 100x less time and 100x less money, approaching free for consumer and IP actions

While not addressing the situation in the same way, here's my knee-jerk idea for defense against patent trolls:

"If you want to sue a person or an organization, you must pay the legal fees for the defendant, in an amount equal or greater to the amount of money being spent by the plaintiff on legal matters pertaining to the case."

So a small business would get full funding for defense, but it would cost them double to sue someone else. I'd say that's an excellent trade-off. This would dissuade not just patent trolls but any lawsuit where money would be the determining factor for victory.

The Achilles' heel would be enforcement, leading to a new subcategory of legal efforts to ensure compliance. But there's an opportunity for a net reduction in legal action.

Actually AFIAK most of the US has moved to electronic filing, but that has actually made things more expensive. Typically courts hire out the electronic filing part. The hired companies typically collect money from both the state/county and the end user. Larger court systems like LA, NYC, and Cook are big enough to force concessions, or even fund new companies, but others have to buy into one system or another.

It would be great if a bunch of courts could band together to setup a shared open source solution, but courts at the state level are pretty fractious. And the legal system is both pretty slow and pretty reluctant to change.

No. The real story is China weaponizing the global IP system in an imbalanced manner.

IP ownership is not inherently capital-intensive in the US.

Prusa makes their products locally, the spare part situation is good, the company runs an open Makerspace in their basement, helps host conferences and has done a lot for Open Hardware in general. They also have offered consistent upgrade paths for old machines for a long time and the repairability in general is good. You can also talk to them. These things matter for purchase decisions. Same logic as per your Knipex and Wera example.

I actually have a Bambu Labs at home for occasional use but I would not consider anything but Prusas for a general-use desktop FDM printer in basically any more serious setting. This has been the situation for many years now (over the last 12 years or so, I've had to make a few purchase decisions for batches of 5-15 FDM printers as well as different single specialty ones).

Chinese stuff these days has pulled far ahead of the Harbor Freight reputation of my youth. I can't remember the last time I've seen a proper "Engrish" instruction manual, most of the things are well designed and well built. Meanwhile, the "good old American brands" seem to just be selling out for cheaper and better profit margin products, so you'll be ending up with Chinese stuff anyways, which is sometimes worse than the actual Chinese brands.

Forced I don't know... But of course the financial incentives are very strong, as in many categories the Chinese brands have remarkable and sometimes astonishing value-for-money. But for a small business, the cost of these tools might be quite low relative to manpower anyway, so paying 2x might not be a big deal. We got 8 Prusa machines at our local hackerspace, and 10 at previous startup lab I was at.

I have Creality Ender3 v3 and Prusa mk4s and they are not the same, you can get them to produce same quality, but ender requires more tinkering and I have had more failed prints.

Creality software is awful, you get no firmware updates for a year and then you get 4 on same day, like do they even test before release? Slicer is also buggy and default settings seem to be max everything, so its loud and fast and has print quality issues.

When I was building the prusa kit, I kept thinking that this is how you should make a product, the machine feels well thought out and documentation is great. Of course prusa is 3x the cost of ender.

Hobbyists aren’t forced to buy anything.. I blame youtube for turning hobbies into an exercise at buying stuff. Affiliate links are one of the few ways to make money online and the reason why the majority of videos in the hobby space seem to be gear reviews. Yet as a hobbyist chances are you won’t practice enough to outgrow your tools anyway, and neither do you have the economic incentives of business owners.

> My current printer I built in 2015. It needs very little work but has evolved slightly through the years...

"It needs very little work" is very different from "an amateur with no knowledge can use it". You're overwhelmingly more qualified to adjust it and keep it running, you even enjoy that part of the process.

I've come to accept that an overwhelming majority of people are not 3D printER enthusiasts, they're barely even 3D printING enthusiasts. They're artists and minifigure builders and engineers and mechanics, and they care about the printer itself just as much as they care about a random screwdriver. Many don't even want to understand how the thing works, they just want it to work.

With those values, yes, buying one off the shelf that's assembled and tuned and adjusted and tested and can immediately begin making parts with decent reliability is better than building one.

It's nice to have a (niche) community around open source HW, but I'd argue it's even better when that community's ideals and ethics can spread to more people through OSHW business, not to mention the benefits flowing back to the community like e.g. cheaper parts.

No one's taking away the community right now, but if the business around it is disappearing, that's also a shame.

> "You are a fool to build your own printer when you can buy one prebuilt" came about. This seemed to be spread by people who either had no idea what they were doing...or were intentionally planting the seed of doubt.

I started with a self-built printer and even got some key parts from members of our local 3D printing community, true RepRap style. I've spent a lot of time upgrading, modifying, tuning, debugging, and trying different controller boards over the years.

I also have a mass-produced printer.

I enjoy both for different reasons. I would never recommend the self-built route to anyone who wasn't looking for a project. The mass-produced printers are so much easier to get to printing rather than spending hours dealing with the printer every time you want to print.

Honestly, getting the mass-produced printer reignited my excitement for actually designing and printing parts. Instead of dealing with the printer, I can forget about the printer and just get straight to my project.

> We were told that it was better/easier to buy 10 and throw away 5 in a year since it was more cost effective.

This is the FUD I hear out of the 3D printing purists, but it doesn't match the experience of myself and my friends with printers from Bambu and a couple other companies.

I can get spare parts for both printers just as easily. To be honest, I have more faith that I can get something like a replacement heated bed for my Bambu 5 years from now than the custom-shaped heater for self-built which is sourced from a little operation that has to carry dozens of different sizes and variations.

Every time I read one of these posts praising self-built printers and downplaying the mass-produced machines, it comes down to something like this:

> My current printer I built in 2015.

I have a self-built printer from that era that has been upgraded throughout the years. I also have a Bambu. It's hard to explain just how much you're missing if you don't have experience with both.

Some people want a hobby. some people want a tool to use.

> Everyone ... outside of China is forgetting and losing capabilities.

To me this is the fundamental problem with the notion of intellectual property and its protection: so much of it is trade secret and undocumented (let's be real, we disclose as little in patents as we can get away with). Companies come and go, and in the process, institutional knowledge of how to do things is lost because there is no incentive to make it public for others to replicate. This also means that once lost, it must be rediscovered later.

> Those $800 Chinese printers are extremely capable after all.

I got my bambu a1 for ~300 euros during the latest sales, I'm still kind of shocked at how good it is for the price. I can't remember the last time I was that impressed by a piece of hardware

To be fair there is a lot of talk about "bringing manufacturing back". IMO what the government is doing in that regard is more than misguided but other efforts exist. I'm optimistic about efforts like https://californiaforever.com/solano-foundry/. Permitting reform is a key piece which they work around, synergy from physical proximity is another. Both are addressed by the Solano Foundry project. One might see US labor cost as a disadvantage but with automation I don't think it matters that much. Jobs have been mostly lost to automation, rather than to China and that so only continue.

I have a feeling that soon, proprietary software won't be a business moat at all. No mater the complexity of your software, it will be too easy to replicate. That could be a good thing for open source. One way of staying ahead of your competition is to control the most popular open source repo.

That software reality you describe is not too far off. Not with LLMs alone, but definitely seen the software copy machines accelerate. Any novel idea launched on an app store that sees any traction or attention will be flooded with close imitations in weeks.

> It would totally kill any drive you have to make a product.

That is already how I feel about LLMs being trained on my AGPL code to produce proprietary code and do so for money. And that's just today's shitty LLM. My condolences for you as a HW person who deals with an actually competent abuser of the system.

> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.

What problem do you think needs fixing?

I'm sorry, but isn't this a job for tariffs? Tariffs are how you impose an artificial cost on some exporter who is using an unfair subsidy, whether slave labor, bad environmental regulation, non-enforcement of the intellectual property system of the importing country, etc... all the way down to simple direct subsidy and willingness to take a loss in order to ruin the importing country's domestic industry.

The fair, civilized way to deal with that is with tariffs. You don't argue, you just impose a tariff. They can counter-tariff and you say "see if we care you don't even import from us," or "maybe we thought we were tougher than we were, we can't even make magnets."

Instead, you get a bunch of grandstanding politicians talking about how unfair everything is, and don't do a thing about it other than whip up nationalist aggression between the two countries (that also offers economic opportunity in arming them.) Or, if that changes for a moment, and somebody sins against "free trade," the same people who were complaining about how China steals everything going: "but you can't impose tariffs, because then I couldn't import as cheaply from China!"

> Imagine what the software industry would look like if an LLM could look at any completed software product, and a few weeks to a month later have made a perfect copy of it.

Humans have always done that, some are even low enough and blatantly copy the original apps assets & code. LLM is only speeding this up.

> People seems generally uninterested in fixing this too.

It's competition. It's in the nature of capitalism to support this. Of course, it sucks to be the one losing. And it's harmful if the winner-side is cheating. But it's not like there is a viable solution for this in a divided world full of Nations. You can't have everything cheap, and fair.

American industry also copied plenty from Britain and Germany during its industrialization in 19th century. Patents didn't really apply to foreign IP.

They even copied lawfare techniques from American corporations, lol.

It will be "interesting" where this takes us. If the American government decides to just ignore Chinese patents then we could see the Berne convention become a paper tiger (or even more of one than it already is)

If you read into how/why Hollywood film industry was created, it isn't something new.

Many Chinese CEO's are graduates of Western business schools. They learnt the Holy American Dao of weaponizing IP and patent law from established US business culture.

Or criticze the west allowing patent law to stagnate and regress innovation and their economies.

Capitalism, at least the American version of it, has a rich history of ignoring property rights, labor laws and ethics, regulations, etc. If anything, China has, and is, out-Westernizing the Western countries.

I bought my Voron Trident as a kit (from a Chinese company) and it is wonderful. As you say, there is an almost complete dependence on components made in China, but at least I can swap out / fix / upgrade parts as much as I like. I've also been able to make use of the schematics on the controller boards to troubleshoot issues myself and other people were having.

Very happy I went this route vs Bambu. This printer is "mine" and I don't need to worry about some company suddenly taking features and capabilities out from under my feet as Bambu has done. For anyone that feels strongly about this kind of thing, dive in and build a Voron.

I think the beauty of voron is that if you lost access to Chinese parts tomorrow you could source replacements elsewhere. Some would be difficult at first, like PCBs, but most like stepper motors are commodity parts that are easily replaced

All of Open Source needs a sunlit patent pool, a searchable database of documented inventions AND all of the follow on ideas around them. This could provide a way to force patent examiners to do their jobs and allow the Open Source Community to crowd source invention bombing the proprietary world.

How does one lookup these patents? They need more exposure so they can be refuted.

People love to point out the ghost cities and high speed trains to "nowhere". But, for every ghost city, there are hundreds of thriving actual cities full of people. Shenzhen itself was a planned special economic zone that went from an impoverished fishing village to a thriving megalopolis and the worldwide center of electronics within decades.

And despite some high speed train stations being underutilized in the off season, the majority of Chinese cities are connected with blazing fast high speed trains that depart every 15 minutes. Even third tier cities have high speed trains and they are amazing. Now, despite using some underhanded tactics to get Siemens and others to hand over their IP initially, the Chinese high speed rail system is the envy of the world, with orders of magnitude greater coverage, track length, and ridership than Japan. At the same time, domestic innovations allow the newer trains to be a more comfortable, faster, and smoother ride than the Shinkansen, TGV, and ICE. I would take that any day over, say, California High Speed Rail dilly-dallying for decades with nothing to show for it.

The Chinese electric car industry is another one of those that are famously subsidized. People love to point out that some shady companies that have large lots of unsold new vehicles sitting there but written off as being sold via some accounting tricks. While that does happen and is deplorable, the fact is that Chinese EVs have basically leapfrogged the rest of the world in quality, capabilities, and innovation. The Xiaomi SU7 is amazing, for example. But don't despair, some Western companies like Tesla are still able to keep up with the pace of innovation.

Also, all this talk of the Chinese government subsidizing this, and subsidizing that being unfair competition, as though China had a magic money tree to fund everything. In contrast, it is sad that the US government, while having vastly greater tax revenue, fails to fund basically any sort of technological development, and instead wastes all of its enormous amounts of money on inefficiencies (e.g. our spending per capita on healthcare being the highest in the world, but most of it is going to bureaucracy, and we languish with poor life expectancy) while being saddled in debt.

> Great! Here is a few million go make AI.

So how is this different from the US? It’s VC’s making the choices not the gov - seems little different. Maybe scale?

> They're not unfamiliar with burning tens of billions to get a few hundred million of value.

The chinese economy seems like proof this is a valid strategy that pays off in aggregate. Yet when gov here attempts any kind of economic development policy it seems largely unpopular.

> you are not competing, because they are just burning daddies money

So like the american defense industry then?

Can't tell if this post is against VC system or just China?

The CIA has it's own venture capital arm (In-Q-Tel) for the same reason, it helped fund Google, Palantir and Anduril.

I mean they are 2nd largest GDP economy with "world factory" title

some words you said can be true of course but its clearly working out for them

I don't see how that could be considered a planned economy, you're describing individuals creating startups of their own free choice and the government backing them with no strings. Individual choices are driving economic progress.

A planned economy would be some government committee deciding what specific startups and how many of them should be started up in any give year, and no one else can create a startup.

>schematic that I could download that way wouldn't be affected by patents, as long as I'm not selling it

not true, there's no personal use exemption for patents

China won’t enforce the patent of a foreign company against a domestic one. If anything, filing a Chinese patent assists copying and clones, because there’s less reverse engineering to do.

Wouldn’t Prusa abandoning open hardware (for some components) be a prominent example showing that open hardware is dying?

Requiring an annual patent maintenance tax proportional to pre-declared fair licensing fee will ensure fairness for everyone. Including foreign patents. So whichever jurisdiction, patent holders want to retain the rights, can pay the tax annually. We can even come up with a public domain threshold as well. If 1000 people / company paid your pre-declared licensing fee, it becomes public domain. And no more per device license fee. 1 Patent, 1 Fee, 1 Annual Tax.

Same for copyrights.

I think I agree with you.

That being said, I have doubts anything will change because I have a feeling that this system is continuing to "work as designed".

These failings are exploitable and since the US government is somewhat bought and paid for, this is how it works. The intent might be to keep it this way.

I run a company in this space...

First, China patents ~5-10x more than the US does currently on a given month. Further, China has made it required for companies to patent.

The US definitely could not respect the Chinese patents, or they could treat Chinese patent's differently. IMO there's a ~1% chance of that happening. Patent law is pretty well defined, there are a multitude of treaties and if the US wants their patents to be respected, they have to respect the worlds.

That said, I will say, I suspect a lot of these patents can be invalidated. My company works heavily in this space and we work with some of the top US law firms. We sell a service that's used to identify prior art and invalidate patents in ~15 minutes -- https://search.ipcopilot.ai/

There's a lot of prior art in the open source community that can be used to attack these patents. Further, if folks publish their innovation it'll provide a solid layer of prior art.

I do think there needs to be reforms about non-practicing entities holding large patent portfolios. Maybe we should have some kind of FRAND (or FRAND-like) requirements for their portfolios.