Last week, we ran a post about a slightly controversial video that claimed that a particular 3D-printing slicing strategy was tied up by a patent troll. We’re absolutely not lawyers here at Hackaday, but we’ve been in the amateur 3D printing revolution since the very beginning, and surprisingly patents have played a role all along.
Modern fused-deposition modelling (FDM) 3D printing began with Stratasys’ patent US5121329A, “Apparatus and method for creating three-dimensional objects”, and the machines they manufactured and sold based on the technology. Go read the patent, it’s an absolute beauty and has 44 different claims that cover just about everything in FDM printing. This was the watershed invention, and today, everything claimed in the patent is free.
Stratasys’ patent on the fundamental FDM method kept anyone else from commercializing it until the patent expired in 2009. Not coincidentally, the first available home-gamer 3D printer, the Makerbot Cupcake, also went on sale in 2009.
The Stratasys machines were also one of the big inspirations for Adrian Bowyer to start the RepRap project, the open-source movement that basically lead to us all having cheap and cheerful 3D printers today, and he didn’t let the patent stop him from innovating before it lapsed. Indeed, the documentation for the RepRap Darwin dates back to 2007. Zach [Hoeken] Smith delivered our hackerspace the acrylic parts to make one just around that time, and we had it running a year or two before the Cupcake came out of hackers patents printing
