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 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).

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.

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.

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.

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

And why would those in power do that, when the justice system as it is exists to serve their interests?

Ie. Each side has 15 minutes to explain their side, then the jury has 15 minutes to discuss, then a vote is taken and a decision made.

Sure, some more subtle outcomes would be 'wrong' - but does it actually matter?

You're leaving out the part that there are a limited number of judges, and to be a good judge requires a LOT of education, a LOT of experience, and a LOT of time (in other words it's expensive to become a good judge and they need to be compensated to reflect the cost of becoming one).

Computers and Zoom don't change the fact our options are either: Put thousands of new unqualified people into positions of power (judges) Or continue with the current system where getting into a court is slow and expensive.

Unless you're planning on building an entirely new court system removed from the current one specifically for IP. To which I say: good luck, because it'll be a massive expansion of government that doesn't include lining the pockets of our current little dictator or his supporters so we'll hear about how we need to shrink government and reduce the debt.

The real costs come from the US legal system being originally designed by and for agrarian villages of Saxons arguing with each other about who stole whose sheep, with the process handled in a more-or-less ad-hoc manner by village leaders for whom it's mostly a side responsibility, and the whole mess serving double duty as a source of community entertainment not unlike modern reality television.

A lot has changed over the past 1,000 years, but at it's core it's still a system that puts an incredible amount of focus on people arguing about Every. Single. Damned. Thing. No. Matter. How. Trivial. The really expensive parts of a lawsuit are the parts that create the most opportunity for this kind of bickering. Which is typically the parts that don't happen inside a courtroom. For example there's the discovery phase, which all by itself is so unusually complicated and expensive that it's spawned an entire multibillion dollar industry that basically only exists in English-speaking countries. And all the ancillary litigation over nitpicky procedural matters. And maybe other things, but those are the two that are the worst for being inherently expensive, easy to weaponize, and peculiarly Anglo-Saxon.

I 100% agree with you and luckily I think with AI this will rapidly change. The USPTO is bringing on as many AI tools as possible, as fast as they can. Similarly, we've built a product that can invalidate patents at scale, conduct prior art searches in 15 minutes what used to take weeks and thousands of dollars --

https://search.ipcopilot.ai/

We and others in the space are rapidly gaining traction, so I suspect it's only a matter of time. I should also mention there are whole networks out there battling patent trolls (LOT Network) and others working on open source, etc.

The backbone of the US economy are services and software, which depend a lot on IP. Deliberately or not, "low-value" American manufacturing was sacrificed for these high-margin industries[1]. AFAICT, it's impossible to turn back the clock on manufacturing without disadvantaging US software/services both on the legal regime and trade fronts

1. Which is why SWE salaries are higher in the US that RoW. I don't think trading high-salary service jobs for low-paying manufacturing is a good decision, but lots of people - including the current executive - think they can get it all. My working theory is Europe and China are not dumb and without agency and are just biding time for decoupling, should their manufacturing industries be undermined by US policy.

Working as intended then

This is the frustrating thing about getting into an argument about how "IP isn't real property" and then having the other side roll their eyes at you like you are some naive ideologue. They're missing the point of what it means for IP to not be "real property". The actual point is understanding that you are, and will be, swimming against the current of the fundamentals of these technologies forever. It is very very difficult to make a digital book or movie that can't be copied. So difficult in fact, that it we've had to keep pushing the problem lower and lower into the system, with DRM protections at the hardware level. This is essentially expensive, not just from a capital perspective, but from a "focus and complexity" burden perspective as well. Then realize that even after putting this entire system in place, an entire trade block could arbitrarily decide to stop enforcing copyright, AKA, stop fueling the expensive apparatus that is is holding up the "physical property" facade for "intellectual property". This was actually being floated as a retaliation tactic during the peak of the tariff dispute with Canada[1]. And in fact we don't even need to go that far, it has of course always been the case that patents vary in practical enforceability country to country, and copyrights (despite an attempt to unify the rules globally) are also different country to country (the earliest TinTin is public domain in the US but not in the EU).

Usually at this point someone says "It's expensive to defend physical property too! See what happens if another country takes your cruise liner". But that's precisely the point, the difficulty scales with the item. I don't regularly have my chairs sitting in Russia for them to be nationalized. The entities that have large physical footprints are also the ones most likely to have the resources defend that property. This is simply not the case with "intellectual property," which has zero natural friction in spreading across the world, and certainly doesn't correlate with the "owner's" ability to "defend" it. This is due to the fundamental contradiction that "intellectual property" tries to establish: it wants all the the zero unit-cost and distribution benefits of "ethereal goods," with all the asset-like benefits of physical goods. It wants it both ways.

Notice that all the details always get brushed away, we assume we have great patent clerks making sure only "novel inventions" get awarded patents. It assumes that patent clerks are even capable of understanding the patent in question (they're not, the vast majority are new grads [2]). We assume the copyright office is property staffed (it isn't [3]) We assume the intricacies of abstract items like "APIs" can be property understood by both judge and jury in order to reach the right verdict in the theoretically obvious cases (also turns out that most people are not familiar with these concepts).

How could this not be expensive? You essentially need to create "property lore" in every case that is tried. Any wish for the system to be faster would necessarily also mean less correct verdicts. There's no magic "intellectual property dude" that could resolve all this stuff. Copyright law says that math can't be copyrighted, yet we can copyright code. Patent law says life can't be patented, yet our system plainly allows copyrighting bacteria. Why? Because a lawyer held of a tube of clear liquid and said "does this seem like life to you?" The landmark Supreme Court case was decided 5-4 [4], and all of a sudden a thing that should obviously not be copyrightable by anyone that understands the science was decided it was. There's no "hidden true rules" that if just followed, would make this system efficient. It is, by design, a system that makes things up as it goes along.

As mentioned in other comments, at best you could just flip burden to the other party, which doesn't make the system less expensive, it just shifts the default party that has to initially burden the cost. Arguably this is basically what we have with patents. Patents are incredibly "inventor friendly". You can get your perpetual motion machine patented easy-peasy. In fact, there is so much "respect" for "ideas" as "real things", that you can patent things you never made and have no intention of making. You can then sue companies that actually make the thing you "described first". Every case is a new baby being presented to King Solomon to cut in half.

In other words, an inexpensive system would at minimum require universal understanding and agreement on supremely intricate technical details of every field it aims to serve, which isn't just implausible, it is arguably impossible by definition since the whole point of intellectual property is to cover the newest developments in the field.

1. https://www.cigionline.org/articles/canada-can-fight-us-tari...

2. https://tolmasky.com/2012/08/29/patents-and-juries/

3. https://www.wired.com/story/us-copyright-office-chaos-doge/

4. https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/447/303/

You're freedom is an illusion. A social contract agreed upon by you following certain rules. Those rules, written by the wealthy, don't apply to the wealthy. In a just society they would be, but we have ceased to be a just society for the last 50 years. Technology isn't going to solve this without becoming that AI overlord everyone is scared of. Court systems are designed to prevent working class from becoming wealthy and to protect the wealthy and their assets from the working class. (violent crimes aside)

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).

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.

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.

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

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.

What problem do you think needs fixing?

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!"

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.

I mean, people can argue about how misguided it is, but this is one of the key motivations for the tariff arguments now going on.

"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.

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.

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

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)

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

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.

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?

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

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.

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.

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

Same for copyrights.

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.

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.

It already is. And its been chaotic and amazing at the same time.

We already have open source:

5DoF 3d printers with slicers

Fixed wing and quad/hexa/octocopters

Medical drug fabrication (Four Thieves)

Electrochemical synthesis lab

Open source flow batteries

Stops and starts of industrial tooling (open source ecology)

I'm going to say something that is becoming less and less controversial: copyrights and patents are the real drag here. Individuals can get patents, but can't actually enforce. So they end as weapons as companies go after each other.

Copyright is also often intertwined into patents, so that if a thing isn't covered by a patent, copyright (with firmware) takes over. Then the DMCA and anti-circumvention shit.

The other problem here in the USA is almost impossible to source parts directly, or small fab labs that can do operations.

I was looking for a 5mm thick 500x500mm aluminum plate to be cut. Waterjet, plasma, whatever. I wanted it slightly undercut. I made blueprints in DXF and pdf. I contacted 2 waterjet companies, no response. Contacted a welding company with plasma table. No response. Down the list, no response.

As a creator, how am I supposed to create, when all avenues lead to "source it in China"? That... Is huge.

Multiple manufacturers have direct contact with community members to produce custom hardware at a small but affordable scale, and keeping up with rapid iterations and multiple hardware improvements throughout the year.

Some of the most cutting edge as well as niche 3D printing hardware available to consumers are being sold on small webshops operating out of someone's garage.

If anything, we're in a golden age right now. 3D printing in 2025 is a very exciting place to be.

That Elegoo seems to be supporting open standards: https://www.tomshardware.com/3d-printing/elegoo-launches-aut... was one thing which allowed me to justify placing that order.

Think about this question for a second and you'll realize that it's rooted in consumerism. We always want 'quality and speed', but most of all, convenience and apparent low cost (that 'apparent' part is important). What if the product wasn't cheap or the best you could get? What if the product requires more attention than being just a consumer? Conventional wisdom says that they'd be dead on arrival. But consumerism also comes with consumer exploitation.

There are numerous examples of this today. People yearn for dump large LCD panels (cheaper ones, not the ad panels or large monitors) instead of the sluggish, invasive, ad-ridden, irreparable and annoying smart TVs that we have today. Configurable modular laptops and phones like the Framework and Fairphone are enjoying a comeback today after decades of soldered-on components (even the battery), individually paired modules, glued on casings (instead of the convenient screwed on ones), horrendously costly repairs and depressingly short service life. The (paper) printer market is so rife with exploitation that their CEOs consider their customers as 'investments' that are lossy if they don't buy ink cartridges on subscription! Similar story in the automotive sector. People annoyed by full touch screen control panels, heated seats on subscription, parts that cannot be serviced by anyone else.. I could go on for hours.

It's very tempting to give up the reparable and open hardware in favor of mass produced better performing products on account of the cost, effort and time needed to deal with the former. But as their market dries up, the inevitable enshittification of the latter sets in. In pursuit of the continued satisfaction of the shareholders, it's no longer enough for the producers to take hefty margins on each unit you purchase. They move to squeezing every last penny off of you by seeking rent on products that shouldn't be under subscriptions in the first place. Eventually, you end up spending more than if you were using the dumb devices. And then predictably like clockwork, people start lamenting about the feature creep, loss of serviceability, loss of quality and greed.

It's at this point that dumb devices market open up again. The market is small and products are costlier owing to the low scale of production. But they grow a dedicated customer base and healthy revenues that improve over time. So with this hindsight, how about we stick with the open and reparable hardware? If their market doesn't crash, their costs wont rise either. This long term strategic decision can help consumers protect their rights and their savings. But that never happens. This is one scam that the world falls for again and again and again, no matter how many times it plays out.

Your tiny order isn’t worth their whole business, but if you did the original design that feels patently* unfair to you.

* sorry, couldn’t help myself

They simply succumb to the tendency to rest on their laurels the moment they start making money, and then especially stop investing in software, which is where Bambu have their edge, as many of their improvements are software related.

i.e. if you spend upfront in software you can create an improved experience with the same parts for every subsequent unit. The Chinese have actually internalized this lesson, while in the west we have forgotten it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evergreening

Your comment is ignorant nonsense.

Regardless the topic is about open hardware being squeezed using shady tactics. It means leas competition, less innovation. Rules to kick such players should be easy to enforce as opposed to required to pay quite a lot for such an action.

Prusa printers stagnated in innovation due to patents filed, making it more difficult to add features. Still, they did expand into SLA and CoreXY.

Prusa printers got more expensive because most of the expensive components come from China, which raised prices and gave subsidies to Chinese manufacturers. That is a de facto export tariff.

They do have entry-level printers, like the Prusa Mini. Of course, it does cost twice that of a Chinese-made clone, but that is because of the aforementioned subsidies.

”Less open” is just plain wrong, almost maliciously so. Prusa offers free printable models of all parts in their entire range of printers. Their firmware is open source, and their PrusaSlicer software is open source. How much more open can you get?

I'd love to, but I'm not getting those into my apartment.

Yes but the fewest come at the price and versatility as 3D printing. Injection molding is very expensive and hard to do in the basement. Wood working too, requires lots of time, skills and many tools...

Clearly stovepiping the generation of IP monopolies and laundering them across borders and through unrelated court systems is a captured perverse incentive structure.

I don't know Tailwind so perhaps it is not easy to fix.

He seems to point pretty directly to Chinese subsidies allowing those printers to be sold under cost. That’s not capitalism.

they're cc-by-nc, though, which is not really open source

Open Hardware designers are having to become international patent experts, which is more expensive than releasing the designs to the community for free.