It has amazed me how much innovation there has been in FDM 3D printers since the patents expired in the mid 2000's. In 2012 Stratasys published an article congratulating themselves for the ten year anniversary of the release of their "low cost" $30,000 3D printer. [1] Meanwhile I'd been playing with my first open source 3D printer which was $1900. The designs did not come from one monolithic corporation but a distributed group of hackers and 3d printing enthusiasts from around the world. Interested parties from all over the world improved on open source 3D printer designs and released their findings for free to be taken up by the community.

8 years later and you can buy a beginner's 3D printer for $250, a very reliable open source machine for $1000, and a super high end machine for $15,000.

To say that patents always stimulate innovation is obviously false to me. Patents may stimulate innovation at times but they also clearly stifle it. I was thinking today how the Prusa 3D printer is no more technologically complex than a pen plotter from the 1980's. If it had not been for patents, many companies could have competed for the high end 3D printer market in the 1990's, prices would have been perhaps a few thousand dollars for a printer in the year 2000, and the spread of personal computers would have led to the same hacking and innovation to lower costs we've seen but perhaps ten years earlier.

And the second order effects of this are I think dramatic. 3D printers accelerate innovation by dramatically reducing the cycle time for iterative development of mechanical parts. In the 1990's if you designed a mechanical part you had to wait weeks for it to come back from a machine shop if you could not hire a 3D printer. With a 3D printer in your office you can get a mechanical sample of your design the next day, and go through 5 design iterations in a week.

Instead of allowing for cheap and ubiquitous 3D printing, we chose to give a legal monopoly to stratasys who got to profit greatly for it. And I think society suffered economically because of it.

It is a source of great frustration to me that people dogmatically believe patents cause innovation. It is quite obvious to me that there are benefits to innovation even without intellectual property protection. Prusa Research still makes all of their products open source and they appear to be a healthy, growing, multi-milion dollar a year business. Chinese clones flood the market and are great for broke students, but those who want more reliability still source from Prusa. It seems there is room in the market both for the OEM and clones as they serve different groups.

The only reason business people love patents is that in a world where patents exist, you have an incentive to collect them. But I think the second order negative effects of this dramatically slow innovation and harm society economically. If Prusa can exist without patents in a market where competitors still use them, we can obviously make functional an entire economy with less intellectual property restrictions.

Unfortunately this is seen as arcane or obscure and nobody cares. Its a HUGE issue that I think affects our ability to innovate broadly but I fear the business community would be against the change we need.

My only hope is that competent and respected economists could examine this issue. People who know China well already know how much innovation can flourish in an open business community [2] but we need to convince the American business community to buy in to IP reform.

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20120217005877/en/Str...

[2] https://www.bunniestudios.com/blog/?p=284