Protecting designs in the age of 3D printing

Lester Miller

You really should see Theo Jansen's brilliant, articulated Animaris Geneticus Parvus emerge from a 3D printer and walk itself across a boardroom table powered only by the breeze of conversation. There is brief elation, then the shock of being dumped unprepared into an unfamiliar world.

The Maker Movement has arrived, taking advantage of fast data transfer across national borders for instructing affordable machines to build tangible products. Designs law around the world is already being reviewed in an attempt to keep it relevant to this new technology.

What is 3D printing?

There is more than one way to 3D print products, but one of the important methods is Fused Deposition Modelling (FDM), patented in 1992 (patent now expired) by Stratasys. FDM uses a computer-controlled dispensing head to place a thin layer of liquid material on a base. After the bottom layer solidifies, the head indexes upwards to drop other layers on the lower ones to form a product. Usable materials include at least 50 plastics, rubbers, metals and even biological materials. Dita von Teese was the main attraction in a 3D printed net gown at an event in New York last year, while it is anticipated that the first fully functioning human organ will be 3D printed within a year.

Figure 1 of Crump FDM patent US 5121329

A consumer 3D printer can be yours for less than $2000, printing coffee cup-sized products for a few dollars.

Creating and using model data 

To design a product, a designer uses a computer modelling package which outputs the product details to a stereo lithographic (STL) file. A converting software client then changes that file to another format, which gives path and dispensing instructions to the dispensing head.

To copy a product, laser digitisers scan 3D objects and create an STL file. Usually everyone scans their own head first (do it annually for fun), and then they move on to copying existing products.

A large number of websites (such as this one and this one) provide STL files of original designs, many for free.

Downloading protected products for free!

Imagine a successful product, the subject of an Australian registered design. Overseas, a person scans the product and makes an STL file available, hosted on a server in a country where the designer did not seek registered design protection. A user in Australia downloads the file and makes it here on their own printer. What remedies can the owner of the registration seek? And against whom?

The design owner may consider suing the Australian maker for making, offering to make, importing for sale, selling, using in business, keeping for sale in relation to a product identical to or substantially similar in overall impression to, the registered design. This is possible, but suing individuals is unlikely to be commercially palatable for a design owner.

Similarly, it would be difficult to make a legal case that there has been third-party authorisation of a design infringement by the provider of the STL file, or that that party is a joint tortfeasor with the maker of the design, because of the high bar set for establishing those grounds and the ease of working around the relevant provisions. It is also not clear whether a take-down request would be observed in one jurisdiction when the design right is in another.

Some Australian cases indicate that posting an STL file on a foreign website may be considered to be an offer to make, but it would probably need to be proved that the website targeted Australia.

ACIP Designs Review

The Advisory Council on Intellectual Property (ACIP) is currently reviewing the Australian designs system. An issues paper is to be released in late 2014 and there will be consultation on that paper in August and September. ACIP anticipates that recommendations to the Government will be finalised by November 2014.

What comes next?

3D printing presents great opportunities for realising efficiencies in designing and manufacturing prototypes and products. But as a result of widespread copying and the international availability of data files of protected products, IP owners risk loss of income, while ISPs and technology companies may risk potential liability for secondary infringement if they are seen to have authorised design infringement. The problems of copyright owners are now the problems of design owners, who should be vigilant in putting in place suitable strategies, starting with conducting regular searches for their products (or close copies) on Maker websites.

The situation for design owners and makers will be clearer in a few months' time once the ACIP consultation process is complete and it has made its recommendations to the Government.


This is an edited version of a post that first appeared on the Allens IP blog, Scintilla.

Once more unto the breach:* Printing the next revolution

Matthew Tracey

3D printing will change your world.

With that bombshell out of the way, let's work out how and why.

3D printing, or additive manufacturing technology, is very similar to traditional 2D printing. 2D printers overlay ink on paper to produce physical representations of a digital file. 3D printers use similar technology but utilise metals, plastics and even food as their 'ink'. Where traditional printers could use a variety of file types (such as .doc, .jpeg or .html) to produce a printed page, 3D printers use computer-aided design (CAD) files that contain the physical specifications of the object to be printed. 3D printers use these files to construct an exact copy of the object, layer by layer. The software in the printer transforms a CAD file containing the dimensions of 3D object into slices. So, if you were printing a scale model of the Empire State Building, the printer would squirt out layer upon layer so as to construct the model from the ground floor to the point. In combination, these layers produce a tangible 3D object.

3D printing in action

Questioning 100 years of manufacturing history

The history of manufacturing is essentially a history of economies of scale. Revolutionised by the production methods of the Model T, Ford utilised scale in such a way as to reduce the marginal costs of production with each and every finished vehicle. At least theoretically, large-scale manufacturing means lower production costs and, in turn, lower purchase prices for consumers.

Let us be daring for a moment and dispense with one hundred years of manufacturing theory and practice. What if marginal costs were constant instead of depreciative? How would that change how we operate as a society?

Say for example you're at home and you've just finished dinner. You're loading all of your dirty dishes into the dishwasher and you find a broken locking mechanism that keeps the squall inside the dishwasher otherwise contained. Instead of sending for a replacement part from the manufacturer and waiting the requisite time for it to arrive, imagine downloading the CAD file from the manufacturer's website and printing off a replacement. Online technology blog Ars Technica has opined that just as online shopping made bricks-and-mortar retail stores appear quaint, 3D printing will do the same in respect of waiting for shipping to arrive from an online retailer. Importantly, 3D printing means that the cost of producing the first object is the same as the cost of producing the thousandth. This equation is perfect for individual consumers who only need one object.

The response from industry and what lies ahead

The rights associated with patents, copyrights, registered designs and trademarks could be infringed through 3D printing. For example, several websites currently offer unauthorised replicas of designer goods in CAD files for download. the3dstudio offers a CAD file of a Mario Bellini Ultrabellini chair for US$20 where a set of four authentic chairs retails for in excess of US$1000.

Unlike Sony in respect of VHS and Napster in respect of MP3s, rights holders have not yet brought 3D printing under any real fire. This is partly due to the lack of consumer-priced devices in the marketplace. However, since websites such as the3dstudio essentially operate as a vehicle similar to Napster (in that they provide a central source for the distribution of authorised and non-authorised material), legal intervention is increasingly likely. Analogous to the recent iiNet litigation, there is a risk that any site which hosts CAD files could be the subject of secondary infringement and authorisation claims. Like YouTube in response to Viacom, online distribution portals may need to have infringement detection and take-down mechanisms in place in order to assuage the appetites of litigious rights holders. However, like many industries' adaptation to new technologies, there will inevitably be winners and losers.

The scope of 3D printing is set to expand to compromise other traditional aspects of mass manufacturing. By way of example, Cornell University has had some success at producing food with 3D printers. The ramifications of printing food will stretch far and wide and will undoubtedly cause us to reconsider how we think about farming and famine.

The internet has ideologically entrenched our demand to have anything anytime anywhere. Traditionally, this demand related only to information. It is now clear, however, that in the future we will be able to print our cake and eat it too.


*'Once more unto the breach' is from the 'Cry God for Harry, England, and Saint George!' speech of Shakespeare's Henry V, Act III, 1598.

Video by 3DCreationLab, published under the standard YouTube licence.