Ask HN: Why did consumer 3D printing take so long to be invented?

https://bsky.app/profile/tlalexander.bsky.social/post/3laiw4...

I think I have heard that in the country he was living in, violating patents for personal use was okay. My understanding is that things are much more strict in the USA, where I believe you can’t help others violate patents so you can’t publish work the way Adrian did. I know that in the early days of 3D printing everyone wanted a belt printer, but users and hackers on the forum regularly expressed concern over MakerBot’s patent and the associated legal risk of violating it. That’s why today’s belt printers have the head at a 45 degree angle. It’s a patent workaround because MakerBot’s patent specified a belt that was parallel to the motion axes. At least that’s what I think Brook Drumm of Printrbot told me.

So even if they didn’t affect Adrian, they certainly had a chilling effect. And I don’t think even under Adrian’s legal regime he would have been allowed to sell the work, so more expensive engineering development was prohibited. We didn’t get cheap 3d printers until companies could mass produce existing low cost open source designs, and that mass production was obviously prohibited by the patents. We didn’t get low cost machines until competition was allowed in to the space. And I’ve heard directly from 3D printer hacker developers that patents affected their decisions not to prototype certain new components. Sorry I can’t point you to a source directly but this would probably have been on the mailing list for the Bay Area Reprap club in 2010-2014, or the Ultimaker mailing list in the same timeframe.

(But wouldn't outnerding a nerd require not just vel0city's smug sense of superiority, but also demonstrating more than a de minimis level of knowledge or technical skill?)

HN comments are not the right place for personal attacks. :'(

I'm being attacked for my neanderthal inability to understand five digit numbers :( my primitive understanding of time can only really comprehend two digit year values. Today is the year 1924, right? I failed to write my calendar application to accommodate such high year values as your superior intellect is used to reasoning about. Here I thought ISO 8601 was over engineered, turns out it didn't go far enough. We're all just too simple-minded compared to other big-brain bretheren. May we all learn from our five digit betters.

I'm sorry I'm just not smart enough to be at your level :'(

The Constitutional purpose of the US patent system is to promote the progress of science and the useful arts, so discussing how to practice or improve patented inventions is definitely legal. (That's why patents are published in the first place.) That's what Adrian was doing. There's no "personal use" exemption in the US law, but there is an exemption (in caselaw) for research, although a court decision around that time narrowed it substantially. It would be impractical to practice a patented invention for such protected research purposes if the law prohibited you from even discussing how to practice it. But in fact you can even go so far as to patent an improvement on somebody else's patented invention.

There is a prohibition on inducing others to violate a patent, but generally it's applied in cases where someone is selling a nominally-non-infringing product whose only real use is to practice the patented invention.

I agree that, at the much later time that MakerBot not only existed but had turned evil, its patents had a chilling effect. I can absolutely confirm that! But at that point the cat was already out of the bag, and the original FDM patent had already expired, so that particular patent no longer had such an effect.

The question I intended to discuss (because in my interpretation it's what superconduct123 was asking) is why we didn't get something like the Prusa Mendel V2 in 01980 or 01990 or 02000 instead of 02010. Obviously the concerns people had about patents after 02010 aren't the reason; if it was a chilling effect from patents, it would have had to be a chilling effect much earlier than that.

And I don't think it was. We could imagine a history where there was a low-cost open-source design in 01990 or 01995 or 02000 or 02005 which companies couldn't mass-produce because of the patent, but that isn't the history we actually got. Why not?

I think the answer is basically that a low-cost 3-D printer sounded like such a crazy idea that none of the small number of people who even understood the concept of a 3-D printer decided to dedicate the effort necessary to make it happen. Also, everything was much more difficult then. I think Adrian accelerated the timeline by 2–5 years.

But only 2–5 years. Fab@home or the (non-FDM!) Open3DP group at the University of Washington would probably have been successful without him. MIT started their Center for Bits & Atoms in 02001, and they started up their first "Fab Lab" that year. EMSL built their Candyfab 4000 in 02006, which was the first 3-D printer I saw actually operating (at TechShop, if I recall correctly). So the memes were spreading.

But basically I think you could have built a hobbyist 3-D printer in the 01980s if you'd realized it was a good idea. Just as you could have built a submarine in the 01600s. The necessary technology was available. It would have been enormously more difficult, especially before the advent of cheap PIC16s in the 90s. Finding like-minded people on GEnie or FidoNet would have been much more difficult than in the blogosphere. 3-D modeling in 512KiB of RAM at 1 MIPS would have been limited. But you could have done it.

The question I'm most interested in here is: what similar opportunities are we missing today?