This post originally appeared on the Engelberg Center blog.

Sarah Goehrke’s recent article on the University of Tennessee’s new ‘patent pending’ 3D printed face shield made me wonder - “what is going on here?” There are a huge number of open source 3D printed face shields out there, and the value of a patent on an ‘innovation’ in the field would probably be pretty small. Why bother paying to get a patent in this case?

update 6/23/20: a version of this post is now also up on Make

This post originally appeared on the Engelberg Center blog.

This post originally appeared on the Engelberg Center blog.