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.

All things being equal, do you want to make it easy for good actors to be good or to be able to punish bad actors for being bad?