Hi Shapeways!  I’m excited to be joining the team as the new IP and General Counsel around here.  3D printing is obviously amazing for all sorts of reasons, and one of those is how it gives people an opportunity to rethink their relationship to intellectual property law.  3D printed objects and files do not fit as neatly into intellectual property law as things like music and movies.  This gives the 3D printing community a chance to redefine the relationship between creativity, creation, and intellectual property law (among so many other things).  Law certainly has an important role, but a healthy community does not rely on law alone in order to thrive.

For the past few years, I’ve been working on public interest technology policy at Public Knowledge.  While there, I wrote a few whitepapers on 3D printing and intellectual property law: : It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw It Up, What’s The Deal with Copyright and 3D Printing, 3 Steps for Licensing Your 3D Printed Stuff.  I also helped to organize 3D/DC, an annual 3D printing policy conference in Washington, DC.

Reihan Salam’s piece on hospitals over in Slate last week felt strangely familiar.  The piece, titled “Hospitals Are Robbing Us Blind” was ostensibly about how hospitals are gouging everyone on medical services.  He described a market with limited competition made up of politically powerful incumbents.  Competition has been reduced by a slew of regional mergers, further consolidating the players.  Although Salam details a number of hospital-specific problems, he concludes that there are essentially two solutions to this problem: recognize that hospitals often have near monopolies and regulate them as such, or use antitrust law in the short term and reduced barriers to entry in the long term to increase competition.

Today is my last day at Public Knowledge.  I started at PK as an intern over seven years ago and, though a series of lucky breaks, have pretty much worked there ever since.  I am, and will continue to be, profoundly grateful for every opportunity that PK has ever afforded me. 

Yesterday, Autodesk announced that it was open sourcing one of the resins for its spark 3D printer. Autodesk says that they are releasing the recipe under a Creative Commons attribution-share alike license, and invited the community to remix, improve, and build upon it as they saw fit. This decision is commendable on the part of Autodesk, but what does it actually mean to open source 3D printing resin?

This is the third 3D printing whitepaper. It was also the last big thing I wrote for PK.  The paper focuses on what parts of 3D printable objects (and files) might be protectable by IP and what happens if those parts are protected. The title is kind of a lie.  It spends much more time talking about what you might be able to license than how to license those parts after you have identified them.