User talk:Ank5133
3D Printing Blog Space
About Me
My name is Adnan Khan and I will be entering my 7th semester at Penn State as a senior in the fall. I'm majoring in Industrial Engineering with a minor in Six Sigma Methodology. I signed up for a summer work-study position as a student research assistant for Dr. Richard Devon and am working under David Saint John.
The position involves working with open source 3D printers, specifically RepRaps. One of my responsibilities includes the maintenance of and contribution to the RepRap wiki. Currently, I am writing a blog about certain articles and various literature that I encounter during my summer job experience. I will also strive to add to this page (which will be used for the blogging) once the summer has ended.
Since Wikipedia, or any wiki database, does not have a comments section enabled, please feel free to email me ([email protected]) about your thoughts and/or suggestions you may have to improve the look of this page, add some insight, further my knowledge. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.
The Legal Ins and Outs of 3D Printing - Thursday, June 14, 2012
I came across a pretty interesting and eye opening (at least for myself) article [1] on the legal issues surrounding 3D printing. I never really thought anyone could get sued over printing exact replicas of action figures and other toys. The idea of doing something along these lines hadn't even crossed my mind.
For those who didn't read Clive Thompson's article, for which the link is provided for in the previous paragraph, here is the story:
Thomas Valenty, a Makerbot owner decides to design a couple of Warhammer toy models and uploaded the files on Thingiverse. However, a lawsuit was brought forth by Games Workshop, a Warhammer toy manufacturer. It claimed that Valenty had violated the conditions listed in the DMCA and could be subject to penalties. As a result, Thingiverse removed the files from the site.
However, digital rights attorney Michael Weinberg states that Valenty is not guilty of any crime. Since intellectual property in this case is subject to patent law instead of copyright law because the Warhammer toys are physical models, Valenty may not even need to have been held responsible for any copyright infringement.
Regardless of the consequences, I'm sure that many people will be infringing upon patent law just as much (or even more so) as they do with copyright law. Everyone has illegally downloaded music, games, and other software at some point in time.
I believe that creating such stringent laws for the 3D printing industry will decrease the level of creativity and talent for users. This is why I'm highly supportive of open source 3D printing since it fosters a wealth of new ideas without being impeded by the law.
Hopefully Weinberg and others can convince legislators to relax the current and future laws that govern 3D printing.
None of us want our creative, imaginative thoughts squashed.
Review of the "RepRap Family Tree" Wiki page - Wednesday, June 13, 2012
As anyone can see, the RepRap Family Tree is quite expansive and well organized.
One of the important items that I noticed in the family tree included the types of RepRap (e.g.: polar, cartesian). Prior to visiting this page, I had not read about the RepRap's movement features, but after doing some research on these types, I feel better acquainted. A cartesian RepRap can move along the X, Y, and Z axes (hence, a typical cartesian coordinate plane) while a polar RepRap can move its tool-head by turning it in a circular direction.
I also realized that a majority of the working RepRaps ended up being commercialized. If such a trend continues, there is a huge market for profiting in the 3D printing business, and this can prove to be valuable for a number of people and corporations. However, the obvious disadvantage with this situation would be the gradual decline of open source 3D printing which has been the core of the RepRap community. New ideas and innovations have spurred from the open source movement, since users can change and improve printing methods. There should be limits to commercialization in order to continue the users' growth in creativity that results from open source software and hardware.
Simplifying the tree might be an issue since most of the information presented on the tree is fairly important and relevant to the history of the RepRap. One suggestion I could make would be to be remove the "less common" RepRaps from the tree. Instead, they could all be listed by their date of inception, as well as their predecessor RepRaps. Here is a rough example in which the Ponoko lasercut Darwin is the "less common" RepRap and it directly originated from the Darwin.
Darwin --------> Ponoko lasercut Darwin
I feel that this initiative would clear up some space on the tree and make it look more presentable while maintaining most of the critical information.
