3D modeling legal issues

Stuff on my radar:

The bbc went after a knitter, "Mazzmatazz", for posting a knitting pattern for a Dr. Who character.
[www.openrightsgroup.org]
[technollama.blogspot.com]

After sending off the initial cease-and-desist, "The BBC have agreed to meet with Mazz and turn her knitted designs into, at the very least, a limited edition of exclusive promotional products." According to the Times.
[www.timesonline.co.uk]

I don't expect most instances that start with a corporate cease-and-desist nastygram to resolve themselves in this manner. Even if Mazzmatazz now has an attractive commercial position, it seems like other knitters aren't allowed to make what they want. In our case, are they going to go after us if we put up a tardis pattern on objects.reprap.org or a similar file library?

More troubling news:
[wikileaks.org]
The proposed US ACTA multi-lateral intellectual property trade agreement (2007) would "criminalize the non-profit facilitation of unauthorized information exchange on the internet."

Everyone takes the 'litigate first, ask questions later' approach nowadays. Its like a reflex. Did you hear about the guy who wrote drivers to let old creative sound cards work under vista, for example? Or for a massively more harmless example, the guy who made the london tube map with anagram station names?

The new intellectual property agreement looks pretty ominous too. It is intended to hit places like the pirate bay, where the people running the thing only use income from ads and donations for fund hardware and bandwidth costs and therefore won't currently fall afoul of the nastier laws intended to stop piracy.

You can bet it won't stop there. Mission creep is practically built in to every new law, and every new law is backed by some heavy lobbying from big business for whom 'fair use' is a state-sponsored attack on their god given right to ever greater profits This little gem is going to be used as an internet gun to sort out all those troubling little websites that share things people would rather they didn't. This would be an awesome weapon for patent trolls to use against open source projects, I suspect.

Maybe I'll start looking to see how hard it is to incorporate a little company in somewhere the US hasn't heard of yet, which has an internet link or two and a place to host a few servers.

... uh - then we have to make our own designs and cover them with ip-stuff too ?

Bad thing, start going annoying and expensive too ...

Viktor

Yep, this global trend towards more and more restrictive patent and copyright legislation is a real problem.

The representatives don't understand the issues, and let themselves be lobbied by industry monopolists, without any input from the general public or independent experts.

Talking to them is not really helping (it's hard to outlobby industrial lobbyists with near unlimited funds with only volunteer effort, as the struggle about software patents has shown).

I think the way to stop the current trend is political - the international pirate party movement ([www.pp-international.net]) is working to get some sanity back into the copyright and patent legislation. It puts pressure on elected leaders in a completely different way than lobbying (at least in EU and countries with a multi-party system - it doesn't work that well in the US). I myself participated in the founding of a Pirate party in my own country last weekend.

I'm not advocating RepRap to take any stance on this, I just wanted to point out the big picture.

Just posted in a different thread about how 3D Warehouse is going to bring this smack home with a vengeance and soon.

I was browsing the Warehouse and began noticing all the patented/copyrighted objects mainly in the form of characters from games and toys. Those can be exported as or converted to STL files. Given a bit more time, our machines will be eminantly capable of reproducing them easily. This dumps a huge number of models that "break" laws right into the laps of the public with no warning to those oh-so-fair companies.

As pointed out above, knee jerk reaction will be litigation. This will--I hope--not work as there should be far too many RepRaps in existence at that time. The companies will begin flailing around--think RIAA leveling lawsuits at old ladies and small children--and will not end without a huge restructuring of either patent law or social liberties. Shitty outcomes seem to abound.

Demented

Actually I am fairly certain the legal issues with this and 3D Warehouse are a fair bit different than, say, Napster and music, in a way that makes me more optimistic about the future.

An MP3 of a Britney Spears single *is the product* in a way that, say, a 3D model of a Harry Potter figurine is not. If you go to your friend's house and play a Bob Dylan song on your guitar, that's still not Bob Dylan singing.

Even a patent, which in many ways is the strongest IP protection you can get, does not forbid people from making copies for personal use. So long as you're playing music in your friend's backyard and making Harry Potter figurines for yourself (which you could do with a pocketknife and a block of wood today), there's nowhere for rights holders to go after you.

For someone like 3D Warehouse the issues are a bit more subtle. While a STL model isn't a 'true copy' like an MP3, it's more like sheet music. The closest analogy I can think of are tablature sites that would publish reverse-engineered sheet music for guitar, some of which came under attack from the music industry a few years ago.

As far as I know, the farthest any of these issues ever got was private settlements between site owners and IP holders. So, we don't really know how the courts would view that. Certainly I don't see any significant liability issues for RepRap on that basis. Though having recently been involved in some rather costly and ill-considered commercial litigation myself, this won't necessarily stop rights holders from trying. If and when the analog hole starts to widen to include physical objects will certainly make for some interesting times.

Quote

So long as you're playing music in your friend's backyard and making Harry Potter figurines for yourself (which you could do with a pocketknife and a block of wood today), there's nowhere for rights holders to go after you.

Well, ish. Copyright law is a very fuzzy sort of thing, far more so than patent law because it doesn't deal with such tangible things. You are violating someone's copyright by making those toys; it just isn't financially worth their while to come and stop you, and it might be a bit of a PR mistake.

If, on the other hand, you are involved in a project which actively facilitiates this copyright violation, then that is a different matter. Producing a free tool to let anyone, anywhere in the world make that same Harry Potter toy? You're practically *encouraging* people to violate intellectual property laws!

And so on and so forth.

Not that wikipedia is the best--most reliable--source on the planet...but, here are a few excerpts:

The wikipedia definition of a patent..."""A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to an inventor or his assignee for a fixed period of time in exchange for a disclosure of an invention."""

And the wikipedia definition of that phrase "Exclusive Rights"..."""In Anglo-Saxon law, an exclusive right is a de facto, non-tangible prerogative existing in law (that is, the power or, in a wider sense, right) to perform an action or acquire a benefit and to permit or deny others the right to perform the same action or to acquire the same benefit."""

That about sums up the conversation my prof and I had about the subject. The patent gives the company the right to stop you from making their object regardless for what use you intend to put it--personal or public. I used to believe that you could make any object for private use but was wrong.

That right there is why this is gonna be a big issue like Napster and the like.

Demented

Demented Chihuahua Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> That about sums up the conversation my prof and I
> had about the subject. The patent gives the
> company the right to stop you from making their
> object regardless for what use you intend to put
> it--personal or public. I used to believe that you
> could make any object for private use but was
> wrong.
>
> That right there is why this is gonna be a big
> issue like Napster and the like.


I am glad that somebody finally clarified the issue. It is my understanding that vis a vis American patent law that Demented is absolutely right. It used to be that in the US you could make a copy of a patented device for non-commercial use and once in the distant past I seem to recall that you could make a copy of a patented device and even use it yourself commercially IF you did not make it for sale. There was a case in my local town when I was quite young when the printing plant of our local newspaper rebuilt their press to take advantage of a new, patented mechanism. The patent holder sued them but lost because the newspaper had no intent to sell their altered press.

In the past 20 years, however, the patent laws in the US have closed those sorts of "loopholes". From discussions with Adrian Bowyer, however, in the UK you can still apparently make a copy of a patented device for non-commercial use.

The discussions that have been going on encompass two kinds of patents. The first relates to Reprap machines themselves. By the letter of the law, Reprap makers in the US probably violate one or a few of those patents. Builders in the UK and most other places don't. In theory, the patent holders could sue, I think, US builders of Repraps. As a practical matter they don't, though, for two very simple reasons. Primus, Reprap builders are no threat to the holders' revenues or business model. Secundus, the patents in question are fast approaching the end of their life.

The second kind of patents and copyrights apply, however, to items that could be made WITH a Reprap machine. If, for example, somebody started making a Mickey Mouse action figure and selling it on eBay you could be sure that the miscreant would be getting a nastygram (cease and desist notification) from the Mouse (Disney). It is an article of faith that you "don't mess with the Mouse". Indeed, the Mouse and other intellectual property companies represented by the MPAA and the RIAA have been primarily responsible for the bizarre and, in my opinion, rankly unconstitutional legislative distortions of intellectual property law in the past twenty years. Sadly, in such matters both Congress, Congressmen of both parties and the Executive Branch regardless of the party represented there have been for sale to the highest bidder on patent and copyright law. In my darker moments I suspect that they're just plain for sale in any matter that they suspect won't draw a firestorm of public reaction.

What the internet and advancing technology have done, from my observations, is democratize innovation and creativity dramatically in the general population. The cost of producing and marketing music, for example, has plummeted in the past ten years or so. More and more musicians and other creative artists are simply recording and selling their own works and leaving the big media companies to sing for their supper.

As usual, though, individual creative artists haven't got the financial clout to buy legislation. Saurian media companies whose revenue is largely derived from their libraries of historical content still do, for now at least.

One way to reduce the chance of character lawsuits is to make more non infringing models for reprap and have reprap say that we want non infringing models and that any company which worries about people making copyrighted models should also encourage people to make non infringing models.

So for example, we should make a Merlin model and if a corporation sues because people are fabricating Harry Potter models, we would point out that we would much rather that people make Merlin models and indeed because that corporation is so upset about people fabricating Harry Potter, they too should encourage people to fabricate Merlin models.

Someone comes after us for MacGyver models, we point out that we would prefer people make Archimedes models and they should too.

Someone comes for GI Joe, we point out Alexander. Captain Kirk, Odysseus. Aladdin, the original Aladdin.

I would like historical characters in any case, because I find them more interesting than corporate characters.

Demented Chihuahua Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
>
> That about sums up the conversation my prof and I
> had about the subject. The patent gives the
> company the right to stop you from making their
> object regardless for what use you intend to put
> it--personal or public. I used to believe that you
> could make any object for private use but was
> wrong.
>
> That right there is why this is gonna be a big
> issue like Napster and the like.

I remain respectfully unsold for several reasons.

Patent actions first require proof of infringement. Establishing this is in many cases a long and expensive process. A copy of a CD is in all practical terms a perfect clone of the original, for which only proof of possession is really necessary to prove a violation of copyright. Among other reasons, this is why many patent-holders today refrain from more than light skirmishing against amateur infringers--it isn't worth the money.

If your patented doohickey is made of metal and mine is all plastic, I might well argue that enough changes were made to obviate the patent. There are even legally well-tested ways to engineer around patents exclusively for that purpose. Should we ever achieve molecular assembly such that we have similar "cloning" of physical objects, then the law may well catch up to that and start treating things like Britney Spears MP3s. If you haven't noticed, the law tends to lag far behind the technology. By the time the legal system caught up to file-swapping, it was already so commonplace as to be almost unpoliceable.

Second, the music and movie industries are relatively concentrated. The major studios and record labels account for an overwhelming proportion of product and of infringement. Thus, they are able to invest the large amounts of money required for large, long-term campaigns against filesharing and the like. By comparison, the patents that RepRappers will violate will be scattered amongst tens of thousands of holders. There will be things like iPods or Iron Man action figures which will present high-profile targets but they will not, I wager, constitute anywhere near the preponderance of "traffic" that you see on filesharing networks with copyrighted music.

Third, and related to the first point, the case law in the US around defending against patent infringement suits is considerably more robust than what currently exists around copyright. One reason is that it is far older--patents have been heavily litigated for hundreds of years, while mass file-sharing infringement is barely a decade old. Another is that the defendants in patent suits are often equally or more deep-pocketed than the plaintiffs, and it is not unusual for suits to drag on for five or more years. To this end, there are also well-established penalties for losing infringement suits, c.f. Rule 11 claims.

Last, and admittedly this is very heavy speculation and a bit of hopeful thinking on my part, we are in the midst of enormous upheaval in terms of society's economic and legal paradigms around IP. While the recording industry is wreaking some outrageous chaos out there right now which is no doubt painful for individuals unfairly targeted by it, it is also very hard to say they are "winning" the fight in the sense that matters most. Most are watching revenue fall by double digits annually.

To that point, there are more than a few top executives in the major labels who privately concede that their legal victory shutting down Napster was a strategic miscalculation. At the time, Napster accounted for the overwhelming majority of file sharing, while the pure p2p networks that replaced it remain virtually impossible to police systematically. Instead, they ended up handing the store to Steve Jobs, who (practically) gives the music away to sell high-margin iPods, while sites like MySpace are slowly but gradually eating away at the central filtering/promotion functions which is all the labels have as their physical media supply chain functions become obsolete.

Needless to say, the major label music business is in many ways a cornered animal, and by the time RepRap gets to the sort of everyman-able level of adoption to be worth the trouble, the major labels will look very different than they do now, not least of which will be a lot smaller. Rights holders may be acting like bastards today but they are not doing it solely for the sake of being bastards, they want to make money. If "sue everybody in sight" has by then been proven to be as much of a losing game as it does today, then rights holders may well decide to approach the situation differently. Certainly the record labels today do not look on the past decade as being one of great vision and strategic foresight on their part, and they are paying the price.

Anyway, back to trying to machine my damned tapered extruder drive screw. I think my lathe needs adjustment and my homemade nasty lathe dog is causing vibration that has caused me to snap the last three, though the last one was almost there when it bought the farm...

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/30/2008 12:23AM by Forrest Higgs.

I agree with Colin that the use of a RepRap to produce patented items is unlikely to draw legal fire because both the plaintiffs and the defendants are too dispersed for lawsuits to be economically viable, especially in view of the relatively low expected payout from going after individuals.

The danger that I see for our project comes from the DCMA provisions which make it illegal to "Provide" "tools" which are "significantly" "designed to enable infringement". All of the phrases in quotes are dangerously broad and the big players are arguing very hard for incredibly broad interpretations. Disney could argue (and it would not be out of character for them) that this site is "providing" plans for a tool which will be "significantly" used to produce "infringing" Mickey Mouse figures. If they won the resulting fines would make it impossible for anyone to legitimately host the site. While most of us might not care if the server is in Berzerkistan, that sort of thing hinders wide acceptance.

I agree on almost all points with Colin. I draw the line, however, at thinking that the companies will not seek to protect themselves from the threat that is RepRap just becuase the tried and true model no longer works.

What I see them doing is lobbying. Massive lobbying by many groups of corporations for laws that allow them to construe possession of an object not provably manufactured by them as an act of patent infringement. Copyright laws did not originally come with all the clap-trap that now adorns them. Companies lobbied for changes and the changes came. Same with Patents.

It'll be a bad set of years if we don't plan for this threat much like it'll be a bad set of years for companies if they don't see this comming pretty soon--I hope the don't!

Demented

Okay. I'm going to tell you guys this once more. We don't talk about FDM because we don't do FDM and because Stratasys asked us nicely not to use the term. They didn't have to ask nicely.

I've edited out the paragraph using that verboten term. Keep it up, guys, and I'll delete offending posts.

PLEASE! Don't make Dr. Bowyer's life and Reprap as an open source project more difficult than it already is. While all you Yanks have first amendment rights and that's good you can also have the socks sued off of you in civil court for misusing trademarks. Keep that in mind.

Cory Doctorow wrote a short story about self-replicating printers about two years ago and was both shocked and delighted to discover that we were making it happen. Like Reprap, Cory's story is open source and pretty much sums up the social conundrum Reprappers find themselves in. Here it is...

PRINTCRIME

(Originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)

The coppers smashed my father

Here's one other thought to roll around. Manufacturing, particularly of run-of-the-mill consumer devices, is increasingly seen as a secondary or tertiary activity for producers like Apple, something best outsourced as much as possible.

Another interesting question is that offshoring seems to be hitting some (perhaps temporary, perhaps not) capacity bottlenecks as wage inflation and transportation costs are starting to make "cheap Asian labor" less competitive than they have been the past couple decades.

From a business perspective, "outsourcing" the production of the gizmo to the end user is sort of the ultimate in cost reduction. Design and marketing are in many cases where 90% or more of the margin comes from anyway.

While this doesn't address the rights issue head-on, it does suggest to me that the constituency for 3D printers will include some corporate interests of its own.

"H.R. 4279 Would Establish Federal IP Cops"
[news.slashdot.org]
[www.billboard.biz]

SebastienBailard Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> "H.R. 4279 Would Establish Federal IP Cops"


It was only a matter of time. This shouldn't surprise anyone. Congress has been for sale to the highest bidder since the founding of the Republic. We should expect no more from a body comprises almost exclusively of lawyers.

You might know that miserable asshole Conyers was at the bottom of this piece of corrupt business.

I'm afraid that Cory got it dead right. I hope you guys are ready to spend quality time in jail. I expect that it won't be too long before Darwin is treated the same way that digital recorders and P2P filesharing systems have been in the States.

WTF? I guess we should expect to get raided by the cops at any point. Too, Google would have to do something about the 3d warehouse. Download that shit before it's taken down! Stupid government.

Demented

Seems like an old thread but just came across it and the subject matter captured my attention.

Firstly the designation B-24 was assigned to the aircraft by the USAAC/USAAF, just like other military/government aircraft (A-6, B-2, C-130, E-3, F-16, MH-60, U-2, etc.) and those designations are not the property of the manufacturer. Certain aircraft designations are trademarks of their manufacturer, e.g. Boeing 737, Sikorsky S-76, Cessna 172, Beechcraft Bonanza, etc. BUT fortunately, for the world of art and media, these names and even trademarked logos can be used referentially. This is one of the primary purposes of "Fair-Use" protection, legally speaking.

A shining example of this (outside the realm of aircraft/3D modeling) is the documentary "Supersize Me", as well as the short film "Logorama". One can surely understand that the McDonald's corporation did not provide Morgan Spurlock (director of Supersize Me) with permission to use their name/logo or images of their products/restaurant locations. If anything, they probably fought tooth and nail to find a way to stop him, but he is allowed to refer to them just as the producers of Logorama are allowed to referentially create art based upon corporate logos. The key is that they are not competing in the same "industrial realm" as the companies they refer to, meaning that Mr. Spurlock's and his film are not a restaurant chain and his use of the McDonald's name/logo/product images is not designed to mislead potential customers into buying hamburgers from him, thinking that he is somehow affiliated with the McDonald's corporation.

However, if Mr. Spurlock were to produce/sell/profit from a film project which featured a character named Mickey Mouse who is in love with a character named Minnie Mouse he could be in big trouble because he is stealing from the Walt Disney Company and competing with them the artistic/entertainment arena with their own intellectual property. There is a bit more leeway if he were to make a documentary about how visiting Walt Disney World changed his life, where the Disney name and characters are the topic of his own unique thoughts and insight, or if he were to paint an interpretive picture of Mickey Mouse in a representative way, wherein the presence of Mickey in the painting serves the purpose of making a statement or critical message. You often see this sort of artwork on the covers of magazines, where a corporation or other organization is represented through a characterization of their logo, mascot or other trademarks.

So anyways, back to how these principles relate to 3D models of aircraft: You can paint a picture of an F-16, take a photo of an F-16, write a song about an F-16, make a marble sculpture of an F-16, make a 3D computer model of an F-16 and you could even sell and profit from your creations. You can't imply or overtly state that your creation is affiliated with the General Dynamics Corporation (unless it's officially licensed/endorsed by them and dropping their name/logo helps you increase your sales). You also can't manufacture and sell an actual F-16 aircraft (in addition to stealing the design then directly competing with the actual owner's business you probably don't have the tools, materials, factory, workers, government contract, production certificate, money, etc.), nor could you sell a 3D model of the F-16 for the purposes of building/engineering one (as building/maintenance schematics), there's a huge liability there, you don't have an FAA production certificate, the design/engineering of the real aircraft for real flight is the intellectual property and primary business interest of General Dynamics Corp..

Hopefully that makes sense. A 3D model is work of art, just like a painting or physical sculpture. Something to be mindful of is stealing and competing in the same arena as the entity you stole from. For example, if you make and sell interactive 3D models of Master Chief from the HALO video game series, you're dangerously close to competing with the makers of the game in the computer/artistic/entertainment arena. The content of the HALO game is itself an artistic creation and is copyrighted as such. Likewise, if you made music and titled it, "HALO 4 - Opening Credits Theme" you are 1.) Lying/misrepresenting your work 2.) Stealing the name of actual, existing, copyrighted music or franchise 3.) Using the name of the actual franchise to gain attention/notoriety for yourself and thus inflicting "damages" upon the real creator particularly if you are making money from this endeavor. Anytime you cost a person or business money ("damages") that's very bad news because they can not only issue a cease and desist order but they can seek to recover compensation for those damages which could result in a financially catastrophic penalty to you and/or your business.

Here's one last example that might make the principle more clear, again using Mickey Mouse. Although you can freely create a sculpture, drawing or other image rendition of an F-16 or B-24, Mickey appears in official Disney created or licensed drawings, images, "sculptures" (e.g. greeting cards, books, lunchboxes and other physical/digital merchandise) which means that the original intellectual property right holder has business interests in that market. If you were to make a stuffed animal that looks exactly like Mickey Mouse, mass produce it and then sell it, you are in a dangerous position because even though a stuffed animal could be considered a "work or art", the true owner already makes and sells (or licenses someone else to make) these "works of art"; you are stealing from them and using what you stole to compete against them in the same business arena.

Final thought, you are free to do many things artistically. Don't be intimidated by someone who tries to convince you that you can not, but be mindful of the fact that you actually might not be able to. If there's ever any question or you wish to extend a courtesy to the owner/rights-holder of something you can always ask them. Who knows, they might really appreciate the fact that you are inspired by their product and providing them with positive exposure.

On a related note, it seems the UK will be extending copyright laws, covering industrial products that are "derived from artistic work".

[www.guardian.co.uk]

shouldn't any STL or 3D CAD file (drawn by an individual) fall under fair use?

3D design files are not explicitly for use in a 3D printer... each file is essentially a piece of artwork... if exchange of money never enters the equation, couldn't any STL be regarded as an artist's expression protected by fair use??

I do work in the advertising industry and need to know quite a bit about the laws (but not everything). One thing I do know is that when a company becomes aware of someone breaking their patent, copyright or IP rights, you MUST take legal action (even a simple cease and desist letter) or they may actually lose the rights to their work all together. That is why many companies seem to have a "knee jerk response" they must or lose the right to take legal action later against you or ANYBODY else that breaks the rights.

Most companies will send out a simple but very threatening sounding cease and desist letter from their legal dogs. Unless it's something done publicly then you might get a more serious letter or lawsuit.

It can backfire on big companies sometimes though. There was a couple in the news that were expecting a baby so they hand painted up the babies room in Doctor Sues style and characters. Some news team thought it would make a good puff piece and did a TV spot on the couple. A few days later Sues lawyers came knocking on their door demanding they wipe out all the paintings or they would sue them for like $50,000.

Well this too made the news and Walt Disney people saw this and capitalized on the situation by sending Disney artists to repaint the room in all Disney scenes and pretty much game them one of every Disney character products that's available. Of course this was a continuation of the news story. It made Dr. Sues look bad and Disney look like the hero.

Solution

A: Make ANYTHING you want to

B: DON'T SELL IT OR POST IT ONLINE.............

Dirty Steve Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Solution
>
> A: Make ANYTHING you want to
>
> B: DON'T SELL IT OR POST IT ONLINE.............


That will work :-)