Maria Peyman from the law firm Birketts LLP has written a well-considered blog on their website about the intellectual property challenges presented by 3D printing. She compares some of the protections and their applicability to 3D printing and gives her view of the prospects of being able to apply these. Worth a read if you are in the process of investing in this (now much more affordable) emerging tech.
Protecting IP becomes more challenging in physical goods when it is possible to send a file from Place A over the internet to Place B that then prints the 3D object. Where did the violation occur? Although she is of the view the protections probably remain in place with existing legislation, she rightly points out that enforcement methods used to be seizure of counterfeit physical goods by law enforcement agents. If counterfeiters are now individuals, rather than crime syndicates, this becomes much more challenging.
She also raises a risk to manufacturers whose entire product is protected but component pieces are not. There is also the risk to their maintenance revenue streams due to the now comparative economical attractiveness of their customers beginning to print their own spare parts. I see this becoming a reality sooner rather than later: the MRO category of spend is a messy and uncoordinated area in many manufacturing companies, and 3D printing represents both an opportunity to tame this unwieldy area and reduce costs at the same time. Proving that the widget being printed is your IP starts to become an unrealistic proposition in the face of a commercially attractive way to reshape your MRO category. Wiley procurement folks will be looking into this right now.
The focus on protecting rights when technology challenges business models is nothing new. Remember when, in the early days of the internet, the music industry got rather grumpy about individuals sharing their newly digitised music via peer-to-peer sharing? This feels like a very similar type of reaction to me.