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"It's possible for one party that owns all the right patents to squelch a whole industry," Samuels explains. "Sure, technology is feisty — especially really great, awesome technology like this — and it's going to be stronger than any single bad actor. But I do worry that abuse of intellectual property laws will slow down its development."
Samuels' beefs represent a common line of argument in the open-source community, whose members blame the early inventors of 3D printing for keeping the industry dormant.
Yet the inventors of 3D printing weren't exactly rushing to make their innovations universally accessible either. British mathematician Adrian Bowyer, who is best known for inventing a 3D printer that prints itself, says that the cheapest machines still went for about $40,000 in the early aughts — roughly 20 times what they cost now.
"There were only 12 companies selling them, and they had all the patents," Bowyer says. Because their clientele was limited to large corporations and universities, they charged what the market would bear.
It wasn't until a couple years ago, when lean start-ups like Type A Machines and MakerBot began popping up, that 3D printers actually became a viable retail product, something that the average consumer could buy and use to fabricate sculptures or toys. Bowyer created an Internet forum called RepRap, through which he and his colleagues published design specs for new machines, or software components, or extrusion methods, so that no one else could patent them. Machines that had previously belonged in large firms or universities were suddenly rendered hip and affordable.
Reading the tea leaves, it was inevitable that the forefathers would come back to reclaim their ideas, Samuels says. And if they couldn't beat the younger start-ups on creativity, they'd pursue a legal avenue. For people familiar with high-tech industries, a spate of acquisitions, followed by a rash of lawsuits, seemed virtually inevitable.
In 2012, an older-line South Carolina company called 3D Systems sued its Boston competitor, Formlabs, alleging that the younger company had filched its decades-old technology for using light beams to harden particles into solid objects. The companies are currently in settlement talks.
The Stratasys suit, which could be far more devastating, came exactly a year later — right after Stratasys acquired a younger, hipper 3D desktop company called MakerBot. The acquisition showed that Stratasys was intent on buying up properties, but it also portended a cultural shift in the industry. MakerBot had been the archetypal DIY company, with a store in downtown Manhattan, and a CEO, Bre Pettis, who decried patent squatting. After the Stratasys sale, Pettis took a 180-degree turn, and began characterizing patents as "valuable business assets."
To Alexander, it's really no accident that the suing spree coincides with the buying spree, or that these older companies are dusting off their patent portfolios right as they try to consolidate an empire.
"Once that deal with MakerBot was finalized, that's when the [Stratasys] lawsuit was filed," Alexander says. He worries that Stratasys will repurpose its suit and deploy it against other companies, thereby seizing the industry.
Brown-eyed, baby-faced, equipped with an incorrigibly good-natured British accent, Bowyer has spent much of his life barricaded in mathematics departments or engineering labs. Now retired from the University of Bath in London, he's had time to ruminate on a scientific quandary that's bedeviled him since childhood.
Namely, self-replication: a practice that's abundant in the natural world, he says, but not quite possible for a human to engineer. Bacteria do it, Bowyer points out. As do yeasts, jellyfish, aphids, bees, and fungi spores. Microbial reproduction is so quick and efficient, in fact, that a single-celled creature can spawn a billion descendants in about 10 hours. Humans subsist by repurposing their own DNA. "We replicate about 60 percent of ourselves all the time," Bowyer points out, excitedly. "We live in a planet that's been knee-deep in self-replication since the beginning."
For years, he's been fixated on the idea that a human might be able to emulate this process. That, given the right tools, and the right degree of brain power, some laboratory technician could create an artificial simulacrum of a living thing.
In Bowyer's mind, 3D printing is the closest we've come to that scientific milestone. It's allowed us to create contraptions that spin exact copies of themselves.
"I certainly find the technology fascinating," the retired math professor says, "but it was only secondary. My aim was to make a useful self-replicating machine."
In 2004, he built the first RepRap printer, a maze of metal rods and plastic clasps that resembles a toy jungle gym, with a wood platform at the top, and a spindle attached to a hornet's nest of wires. Bowyer christened it "Darwin"; "RepRap" stands for "Replicating Rapid Prototype." The finished RepRap 1.0 could repurpose about 50 percent of itself; Bowyer posted designs for the remaining electronic parts, so that anyone could order them. Bowyer shunned patents, partly for pragmatic reasons — "If you want something to copy successfully, you don't put walls in front of its ability to copy," he says — and partly because they didn't mesh with his ideology. Bowyer wants to give everyone in the world access to engineering tools. He wants to turn 3D printing into a social virus.
Type A founder Andrew Rutter is quick to spread the gospel.
"Put it this way," he says. "You give all the people in Africa an Internet connection, and suddenly they're all on Facebook." Alternatively, if you give them the tools to make a self-replicating printer, then suddenly everyone has a home factory. Not to mention everyone's socialized to be an engineer. Anyone with a RepRap can spread the means of production among all his friends, so that in time, all of them can print their own objects. And that, Rutter says, is what's going to solve the world's problems.
