Ongoing development in 3D printing means faster, more accurate and more affordable 3D printing especially in industrial applications. Even through industrial property rights and their interpretations seem to remain largely unchanged, new business models enabled by 3D printing imply new industrial property right setups for companies adopting such new business models.
The future of and industrial property rights in 3D printing were under scrutiny in a breakfast seminar jointly held by Berggren and 3DStep on November 14th in Tampere.
As 3D printing gets continuously faster, more accurate and more automatized, it is a viable and economic choice increasingly more often in industrial applications – though, of course, not in all cases. In addition, the new business models enabled by 3D printing require new perspectives on planning and managing business-supporting industrial property rights.
According to 3DStep CTO Vesa Kananen, technological development is particularly rapid in industrial metal and plastics printing. Currently, printing costs decrease – depending on a particular technology – by approximately 10-20 % per year.
At the same time, advances in printing hardware enable for example in industrial plastics printing a 10-fold increase in printing speed with printers incorporating a million (!) diode lasers above a powder bed, to build the printed object.
Yet, perhaps the most notable trend in industrial 3D printing is, according to Kananen, the automatization of the whole printing process from beginning to end – including post-print processing. This means that 3D printing can run unmanned for days, around the clock.
3DStep CEO Pekka Ketola adds that all this has translated into clear increase in 3D printing utilization particularly in “traditional” manufacturing industries.
However, both Ketola and Kananen emphasize that industrial utilization of 3D printing must have a clear, well-founded reason for it to make economic sense. Usually such reasons include speed from a plan or design to a finished product (e.g. very rapidly required critical spare parts), freedom in planning and optimizing product features (e.g. internal channeling in a fuel nozzle) or cost-effectiveness in highly complex structures (e.g. making internal structures within a product).
As an emerging and interesting trend both Finland and abroad, Kananen and Ketola mention the concept of digital spare parts. Here, the idea is to “store” spare parts as digital model files which are only 3D printed when parts actually are required – possibly by the end user of the spare part, or in a supply chain near to the user.
Berggren’s IPR lawyer Arttu Ahava and patent attorney Tomi Nokelainen reckoned that industrial property rights and their interpretations remain largely unchanged in the case of 3D printing and 3D-printed products as such.
For example, it seems evident that a new product is not rendered patentable solely by the fact that the product is or will be made by 3D printing.
However, 3D printing enables new product features – for example functional structures within other structures – which have not been possible before 3D printing. Thus, 3D printing seems to enable a wide range of possibilities for patentable novel product features which previously were not possible to implement or even imagine. Some Berggren’s clients have already embraced such possibilities and their protection.
Yet, Ahava and Nokelainen perceive the largest 3D printing-induced changes in industrial property rights to result from changes in supply chains. Such changes include rearrangements in supply chain actors’ roles and mutual transactions. One example of such rearrangement is the above-mentioned concept of digital spare parts, in which case the parts supplier adopts a role of supplying digital model files instead of physical products, whereas actual manufacturing takes place, on-demand, closer to the end user or by the end user itself.
And more generally, when a company previously supplying physical products begins to commercialize its core competences in selling customer-tailored 3D models for its customers to print, or outsources its manufacturing and logistics (or a part of it) to a 3D printing farm, this changes the IPR setup for the focal company in a major way. To begin with, the business no longer is premised on selling physical products but on selling usage licenses to digital model files – with predetermined conditions.
In such a case, the role and importance of IPR protection increases, because a 3D model file reveals nearly everything about the product – after all, the model file is a “recipe” for making the product. Consequently, it no longer is viable to try to protect the product or its manufacturing process with business secrets.
You can ask for more details or elaboration on the topics of the breakfast seminar – or anything else relating to 3D printing or its industrial property rights – from the speakers:
3DStep, CTO Vesa Kananen
Berggren, IPR lawyer Arttu Ahava
Berggren, patent attorney Tomi Nokelainen