Lego Style Snap Together Pieces

Ah, yes, well then let me clarify myself.

The stance I have in the above message is based on our continued use of a capitalistic (free market) system. I personally, don't believe in this system.

In a perfect world without capitalism, we don't have to worry about people stealing our ability to make money. I would love to design things for the free use of everyone. I would love to be assured a roof over my head and food on my table, and see others building and expanding upon my ideas.

Unfortunately, in a capitalistic system, intellectual property becomes a necessity to protect one's income from those who might want to take it away via an easier road, skipping the hardest parts of production - the design process .. the time-expensive building and nurturing of a brand ... that sort of thing.

The book you are reading gives an extremely popular viewpoint that I've read in other publications within the last 5-10 years. It's a viewpoint that would thrive and be useful in a society that is not built on capitalism. However, it's a viewpoint that encourages those, in a capitalist society, who want to reap rewards easily based on the the hard work others do - having a ride on the coatails of others.

We have intellectual property laws as a bandaid fix for a flawed system. Ignoring intellectual property in this system does not lead to greater innovations and better work - it leads to the opposite when the greatest innovators are forced to spend time making money elsewhere instead of working on designs because entrepreneurs with a sense of entitlement think they should be allowed to copy their ideas.

Free market sounds so nice ... but it's not a system based on free. No system is. If you get something for free - someone somewhere always has to pay.

If you want my advice, make something great - by working with someone via a fair license - or by yourself from scratch. If you go by any other creed, you will likely be quite successful by free market standards, but you will not have the soul of an artist, a collaborator or an innovator.

-Whystler

Excuse me for helping derail this thread, but if you read that, then also read about how US industrial power came to be (mostly by not giving a F about British patents), or how "Made in Germany" started out as a mandatory warning on cheap ripoffs. History just keeps repeating - give it another ten years and chinese designers and engineers will be mightily frustrated about the Indians, Russians or whoever else not giving a F...

I am not criticising SW or saying that I expect them to do anything other than they currently are, I'm just trying to think this through.

Wrt your specific points, if SW was just showing our models and we fulfilled the orders, I think your telco analogy stands, but since the customers' total engagement is with SW, I think it becomes a bit grey. Outside of the 3d printing world most people would say that SW DO provide the content, i.e. atoms and that we are just the designers getting a percentage.

As for the RIAA thing, I think a relevant case more recently is MegaUpload. Their defence was that they were just a service, the content was nothing to do with them. That went well...

I too hope SW and similar companies can continue to be places that we can design stuff and get it made and have that thrill, but I can't help feeling we're in a golden age at the moment, and pretty soon there will be issues with the companies that own often appropriated IP and probably the emergence of IP Troll companies in the same way that they exist in the Patent world (great article, Wired).

I actually think there's a pretty good case that the design is the content. If SW sent customers baggies of unorganized atoms we might see some complaints, even from people not very familiar with 3DP.

True dat. It's an interesting case -- they're being charged (according to Wikipedia) money laundering, racketeering and wire fraud in addition to copyright infringement. I wonder, without knowing much about it, whether that indicates that the Feds felt they wouldn't be able to force a takedown for copyright issues alone...?

Yes, I agree that the big players are just waiting for the legal environment to get a bit more coherent before they move in and take over. And probably also for the marketplace to grow enough to be worth the trouble. There won't be a damn thing any of us can do about it when that happens.

I don't know anything about philosophy and have no political opinions to speak of. I'd just like this platform to continue existing.

Golden Age - nice analogy. I feel the same way - so many people are taking advantage of companies who are overlooking the issues, but soon something will happen to make it easier for them to bring the hammer down hard.

I guess some of our design decisions are based on...

...whether we want to have a quick buck riding on someone else's meme/brand property

...whether we want to collaborate fairly with another design's license, which takes some time sorting that out and accomodating restrictions.

..or whether we want to wait to work longer at building and marketing our own ideas.

I think the first is really really attractive ... popular culture icons are hot in the marketplace right now - plus - a lot of folks who are doing this as a hobby want that fast instant gratification. But I think the last two give a more self sustaining, self respecting outcome.

I am just hoping that companies like Shapeways can lighten up their grey area quickly and steer clear of the dark end where the hammer will fall. I would hate for those looking for a "live fast die young" approach don't ruin it for us all.

-Whystler

This one made me chuckle - http://shpws.me/lsSy
It is not for sale, has no resemblance to LEGO, and as far as I know is not a LEGO product.

But hey, obviously, it must be ok as it still exsists

I have asked a LEGO Group representative if they can contribute to this thread - sorry if that pisses anyone off,

Paul

My advice to anyone who wants to clone the LEGO process:

1) don't

2) make a portfolio of 3d designs using the LEGO process, and make a proposal to the LEGO company.

3) - my personal favourite - encourage a group of designers to brainstorm a modular construction system (via a contest?), research research research to make sure you aren't stepping on any patents, and then, make it open source, since this is what you believe in.

My advice to LEGO:

Partner with SHAPEWAYS to create a developer program that allows designers to create new components using the LEGO system, and then sell these components (3d printed on demand) via a LEGO-Shapeways website, where the developer-designer, LEGO and Shapeways benefit from profit. This way, you avoid the above #3, which creates competition.

-Whystler

When I said "Lego Style Snap Together Piece" per title of this post, I was envisioning making life size furniture, like coffee tables or tv stands, out of 3d printed pieces that would not resemble LEGOs in the slightest. I simply said "Lego Style" so that people would know that I meant that the table is not being 3D printed in one piece, but rather would need to be "snapped together" or assembled from multiple pieces. These pieces would obviously need to have more heavy duty connectors than regular legos since being used for life-size functional furniture. Per Whystler excellent suggestion, I would like to make a contest, in which I will pay winner , lets say $500 for best life-size coffee table 3D print design. Does anyone have any suggestions on how I would get the word out about the contest. By the way, I sell furniture for a living on my website. http://www.fastfurnishings.com , which is the reason I am interested in 3d printed furniture.

Haha, well I guess we jumped down your throat too fast I think that just shows how hot and important the intellectual property topic is right now.

You might want to contact Shapeways about a contest. Since 3D printing is their interest, and since furniture if yours, I think it would make a great partnership. They would be able to add promo and hype to the contest, and also perhaps some prize winnings.

Be really clear about who owns the property of the winning design. You will find more people interested in entering the contest if the winning design is the property of the designer, or if the winning design produces an open source solution. If open source, you might also interest Thingiverse/Makerbot in partnering with the contest.

I'll be interested to see the terms of the contest - cool idea.

-Whystler

With respect to the spawned discussion, I found this on wikipedia:

The Lego Group began in the workshop of Ole Kirk Christiansen (born 7 April 1891), a carpenter from Billund, Denmark, who began making wooden toys in 1932.[1] In 1934, his company came to be called "Lego", from the Danish phrase leg godt, which means "play well".

It expanded to producing plastic toys in 1947.[1] In 1949 Lego began producing, among other new products, an early version of the now famous interlocking bricks, calling them "Automatic Binding Bricks". These bricks were based in part on the Kiddicraft Self-Locking Bricks, which were patented in the United Kingdom in 1939[2] and then there released in 1947. Lego modified the design of the Kiddicraft brick after examining a sample given to it by the British supplier of an injection-molding machine that the company had purchased.[3] The bricks, originally manufactured from cellulose acetate,[3] were a development of traditional stackable wooden blocks that locked together by means of several round studs on top and a hollow rectangular bottom. The blocks snapped together, but not so tightly that they required extraordinary effort to be separated.

... ...

The definitive shape of the Lego bricks, with the inner tubes, was patented by the Lego Group in 1958. Several competitors have attempted to take advantage of Lego's popularity by producing blocks of similar dimensions, and advertising them as being compatible with Lego bricks.

In 2002, Lego sued the CoCo Toy Company in Beijing for copyright infringement over its "Coko bricks" product. CoCo was ordered to cease manufacture of the products, publish a formal apology and pay damages.[23]

The English company Best-Lock Construction Toys was sued by Lego in German courts in 2004,[24] and 2009.[25] but the Federal Patent Court of Germany denied Lego trademark protection for the shape of its bricks. [26] The Canadian company Mega Bloks were sued by Lego in 2005 for trademark violation, but the Supreme Court of Canada upheld Mega Bloks rights to sell their product.[27] In 2010, the European Court of Justice ruled that the eight-peg design of the original Lego brick "merely performs a technical function [and] cannot be registered as a trademark."[28]

(full article, with references here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego)

More wikipedia info re: lego clones that have a right t produce:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego_clone

It seems that the design used for lego bricks is less intellectual property than we may think. It is more the LEGO brand name that really comes into play as a problem when marketing building blocks. If you say, my blocks can be used with any LEGO system, then you run into problems, and this is where folks try to take the easy ride on the coatails of the LEGO company.

"The Lego Group has filed law suits ... in courts around the world on the grounds that [the] use of the "studs and tubes" interlocking brick system is a violation of trademarks held by Lego. Generally such law suits have been unsuccessful, chiefly because the functional design of the basic brick is considered a matter of patent rather than trademark law, and all relevant Lego patents have expired."

-Whystler

pretty much what I've been saying all along - LEGO = trademark (no matter what the case of the lettering or the addition of the extra 's' that some folks seem to favour)

And fwiw. I have some original LEGO 1950's vehicles here, and none of them resemble any LEGO brick, but they're still marked LEGO and as much as I would like to make replicas, I shall not because I respect the brand (oh so very much!)

Paul
(3D building since 1971)

Some of my designs are "snap together pieces" but they do not resemble Lego pieces, unless you include the c-shaped lego hands
https://www.shapeways.com/model/879691/kineticlip-frame.html? li=my-models.
https://www.shapeways.com/model/879733/kineticlip-frame-array .html?li=my-models&key=74f2b04da28411058f022dcf904abe7c

Cool idea funky monkey! Maybe think in terms of connecting standard components (two-by-fours, watermelons etc.), with 3DP fittings, rather than making the whole thing out of 3DP? The material costs are still kind of sad for big objects.

I'm with Whystler, I won't enter a contest if designs become property of the contest admins. That feels disingenuous to me...if you want to use my design make me an offer; I'll listen to anything reasonable, but "you take ownership of my design and I consider that an honor and a privilege" isn't it.