During the slow news week at the very end of last year, 3D Systems announced that they were stepping away from their consumer-oriented Cube desktop 3D printer. Since the Cube is designed to only accept printing filament made by 3D Systems, as part of winding down the Cube - and as an act of good faith to Cube owners - 3D Systems should explicitly open the doors to third party filament. This can take the form of two simple public commitments.  First, 3D Systems can promise not to sue any Cube users who use non-3D Systems filament for the Cube.  Second, 3D Systems can promise not to sue anyone who wants to make and sell filament that will work with the Cube.  Doing both requires circumventing the verification chip that 3D Systems includes in its filament today.

Five years ago today Public Knowledge published our first 3D printing whitepaper called “It Will Be Awesome if They Don’t Screw it Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology.”  It was our attempt to take Public Knowledge’s expertise in intellectual property and apply it to the then-emerging world of 3D printing.  Alex Curtis had been pushing Public Knowledge to look into 3D printing for a while, and Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer, and Patrick Haufe, released their paper on 3D printing and IP earlier that year. Thanks to a jury duty-enforced light work load for the summer of 2010, I got to beat Alex to the punch and write the PK paper essentially porting the EU and UK legal analysis from the Bradshaw/Bowyer/Haufe paper to US law.

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.  Although I didn’t explicitly frame it as such there, this is probably the closest thing to a distillation of a bunch of thinking about 3D printing and policy that I did in my first six months on the job.  The content policy section was the result of a lot of reflection about how to draw lines on a service like ours, and the product liability section is a small public example of some long conversations I had with our product liability counsel Patrick Comerford.  It also kicked off a reorganization of all of our policies to guarantee that it would be easy to find all of the previous versions of policies after they were changed, a process that my colleague Allessandra McGinnis was way, way too accommodating of me during.  Anyway…

This post originally appeared on the Shapeways blog.

Just a note that this is an immediate reaction to news that broke this morning, and my interpretation may evolve over time.  If it does I’ll provide a link here.