Interesting to see how this will play out. Or if Bambu will pay out…
Edit for context:
USPO 9421713 - purge towers and generation methods
USPO 7555357 - Remnant path slicing algorithms
USPO 9168698 - Contact force measurements used for bed leveling and Z offset
USPO 10556381 - Covers force detection but goes into more detail on the system
Strange, 10 minutes and zero apologists here. What happened?
Anyway, BL are not in here for charity as well, they are patenting the ■■■■ out of anything and will do the same thing, if they would have the choice.
Also, can we have an obligatory joke about PRC company infringing on a patent? lol, never seen that before.
A US-Israeli company winning patent infringment against China company in a US/Texas court… Not saying the claims are or are not valid, but I won’t claim to be surprised.
Edit: Thanks for the update
Keep in mind this has been almost 3 years in the making, multiple appeals, multiple courts, multiple continents.
And half the IP claims were thrown out or made invalid.
Fair point. But I remeber how the US kept on about the Banana subsides and the PR Bacardi licensing issue for decades.
$26.3 is not much money for a suit as large as this one was. That’s less than quite a few of us make in an hour.
Worth noting that a big chunk of this focuses on nozzle-force automatic bed leveling (strain gauges). Bambu can absorb this cost, but since Creality, Prusa, and others use similar nozzle-tapping tech, this verdict creates a dangerous precedent for the whole consumer market if Stratasys starts demanding a $20 royalty per printer from lower-margin brands, it completely breaks the budget printer market.
Force detection through the toolhead is a pretty big hit, but 7,555,357 is kinda the whole ball game. Pretty tough to have 3D printing without slicing.
Bambu really needs to buy Stratashyt - or even better, a consortium of manufacturers should do it.
Love or hate Stratasys, you have to give them credit where it is due. They are literally the pioneers of FDM technology (still a trademarked term BTW).
IMHO, Stratasys is a great company, although their huge mistake was not getting into the consumer market. That is obviously where the money is.
If Bambu bought Stratasys, instead of sending out a technician, they would send you out a free roll of PLA basic.
This story reminds me a bit of Nokia - once a pioneer in mobile phones, but eventually unable to keep pace with the consumer market and forced into bankruptcy more than once.
It wasn’t until the company realized it was sitting on a treasure trove of patents - not just for mobile phones, but also for transmission towers / technology. Today, they’re earning a fortune as other companies succeed using those technologies, and there are an awful lot of them.
Sometimes you don’t have to be a market leader, often it’s enough just to be the patent holder.
Texas courts are a well known playground for patent trolls, its a whole industry down there. If you want to learn more this is a great doc to watch:
This is a really interesting development, and it could potentially become quite unpleasant for Bambu Lab users in the U.S.
If Stratasys ultimately achieves broad success with its patent claims, it is at least conceivable that Bambu Lab could be required to modify or even disable certain infringing features on already sold printers through firmware or software updates.
That would mean the patent dispute could eventually have very practical consequences not only for Bambu Lab itself, but also for owners of existing machines.
Definitely an interesting situation to watch. I’m very curious to see how this develops.
While possible, idk, stratasys just wants a chunk of money, and bambu is flush
all that’s true, and they do standfbehind their warranties, which is nice. But their long history of patent trolling cements their place in history as giant biatches and to be held at arms distance
Patent trolling? Why? Is it because we are on a Bambu Lab forum?
Stratasys developed the thing and then patented it. It’s their right to enforce it whenever they want. If you call this “trolling”, then take a look at other electronics market. Every single company sue each other over patents. It’s normal to protect what you created.
Exactly, I have loved all of their machines that I have gotten the privilege to have experience with. They make rock solid stuff.
People can criticize them for not being open source, but a lot of those people fail to recognize that a lot of the stuff that is in the open source was originally taken from closed source and copied, or relies on expired patents. Including RepRap, the grandfather of Prusa.
I think quite the opposite and the biggest criticism of Stratasys is that a lot of the things they patent have been around in the open source community for ages, things that have prior art and use. That is the main reason for their dislike in the general 3D printing community. That was Bambu argument in the EU patent court and the reason some of the claims were invalidated there.
This is such a misused term.
Patent Trolls are companies that buy up patents and use enforcement of those patents to make profit. They do not make a product or provide a service.
While in comparison, Stratasys has thousands of patents, in which they have the legal duty to defend. This is not a source of income for them, it is part of running a business.
No?
Just a reminder, a lot of the foundational concepts go back to Stratasys in the 1980s. The important distinction is that they were closed source first.
Now if people want to criticize them for defending work that took millions to develop, they can have that opinion, but they are wrong.
Im sure there are a lot of things they did develop, but they have also patented things that were taken directly from the open source community.
