3D printing and freedom

Nathan Myhrvold is the founder and main owner of "Intellecture Vectures", the largest patent troll ever. It literally raises hundreds of millions of dollars per year, while basically producing nothing.

If you want to learn more about patents and, in particular, about "Intellectual Ventures", I highly recommend you listening to the episode n°441, "When Patents Attack!" of This American Life. There even is a (less interesting) sequel: episode 496, "When Patents Attack... Part Two!".

You can search for This American Life filetype:torrent.

I do not know where you live but, in many countries, the so called content-industry has passed many laws to punish non-commercial sharing between individuals (most of the laws are not made by the people anymore; yet, those counties still claim they are democracies).

In France, where I used to live, the Hadopi was monitoring P2P networks and threatening people of fees and Internet privation (for up to months). Thanks to free software activists (in particular the April association I am a member of), the law happened to be inapplicable and Hadopi's only damage so far was spamming (millions of threatening emails) + 12 millions of euros per year that the government could use to make interesting things (such as promoting the Arts!).

In the USA, there was SOPA and PIPA. At the international scale, ACTA almost passed. And many more acronyms are coined: TAFTA, CETA, etc. They are all dictated by companies, written by public employees (not elected ones) and negotiated in secret. They all aim to stop any sharing between individuals so that the companies (not the artists) can keep on making tons of money by selling copies; a totally outdated business model when the cost of such a copy basically dropped down to 0.

Like Jeremiah Asbury, I fear the same battle will have to be made when manufacturing companies will decide that it is easier to claim that the 3D models shared on the Internet is a "loss of income" than actually trying to adapt their business model to the new context. And like Jeremiah Asbury too, I do not think this battle will start in the following years because 3D printers currently are primitive.

No, patents are a lot worse than copyright in everything but duration. You don't need to know about the patent to get in trouble (though you are in more trouble if you do), no commercial distribution or even distribution at all is necessary for you to get in trouble, and even a mere consumer/user/whatever can get in trouble for obtaining something that has a patented design and didn't pay demanded royalties.

I think patents are absurd and am not convinced that they offer any significant benefit to society. Just look at Thomas Edison and his patent(s) on direct current: he was so determined to be able to get royalties from DC that he actively tried to get people to be afraid of alternating current, which is much more useful for delivering electricity to houses, by electrocuting animals and introducing the electric chair. He was doing everything he could to get people to use an inferior method because he had a monopoly on the use of that method and wanted to make easy money from that monopoly.

The idea of patents is to get people to publish their ideas, but I think the damage patents do while they are active probably outweighs any benefits of increased idea publication.