[MUSIC] In this video, we will speak to John Hornick who's actually a lawyer by profession. And he works a lot in the intellectual properties space around 3D printing. And we'll hear from him later in the course on that, but he's also written a great book on the topic and that provides a lot of context around why 3D printing is really a paradigm shift. And how is that changing manufacturing and disrupting the industry? So his perspective on the issue is that 3D printing is really a disruptive force, it's going to eliminate some jobs and create other kinds of jobs. It is democratizing manufacturing, reducing the barriers to entry and many of the firms in the future instead of selling products might just be selling designs that can be 3D printing. As a result, many of the customers are also becoming manufacturers and he shares some interesting case studies as part of this interview. Hi, we are here today to discuss issues around intellectual property in the context of 3D printing given that 3D printing is available everywhere now. And we are fortunate to have with us John Hornick, who's the partner at the law firm Finnegan in Washington. And he's also helped set up the 3D printing working group at the firm. So John, thanks for joining us and spending time with us. >> Thank you, it's my pleasure to be here. >> First of all, you have over 30 years of experience in the field, but you've recently over the last year or so focused on 3D printing issues. Give us a sense of the work you've done in this area. >> Well it's been several years now actually. But the work that we do is mostly intellectual property related. My firm is an intellectual property law firm, that's all we do. We have about 350 lawyers. And I realized several years ago, well actually I've read in several places that 3D printing present a lot of issues for intellectual property, but it never said what they were. So I thought well, I'm going to figure out what they are. And so I started diving deeply into it, and the deeper I got into it I realized well, this has implications for really all types intellectual property, all types of technology. Many of our clients, maybe most of our clients, so I started to realize that we could actually formalize our practice in that area. We'd been doing work in that area for many years it was mostly called rapid prototyping. >> Yeah. >> It's only have been with in the last few years that companies and others have started to refer to it as 3D printing added in manufacture. When I realized that we could formalize our practice in that space and around the same time we started to see the clients were getting curious about it. So the two kind of came together at the same time. >> I had the opportunity to meet you at one conference, I believe last year in New York. One of the things that sort of stuck in my mind there is sort of your framing of the micro level impacts and the macro level impacts of 3D printing. Could you share more- >> Sure. >> On that. >> Well on a micro level, because of machines, the machines have the potential to make a part of a product in one build basically, no assembly required, you eliminate a lot of machines. In traditional manufacturing, you might have had 12 machines, 12 operators and 12 different operations that had to be used to make some particular part. Now you might be able to make that entire part or maybe that entire product in one build, that eliminates a lot of machines, eliminates a lot of labour. Also the technology really allows you to design in ways that you've never been able to design before. It used to be that we had to design for how products could be manufactured. Now we don't have any limitations really on how they can be manufactured. So we can do things that we were never able to do before. First of all, the designs can be very different from anything that we've seen. But it just a kind of simple examples are you could make nonlinear holes, you can build honeycomb structures easily, you can have variable wall [INAUDIBLE] this is. You can have semi porous materials but more importantly, you don't have to have square edges, you don't have to have square corners. I think design with 3D printing can be much more organic, maybe much more like mother nature. But in addition to that with 3D printing, the economies are very different. With mass production you have to have economies of scale to make it cost effective. With 3D printing, you can make one product and it's as cost effective to make one product, because it is to make a million products. Also it lands itself to mass customization instead of making million products are all the same, you can make a million products that are different. So those on a micro level, those are the effects that I see, I think that everybody sees. On the macro level, I think we have the potential for creating jobs and having a manufacturing renaissance in countries with high intellectual capital, but also high labor costs like the US and UK and Australia and even Japan. It seems like we might be having a manufacturing renaissance. 3D printing can be very disruptive of traditional business models. We might be eliminating jobs in some regard, because it's changing the way that we do things. But it might be creating entirely new jobs at the same time, and entirely new job ideas, and also startups that have never existed before. >> People when they come into the lab and when they see the potential of this, it sort of opens up their mind. And people often say that 3D printing it represents a paradigm shift. Do you agree? >> I think it is a paradigm shift, because it has the potential to democratize manufacturing. So an example I often use is hammers. I don't know how many companies in the world make hammers. But let's just say there are five companies or ten companies that make large numbers of hammers. So there's five or ten companies, but with the democratization of manufacturing, you could have a 1,000 companies or 10,000 companies or 100,000 companies all making hammers, because 3D printing essentially eliminates barriers to entry. Anyone, even a small company, even a garage shop can start to make products or parts as long as they have the right equipment to do so. And the other thing that can happen is that, some companies may start to shift from selling products to selling designs. And also we may start to see customers become manufacturers. A great example of that is a situation I know of where a company that needs turbine blades for power generation, they have to replace these turbine blades every few years. And now what they're doing is they're using 3D printing not to make new blades, but to repair the blades that they had. So we have the customer essentially becoming a manufacturer. And this is great for the company that needs the blades, but it's terrible for the company that makes the blades. So that company that makes the blades might eventually say, well why are selling blades? Maybe we should just sell the design for the blades. So you see they might realize that really doesn't make any sense for us to continue to manufacture. We can shift that burden to our customers or maybe to independent fabricators. And we can get out of the manufacturing business, cut a lot of overhead. Maybe still make a lot of profit from selling the designs, because they can be very valuable. So those things together are a major paradigm shift in how businesses are organized. Companies that for example are being manufacturers today, may turn out to be design houses in ten years. >> So to sort of close the discussion, give us your thoughts on the future. >> As I said, I think there's going to be an increased amount of 3D printing away from control. There will still always be a certain amount of 3D printing that's done within control. But I think it would be a mistake to assume that the within control world is just going to continue going the way its going and it really won't be affected too much. I think the more and more 3D printing we have away from the control, the more pressure there's going to be on the with in control world. And the example I gave before is company might realize that it doesn't make sense to sell products anymore. Maybe they can't sell products anymore. There's no demand for them anymore, because people only want designs. And if the company won't make its own designs available, then whoever needs a design will just go on the Internet and they will find a design, a reasonable substitute or they'll take a 3D scanner and they'll scan the part that they need. They'll create their own design and print it out themselves, and that will eliminate the need not only for the parts sold by that manufacturer, but for the designs sold by the manufacturer. So I think we'll see a lot of disruption of industry, I think we will see some companies fail that don't adapt. We'll see a lot more smaller companies, fewer larger companies. In the intellectual property space, I think we'll see companies start to beef up their IP portfolios. They'll do whatever they can there. We will start to see increased amounts of litigation over, not only in the space where 3D printers are made and materials that are sold for them, and the process that are involved. But also in the area where they're used, which could be virtually anywhere. I also think we'll start to see calls for legislation, new legislation. One area that we will probably see that demand or pressure on congress to enact laws that would provide broader copyright protection. Copyright protection for digital scans for example, I don't think it will happen. Will probably also see pressure on congress to make it more likely to be in Frenchmen if someone makes a copy from a digital scan or scanning a part and then printing it, make that infringement. And that's possible, but over time I think we're just going to see IP laws become narrower not broader. We're in a period right now where IP laws are really unprecedented attack or pull back. We have a court decisions resulted in a lot of patents being invalidated. We have the America Invents Act, which was intended to strengthen patents, but the result of it is that roughly in 80 to 90% of patents that are being challenged are being canceled. And we also have congress that wants to make it harder for certain types of patent owners to sue. The fair use exception in copyright is becoming broader, and courts have been chipping away at copyright owners rights, especially in the software area for years. I think those trends are going to continue. So I think that we're going to see narrower IP laws over time. So even though incumbents who own IP rights might want to see IP rights be broadened. I think it's more likely that IP rights in general would be narrowed over time. [MUSIC] [SOUND]
