Legal Aspects of Protecting Intellectual Property in Additive Manufacturing

Abstract

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Implications of Malicious 3D Printer Firmware

“…Brown, et al, [5] analyze legal aspects of IP protection in AM. Based on current US law, the authors discuss whether and to what extent patent, copyright, and trademark protection can be applied to blueprint, process, printed object, and design on object.…”

Evaluation of Additive and Subtractive Manufacturing From the Security Perspective

“…One of the broadly discussed topics in additive manufacturing security is the impact on intellectual property. Numerous problems have been identified by researchers who have analyzed the legal aspects of intellectual property protection in additive manufacturing environments [9,20,38] . For example, a 3D scan of a manufactured object is not considered to be an original technical drawing (blueprint) and, therefore, does not have the same legal protections [9]; thus, it can be used to circumvent copyright protection.…”

“…The growing importance of additive manufacturing and its reliance on computerization have led several researchers to voice security concerns [2,9,39,44,45,[48][49][50]. However, it is not clear whether and how additive manufacturing security differs from the security of other cyber-physical systems, especially as traditional subtractive manufacturing serves the same purpose and employs similar processes and computerized components.…”

Investigating 3D Printer Residual Data

“…Fruehauf et al [3] note that the flexibility of this family of manufacturing processes permits the creation of a wide variety of objects, from trinkets and custom components to Automated Teller Machine (ATM) skimmers, weapons, and illicit chemicals. Several researchers have also voiced apprehensions about the technology enabling infringement on Intellectual Property (IP) [4][5][6]. In addition, security researchers investigating these technologies have successfully demonstrated means of subverting the devices [7,8], the data files and communications protocols involved in the manufacturing process [9,10], and have even considered the use of the AM system itself as a weapon [11].…”