Stratasys files patent infringement lawsuit against Bambu Lab to be judged in the Eastern District of Texas, Marshall Division

Stratasys is losing ground because their massively overpriced ecosystem is getting outclassed by literally everything else in the market. So why improve if you can just sue your competition out of the US market?

  • EmilieEvans@lemmy.mlEnglish
    311·
    4 months ago

    I hope that one day the constant bullying of Stratasys backfires.

    Overall the patent system is in dire need of improvement:

    • protection for real invention that isn’t trivial: yes
    • troll patents and trivial: no

    Right now we are at a point where the trivial patents are so dominant that I believe the patent system does more harm than good. Stopping progress/innovation instead of encouraging it.

    So why improve if you can just sue your competition out of the US market?

    Stratasys: probably doesn’t feel BambuLab at all at the moment

    Ultimaker: there is some pressure. Dozens of companies are using BambuLab but they still have a customer group that isn’t yet addressed by BambuLab

    MakerBot: Hell yes. Why would anybody buy a MakerBot right now? Their entry-level printer is at the same price point as a BambuLab X1C and gets obliterated by BambuLab’s performance. I also see how education facilities (schools, universities) are choosing BambuLab offerings.

    • Riskable@programming.devEnglish
      13·
      4 months ago

      It’s not just actually innovative patents that are missing from the patent system (which they are). It has also become so expensive to both file and litigate a patent that only big businesses and patent trolls can afford it.

      The median cost to litigate a patent is five fucking million dollars (in 2021). What this means is that if your patented solution isn’t worth at least 2x that amount it is quite simply not worth patenting.

      The whole system should be scrapped. It was fundamentally flawed from the start and has demonstrated over and over again that it does not scale. It’s not even worth it to keep pharmaceutical patents (there’s other, better, cheaper ways to come up with new drugs than $100 billion dollar commercial entities ripping us all off and spending half their budgets on marketing).

    • Moonrise2473English
      7·
      4 months ago

      Exactly, patents that is simply describing obvious stuff like “Method for sharing and searching playlists” (it actually exists) should be rejected or get just 3 years max

      Stuff like this took more time/money in filing the patent application than the actual development

      • morbidcactus@lemmy.caEnglish
        4·
        4 months ago

        Obligatory I am not a patent lawyer, but quick glance at the description, how the heck did that pass the novelty requirement?

        A method for making a playlist available to the public, in which the playlist comprises user-defined descriptor information. The user-defined descriptor information is entered as free form text or prose.

    • empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      OPEnglish
      4·
      4 months ago

      Strstasys is absolutely feeling Bambu, as well as all the other consumer printer companies. Their revenue has been flat for years. Every time I get into a thread on engineering printers the almost universal consensus is “unless you need really big build volumes like the Fortus series, there is no point to Stratasys for the cost”. And they’re right. The x1c and x1e’s can do effectively everything that an f170 can for like 1/20th the price.