By Tom Kurke, COO & President, Geomagic
An explanation
It has been a little while since my last blog on IP issues in the capture-create/modify/make ecosystem and I apologize for that. As many of you may know, Geomagic develops a wide range of software solutions to capture, modify and inspect 3D digital models of physical objects.
Part II of this post by Tom Kurke looks at the terms and conditions of the various 3D aggregation and printing services currently available and comes to some conclusions about what is really needed.
The latest in a series of posts by Geomagic COO, Tom Kurke, who is intrigued by the current state of Intellectual property laws, or more precisely the lack of them, and the effect it is having on protecting your designs in 3D.
It doesn’t matter whether you believe that the current boundaries of intellectual property protection do not go far enough to protect the rights of content creators or if you believe that copyrights, patents and other forms of intellectual property protection have been stretched well beyond their intended scope – the conclusion still remains – “Houston, we have a problem.”
By Tom Kurke, COO, Geomagic. (The second part in a series of posts about IP and 3D data.)
So, what exactly is intellectual property? No, it isn’t a fancy phrase created by lawyers just to confuse. Really. I promise. Being a reformed lawyer myself (I got better) I can say that with some authority.
In summary, intellectual property is a blanket term often used to cover and unify a broad range of rights associated with intangible (i.e. things that aren’t physical) assets. Intellectual property rights empower the holder to exclusively “do” something (or prevent others from doing so). While the scope varies from country to country, at a high level most would consider that copyright, trademark, trade secret, industrial design, patent, and moral rights fall into the definition of intellectual property...
