On the other hand, the past is full of interesting example of PATENT FAIL like Whitney's failure to enforce the cotton gin, but he got rich with producing munition for the US army, while at the same time inventing the concept of interchangeable parts.
We saws that American writers hating their competitors from England because of the massive piracy of British literature leading domination in the American literacy market. Some English writers managed to make more money from the American than he could collect via some amount of royalty years. It was only when large publishing house finally change their tune that the American finally recognize British copyright.
We also saw James Watt's partner using the parliament to extend patents for Watt's steam engine invention. This waste to tremedous wasteful effort from Watt suing various people for violating his patents. In reality, Watt was just one of the many steam engine inventors, who hampered other steam engine inventors' ability to make a living and build on top of his work. He also ironically got hampered by some other guy's patent, forcing him to use inferior design for his steam engine.
There's an interesting bit about the English/American writer thing you mention, specifically Dickens. From chapter two:
The amount of revenues British authors received up front
from American publishers often exceeded the amount they
were able to collect over a number of years from
royalties in the UK. Notice that, at the time, the US
market was comparable in size to the UK market.
More broadly, the lack of copyright protection, which
permitted the United States publishers’ “pirating” of
English writers, was a good economic policy of great
social value for the people of United States, and of no
detriment, as the Commission report and other evidence
confirm, for English authors. Not only did it enable the
establishment and rapid growth of a large and successful
publishing business in the United States; also, and more
importantly, it increased literacy and benefited the
cultural development of the American people by flooding
the market with cheap copies of great books. As an
example: Dickens’ A Christmas Carol sold for six cents
in the US, while it was priced at roughly two dollars
and fifty cents in England. This dramatic increase in
literacy was probably instrumental for the emergence of
a great number of United States writers and scientists
toward the end of the nineteenth century.
There's also a part in the book about the steam engine stuff, too, but this is already getting long...
1: http://levine.sscnet.ucla.edu/general/intellectual/against.h...
The entrenched players in the industry have large patent portfolios, and this hurts the ability of projects like the RepRap to actually make improvements. We probably could have had all of these kinds of projects years ago, but the patents are only now starting to run out...
Secondly, it would appear to me that MakerBot, for example, is pretty blatantly infringing on the FDM patents that Stratasys has. Those are about to run out Real Soon Now, though, so they're probably fine.
Third, the industry has shaped up the way that it has because of patents. There's a reason there's 14 different ways to do 3D printing. Yeah, some are better at some things than others, but realistically, we'd really have like 3 or 4 processes if there were no patents to force new hardware companies to reinvent the wheel all the time.
The fact that there's pretty much a 1-1 mapping between companies and processes suggests that it's difficult to start a business in this area, due to the large amount of capital needed to invent a new way of doing things.
if we ever got to the point where it makes more sense for you to manufacture the entire product at home, then the concept would be the same. You are purchasing the rights to manufacture 1 working copy. If you give the files to another person who uses them, technically they are breaking the law.
Of course I think this is all kind of ridiculous. However the only solution I can think of to combat piracy is to crowd source the funding to the creation of new plans, and release the product in the public domain.