3D Print Trademark and Copyright Advocacy with Michael Weinberg of Shapeways

 

 

 

 

 

3D printing trademark and copyright still have a lot to develop with regards to scope. Advocates like Michael Weinberg is doing his part in helping shift these laws, paving the way to a more financially viable 3D printing industry. He is here with Tom and Tracy Hazzard as he explains the importance of having your 3D creations trademarked or copyrighted and how your products can be protected by doing so. As the I.P. and General Counsel of Shapeways, he explains their efforts to make changes to the laws allowing them to be more applicable to the industry. By sharing his experiences with patenting, trademarking, and copyrighting and the internet, he also talks about organizations like Public Knowledge who are helping out in shaping policies for 3D printing.

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Listen to the podcast here:

3D Print Trademark and Copyright Advocacy with Michael Weinberg of Shapeways

Today, we’ve got a great interview regarding 3D print trademark and copyright advocacy with Michael Weinberg of Shapeways. Michael is the IP and General Council of Shapeways. He also came from a public consumer advocacy group called Public Knowledge, and they are really focused on making sure that the digital copyright laws and all of those things got shifted. He’s also got a lot to do with 3D Printing in terms of 3D print trademark and copyright especially.

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Thanks so much for joining us, Michael. We have been wanting to have you in the show for quite some time as this IP and all things that are legal related like 3D print trademark and copyright has always been of interest to our audience.

Thank you so much for having me.

You are the IP Intern Inside Council for Shapeways, and you are posting things on Shapeways blog about these issues. There is one in particular that recently have caught our attention about 3D print trademark and copyright issues. We want to learn from you a little more about that, and why you say that it is going to hurt designer’s rights.

Explain why trademark right has relevance in it?

The trademark is generally something like logos. It can get a trademark in what is called trade rests. A classic example is that classic Coca-Cola bottle shape. The reason that we got involved with the trademark issue, is sometimes people are using trademark to either identify something that they are making with 3D printing, or they are integrating trademarks into something that they are 3D printing. The question is, is that a trademark problem or is it legitimate? Sometimes, sites like Shapeways get complaints related to trademark because of the way trademark law works. We don’t have an opportunity to give our designers the chance to push back and say, “There is a person that is claiming that we’re infringing their trademark.” They’re wrong and it’s not based on facts, which is why I have to challenge it.

That is really interesting. I was reading in your blogposts here that there are a lot of these blanket complaints that comes through alleged trademark. Yet, the digital laws that we have don’t have the ability for us to do this challenging 3D print trademark and copyright issues.

Some people are familiar with this digital law and copyrights. It’s the MCA system for copyright complaints. The way that this works for every website on the internet, for people who aren’t affiliated in the websites post on their Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and more. With Shapeways, every user uploads a file, video, image, or text. Then, a rights folder comes along and says, “That’s infringing on my copyright.” Because the way the law is structured, the user can challenge that allegation of infringements, and the website will essentially defer to the users or the rights holder. The website can put it back up without being dragged directly to the fight. There is not a same source of system with trademark. The really important check that is built on a copyright online, which is, if someone accuses you of copyright infringement, you can push back and say, “I’m not infringing on your copyright.” Then, the website that is hosting that content will put it back up.  It doesn’t exist for trademark. So if someone comes along and accuses you of trademark infringement, and you wanted to say, “No, that’s not right.” It is pretty unlikely that the websites would not put it back up, even if your case is a strong one, because of the structure of the law.

So you only have the choice of being in the courts at that point, to get to try your stuff back?

Yes, exactly; whereas with the copyright, there is a system that does not involve the course that is used all the time. There is no system like that for trademark. The only way to get it back on the site, is to basically sue the person who is accusing you of trademark infringement, and win and bring back that judgement to the site that is hosting your stuff, which is obviously burdensome for most people.

That sure is. I think I have misunderstood this. I thought it had to deal with most websites, because these platforms where files that are put up there. I thought it has more to deal with the site’s Terms of Use, than it did with 3D print trademark and copyright law. But you’re saying, because the trademark law doesn’t have a mechanism within it to negotiate or informally arbitrate such a claim. Are these websites forced to take these things down? Or would the trademark holder have to go to the court to force them to take it down for the person who is being accused?

Yes. All these things could have been related, but the real heart of the issue is that: In the copyright world, there is an amazing system of a baseline because it’s something that people could be more familiar with. What the law says is, as long as the website follows a couple of basic rules, the website will not be liable for the copyright infringement of its users. What that means is, if the website has some copyright complaints from a rights holder, and they go to the user and say, “You have been accused of copyright infringement.” And the user has some backing, and says, “No, I am not infringing.” Then obviously, it can put it back on without having to worry that the website itself will be liable for copyright infringement. And so, they allow the user to post the things back up because they are not putting themselves in the line for a copyright complaint. With trademark, there is no safe harbor built into the system. If the website allows the user to put a thing that is accused of trademark infringement back on their site, they are putting themselves in the line as well. In almost all cases they won’t do that, because it’s just not worth the risk on your part.

Is that the same case if there is an alleged patent infringement as well?

Yes, patent infringement falls in the same category as trademark.

Is that a function of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act? Or is that a function of some other aspect of the copyright law?

Yes, it’s the function of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. That is the safe harbor noticing take down process that is only a copyright process. It is not a trademark or patent process.

Do you  think that companies are using the fact that there is no safe harbor within trademark as a sort of leverage point to bully people out of their territory even when they have not necessarily have caused to?

I don’t want to speculate about motivation. But what we’re definitely seeing on the ground is, if you are a rights holder and you want to bring a copyright complaint, there are two things that make sure that you are sure about your complaint. One is the target of the complaint that is going to have an ability to push back. This is built into law that when you make that complaint, you have to swear under bounty of purgery that it is a legitimate complaint. There are some checks on that. Those checks don’t exist for trademark, and for patent complaints. Whereas in the past, you might see a letter that says, “I’m accusing user acts of copyright infringement.” That whole dispute would be this notice of take down that is a DMCA process. If the letter says, “I am accusing the user of copyright and trademark infringement.” What happens is that all of a sudden, that user doesn’t have any challenge of it. If you are a rights holder and you send that broad letter, you don’t have to worry about users challenging.  Why are they doing that? I’m not sure. But I think that we are seeing evidence that if there is a patent that is emerging, it’s combining these complaints in a way that pulls it out of the traditional safe harbor process.

The one thing that I found really interesting in the blog post was that there was an analysis done, and I don’t remember the third party that did it. But an analysis done on this in a university is that it really looked at complaints that were going on. There were a lot of them that appeared to be like bots. Something like they were just randomly sending blanket complaints that were exactly the same every single time. That is clearly a burden on that site of yours?

There was a study that Jennifer did that came out of it. She got access to a bunch of data and really drove into what we’re seeing. One of the conclusions that she came to was, “You do see the rise of the bots on some level, where some of the take downs were on the meeting.” Infringing is sometimes when you are handling over to a buy, you are probably going to make errors. If you are designing that buy, unless you are rights holder, you are probably would error on this site than sending a take down request which is all well and good, except  that there are a pack of accusations that aren’t actually legitimate, and it becomes burdensome to some users. We are already seeing an almost buyification of the system, where someone like Google that receives takeout orders, they process take down notices automatically. On sites like ours, we don’t tend to see this same kind of coordinated system on either side. We process them by hand, and we get the take down request by hand. But it certainly is wouldn’t be surprising if it starts at a high volume site like Google.

That is really interesting. We think that it is a new thing for 3D printing, and because it is still so new. There are ideas like, “Is this an infringement? Is this not? Is this a copyright?” What is the general policy that the manual team at Shapeways takes when they evaluate something? Does a designer have to provide a filed copyright, a registered copyright, or is it okay to just have some other type of proof?

First of all, you do not need to have a registered copyright. If you make something that is protected by copyright, it’s protected by copyright the moment that you make it. You don’t have to register to gain protection. If you are concerned and if you are a right’s holder and you want something taken down from the sight. We have a content policy, you go to it, and it has a list of the couple things that you need to include in your takedown request. That mostly comes from the digital volume copyright act. It is pretty straight forward. What we need is a URL that is actually what we are focusing from. If you send a request that says that there are stuff on your site that infringes on my work, then that is not enough because we can’t find it. We need a specific URL, then we need information again on the kind of purgery that you will make you believe that this is an infringement. You really have the ability to write to make a takedown request. That last one is for situation requests where if you’re not the right’s holder, and you just are speculating on some design you don’t know is infringing. If you send that takedown request in, we’re not going to process it because you’re really not in a position to know the relationship between the rights holder and the designer and all those things. As long as you are the rights holder, and you have a good faith belief that they are infringing, then we’ll process it and we’ll take it down. We’ll tell the user that their work has been taken down. If it’s a copyright complaint, we’ll tell them that if they may think that their complaint was incorrect for any number of reasons, they can tell us, and we’re going to put it back up. That’s a pretty standard process for most websites and hosts of generating user content.

I think that’s great. I think not a lot of people unfortunately understand that there is a process and it works whether it’s a blogpost that you take down, or a 3D print model.

YouTube is much bigger than Shapeways, they have essentially the same process.  We got a file name with a bunch of other companies, and their general process is very similar, because it’s all grounded in this Digital Rights Copyright Law.

Where do you think that copyright law might go in the future? It seems to me that 3D printing is such a new industry and it’s prompt a lot of issues to the IP world that the laws were written well  before it existed. What efforts are there to make changes to the laws to be more applicable to the 3D printing industry?

I think that sometimes, there is an instinct to assume that sometimes the whole laws cannot simply just imply. I think in reality, very often, thing like copyright law are general high-level laws. In a lot of ways, they are built to be able to accommodate new types of technologies. I am not a person who thinks that we’re just going to throw right out of copyright law and start it over because of 3D printing. That being said, 3D printing does raise a couple of really interesting issues, within the copyright. I think there are issues that relate to the copyright.

The most obvious of those right now is this issue called, severability. The super short version of this idea is that, things in the world can be put in to one or two categories. There are creative things that have a category that is protected by copyright, while there are functional things that have a category or are protected by patents. Sculpture is a creative thing protected by a copyright. A screwdriver is a functional thing that is protected by a patent. But the complication arises when you have a single object that merges both functional and aesthetic elements, and how you sort out which parts of that, if any are protected by either copyright or patent. That has been an issue in copyright for decades. But it has been of a sideshow issue. But as we see more and more of these physical things like integrated and functional design elements. The question of, if they are actually protected by copyright becomes really important.

There is actually a case now that is trying to get heard by the Supreme Court. That is asking the Supreme Court to take notice, because right now, there are ten different tests that you can use to try and decide which parts are copyright and which parts are patent. Those tests really don’t mind each other. And so, we along with a bunch of other people submitted to the Supreme Court saying, “We actually don’t care which of these ten tests we decide to use, to make a distinction on which are copyrightable parts or patent parts on these things.” It would be really good if we have a single test.

This is actually a big debate and we have all the time, because we have chosen to merge that to actually do that to our own design work here. I don’t know if you have seen it, but Tom has created a 3D printed tie, and the idea of a necktie is decorative. It is not necessarily functional, but yet, it is a tie, and it is a thing. It is very artistic and unusually shaped. We just did something which is just out yesterday, is a coffee sleeve. It is very artistic in a way that it is 3D printed. It is unusual but it is very decorative at the same time. You have these overlaps, and we tend to design right in that area of overlap at all times. We would love clarifications on this in terms of 3D print trademark and copyright.

Those are wonderful examples of these things that have combined to the two world of IP; the coffee sleeve is a very good example of it. If you want to have it taken down, it is a question of, Could you use a claim of copyright infringement against that kind of thing? Part of the answer to that question goes back to how to use separate the copyrightable parts with the not copyrightable parts. That one test could be really helpful.

It would be great, and we would love to get to that. There has been a lot of lobbying in general for 3D print trademark and copyright. Are you set in lobbying, in the non negative way? There are good proponents, and there are some people pushing the legislation to change. Can you tell us a little bit about the kinds of companies and the people involved? And also, where might some listener out there that could get involved and can do that?

Before I was in Shapeways, I was actually working in Washington DC at a non-profit advocacy organization, called Public Knowledge. Public Knowledge’s role is about representing consumers into public interests in technology policy debates. We did a lot of things in telecom and open internet, and copyright stuff. This is why I ended up doing the copyright in 3D printing. For the last five years, Public Knowledge has events in DC, called 3D/DC. That was really designed to grant the 3D printing community to Washington, to introduce that to policy makers. The most recent one was just earlier this month. You can go to Public Knowledge website, which is publicknowedge.org.

The way how the event works is that there is a series of panels that explain different policy questions around 3D printing as a discussion. At the end, there is a cocktail party/science fair down where policy makers and members at Congress can come and see the technology and the prints in person. You can talk about 3D printing for hours, but if you show someone something for a minute, it will all of a sudden be more effective. Public Knowledge is probably the longest standing 3D printing-related advocacy. As issues popped up over the years, they have been really involved in leading the fight with that. In addition to that, there have been a couple of specific issues, and we at Shapeways have been working on issues like the safe harbor question, that becomes more important because of 3D printing, and other areas like Supreme Court briefs, like just what I described.

I think you know that that makes sense because obviously, whatever the result of that, impacts the way that you guys have to administrate. You should be involved in that, because if it gets burdensome on you, then its costly to you guys to technically handle it on your end.

If you think about Shapeways as a community of users, part of our role is when there are policy debates that would impact our users, to make sure that consumers understand that. One of the reasons that we first put together 3D/DC was the idea that when a lot of the rules around copyrighting and the internet. When those rules were written in the way, there weren’t a lot of people who were representing users of the internet. AOL was there, the movie industry was there, the music industry was there, but there weren’t a lot of people who were doing start ups or who were just internet users. Part of the idea in 3D/DC was to make sure that as policymakers start engaging in 3D printing, that if 3D printing can unite ideas in conversations. That means 3D printing companies and 3D printing users are part  of the burden or responsibility that 3D printing companies like  Shapeways have, is to go in and say, “Look, these are the rules that would impact us. But also these are the rules that are going to impact our users.”

You mentioned the music industry briefly, and I am hoping you can give me an answer to this: The music industry must have a lot of impact in the day, because they have all kinds of benefits in the music that appears to me there are a lot of really analogous issues between the music industry and what is happening in 3D printing. Do you ever see their being an ASCAP of the 3D printing industry as a way to help maintain the rights and proper attribution and proper reward to the designers who create things in this industry other than through 3D print trademark and copyright?

ASCAP is the organization that asks questions for some writers when they perform publicly. So you have this kind of structure that existed before the internet, where you could get a blanket license to perform in a bar or in a restaurant. For that, it wasn’t so much of the music industry that created a whole new structure to coordinate it to the internet, but instead, they can take the structure to try and find out how to best support their intent. That’s a more competitive start, but at least, they have that conceptual model.

I think the kind of larger question about what happens when an industry that can be disrupted by 3D printing runs into 3D printing? And how they respond and how they deal with it, is the optimistic view in them, and this time, I am actually an optimist. The optimistic view is that everyone involved in a conversation in the process, weave through the music industry. They can run the lessons of their process and hopefully address the integration of 3D printing into their business in a more productive and efficient way.

The music industry did it, because they have the lessons of the music industry to build on. You can skip the phase where you zero every user in hopes to see the technology in existence. You can skip the phase where you try and make up the magical digital watts that are walking with them. You can move more efficiently towards a place where you realize that there is a reality in the end for your users, your consumers, and your fans, to have a 3D printed realm to whatever business that you are in. The best way to deal with that is to meet that market where it is, and provide them the 3D printing element.

We think that’s really interesting because I have been having this debate about Spotify and what’s going on in that. There is this dissection of these music artists who are only available on these streaming channels. Things like Taylor Swift is only on Apple and not on Spotify. These kinds of things are going on. We think that that’s actually going to be the way that sites like Shapeways, and sites like that do, because when they actually embrace the idea that there are rock star designers out there. When they really incentivize those rock star designers to their site, they then have the ability to attract mainstream consumers. But until that happens, we think that there is this hesitancy for many designers to hit the sites. That’s because it doesn’t seem worked out yet. Like what you have said, it’s still in this messy middle stage there.

When we think about building tools and improving our site, the reason why we want to improve our site, and all the tools that we are using in the site, is we want it to be a better experience for a designer who’s paying for customers. We want both sides with that equation in, and say, “This is really great. This is really easy to deal and engage with. I want to be finding stuff. I want to be discovering stuff; I want to be finding 3D designs”. But I think you’re right. If there is this idea of, if you are a designer, when can you jump in? There is always a tension between. Maybe you would jump in and there are hiccups along the way or things that you would worry about. But you need to pick the game and take on the opportunity to make a name for yourself. You can also get to internalize a lot on how the system works before everyone else. Before you wait longer until things get a little bit more mature, there are a fewer rougher edges. You are also going to be competing against designers who have been their longer, and understand how the system works. There is no right answer for every individual designer, but it is certainly a tension that will always exist in something like this.

It is interesting you say that because this is kind of like a lot of our listeners had asked us to put our designs out there. We haven’t done it yet. It doesn’t mean we don’t know what’s going on. We see the rough edges. We actually are on all the sites. We don’t have public shops. We know what is going on, and we know how they work. But the reality  for us is, we’re in it and we know what’s going on, but until this system is not speaking to the 3D print converted in the community, until it really is speaking to the general public consumers, we are not going to dive in. That’s the line we’ve drawn. I know others draw it differently, but we drawn on that line there. Instead, we are speaking to what we hope our new users, and the consumers that are coming in to the incoming users of 3D printing, through our podcasts. That is the line that we drew there. It is an interesting idea to be either an early adopter, or wait until everything is streamlined, so that you can just set it into the system you already have in place as the designer.

I think one of the questions is, what is the process of bringing in that kind of next ring of consumers in 3D printing. There is this corner of people that are very big, which is still growing. These are the people who think of themselves as 3D printing enthusiasts. But there is absolutely a next ring of people beyond that who are people who might be interested in the things that happen that could be 3D printing, but aren’t on a necessary look out for 3D printed things. The question is: What’s the website? What are the services? What’s the structure of the site that can bring those people in? But then also, what is the content? What are the things to be designed that can draw people who don’t think about 3D printing at all into that world? It really is collaboration between platforms like Shapeways, and other designers to make sure that it’s a world that is approachable as possible to people who don’t think of themselves as enthusiasts, but as one beautiful thing.

Exactly! I couldn’t agree more that it is a collaboration and that’s why we keep trying to raise issues and make sure that companies like Shapeways have a voice on our podcast so that they could talk to those out there, and hear back from them. Hopefully our listeners will give you some feedback.

Our forums really have a great price with this. We hear their feedback and we have internal meetings where we say, “Okay, this is what we’re hearing. These are the concerns that people are raising. How can we prioritize addressing it as quickly as possible?” We know that if they are friction points people, then they are friction points. If we remove them, then everyone’s experience will be so much better.

Thank you so much Michael for joining us today. We have really appreciated it. Hopefully, we’ll hear from you again soon, when you can give us updates on what’s going on.

Thank you so much for having me. I am happy to give out tips to whatever you’re looking for them.

3D Print Trademark and Copyright Advocacy with Michael Weinberg of Shapeways – Final Thoughts

We talked about IP a lot over the course of time, because it has a long term effect on the viability of designers working in 3D printing. We really have to pay attention to what’s going on with 3D print trademark and copyright. For some, it may be unimportant, but it is actually not. We should not be paranoid of what’s going on around here, but we should pay attention because it hurts the overall financial viability of it, if the laws are not strong here.

I believe that copyright is the right place to cover a lot of the intellectual property issues that we face in this industry. I am satisfied at this point that there is enough protection in the existing copyright laws. I would still like to see things improved in terms of 3D print trademark and copyright, but I think we are already much better off. I completely agree with Michael that the tent of 3D print trademark and copyright has the functional ways, where you just decide if something is functional or creative, or both, because it accounts and it is covered. Clarifying that is essential. We just need to make a clear cut. I think that the petitioning that they are doing to try to get the trademark log had kind of lumped in to the digital rights management, is really important for all of these sites and we linked to Jennifer Urban’s research on it because it was really interesting. A lot of it was mostly researching and boring, but it was really interesting to really see, because the numbers of complaints they get against Google, and the number of take down requests they get. They enumerated all of them and you could see that there are a lot of spamming going on. It is burdensome to these sites, which then means that their operational costs go up. When their operational costs go up, that has a direct effect on us, as Shapeways store. If their operational costs go up, then the underlying profitability of your item on their shop goes up.

The cost that they are going to charge for anything that they produce has a factor on that, and we are all paying for it. It’s not like it doesn’t have a direct affect on you if you’re not dealing with that copyright issue. It does have an effect on you, because it affects the costs of things. That is so frustrating to me to realize that there are these predators or people that are taking advantage of the system, realizing that if they make a claim of trademark infringement, they will succeed in taking it down all of a sudden. I hate that because it is so frustrating.

We have a personal experience with that, because that is actually how we got one of our clients seven years ago. It was one of these things that it happens all the time, at mass retail. Walmart gets hundreds of letters every week or every day. I think we can see the statistics as to how many times Walmart gets notice for being sued for something, because it is just totally ridiculous. It is at the point where what happens is they get these letters, and their policy is their lawyers get them. Unless, there is a whole bunch of documentation going along with it, that has proof which 99% of it don’t. They basically have this blanket letter saying, “You guys are infringing on our trademark, our patent and our copyrights.” They just allege everything. They point out that unless it is the DMCA (digital management law), there is no penalty of purgery for saying that. You can just make a claim, and that is what these people do.

We had it happened to a client of ours, where they received one of these letters that went to Costco as a complaint. This complaint was for a chair that had not entered the market yet, that was about to be bought, was an infringing on the armrest. It was some patent that this company claim to have. What these companies do is they send it off to the buyer level and say, “This is your vendor’s problem, and you deal with it first.” That is how they do it. They push it off on them and say, “You guys are going to have to deal with it.” They then issue you a standard response. But then what happens, is that this vendor who ended up being our client was like, “Well we know this arm doesn’t infringe because this is a standard market arm that anyone can buy off the shelf. It wasn’t special”. We don’t know what to do here. They then came to us and said, “Can you design a bunch of new ones, and then we’ll just present a different arm to this client, and hopefully they’ll end at Costco, and hopefully they’ll take it.”

Our client really avoided the issue, to not engage in the legal posturing that was going on. This really would have happened as a vendor of record at Costco, and was threatened by a competitor who became our client. They were trying to defend their turf, claiming that something of the would be new vendor was presenting something that violates a patent of theirs. Anyways, it was a bogus argument. It’s like what Michael was saying when people allege copyright infringement or patent infringement, there is a legal process that you could go through which is messy, costly, and everybody can go through it. But at Michael’s point, the retailer does not become liable in that kind of a dispute. They can if they knowingly did it. So if they didn’t do this response, and they pushed it off, then they knowingly are not continuing to market it. This is a simple process that the retailer can go through. The fight becomes an issue between the other two parties, but not the retailer.

However, trademark is really a different animal. The fact that different companies can use that to achieve their goal of preventing someone from competing in that marketplace of the alleged trademark, that’s not right. That needs to be addressed, it needs to be fixed. Especially when a trademark is so easy to verify, like if it have a mark or if it doesn’t. What actually they are talking about, is they are trying to expand the safe harbor rules, but at the same time, they are actually trying to make it so that they have this ability for us as designers to say, “Hey, it doesn’t have it. Do you see this mark anywhere? This is there registered trademark. I don’t have that. Mine is different.”  Then, it moves it out so they have the ability to put their stuff back up on, while a dispute may be happening offline.

Even just a simple thing of extending that same penalty of purgery if you make a false claim, to trademark the way it is in copyright, you are just doing that simple thing to improve the situation tremendously. It would improve the situation overall because we have that happen so often in patent as well, if that is just completely false claims. We’ve seen it to us where people just make these blanket things where everything is infringing and stolen, even though it’s not. They don’t have any burden of proof in that process of the very first letter that they sent. I thought patent was the same to copyright, but not to a take down letter. Patent litigation is even a much more messy and complex copyright.

Thank goodness, in this 3D printing industry, when it comes to content, we probably not have to deal with 3D print trademark and copyright as much. I really look forward to the Supreme Court taking up this situation. I really hope that they address the issue, and help bring some definition to this. It will make everything at least become clearer. 3D print trademark and copyright seriously can’t be too big of an issue because it helps both sides. I don’t see why they wouldn’t take it up. I don’t think that party lines really have to do something with this. This is an easy one, even without a full court, so maybe we can get it through. Let’s just agree on the rules that we are all going to decide in this buying. If you don’t, and if there are 10 different standards, you have lawsuits in 10 different places in the country, and you could have 10 different results. That is not a good situation, and it is complicated especially in terms of 3D print trademark and copyright.

We find this subject on 3D print trademark and copyright fascinating, we hope that you found it helpful as well, for those of you working in this  field and has a business and as designers. If you have any questions for Michael, please shoot an email out, and comment on this blog post, or send us a message at @HazzDesign around social media.

Regarding one of our most recent copyrights, don’t forget that if you want to get your free coffee sleeve of our designs. We’ll send to you a 3D printed and ready to use coffee sleeve, for free. Just mouse over on the upper right corner of every page of our website. It will expand, you can click on it, and get sent to a landing page at Makerbot where you can fill out a letter of information so they know where to send it to you, and you can get your own coffee sleeve of ours. Please take pictures of yourself using it out on your favorite coffee shop or your office, wherever you might be. Post them in social media: Instagram, Facebook, or wherever you are comfortable doing it. We would love to see it.

I just want to give a little kudos to our design team for the website, because I hate it when a website has that popup that happens, and immediately when you go to their site, you have to enter into the form or click it away. That annoys me to no end. But to have something like here that just goes smoothly. I hope that nobody is offended by the fact that we have are putting advertisements on our podcast. We’ve got to keep funding the venture as we go forward. That is our goal with this. Any time, you can help us out with that. We want to make it not in your face, but we want to make it there and know that these things are there.

Important Links

• Public Knowledge
• Michael Weinbergs blogs on Shapeways
• Study on bots claiming fake trademark and copyright infringement – Jennifer Urban
• Digital Millenium Copyright Act
• Supreme Court case over copyright infringement and cheerleader uniforms
• 3D/DC
• Hazz Design 3D Printed Necktie
• Free Hazz Design 3D Printed Coffee Sleeve from MakerBot

About Michael Weinberg

Michael Weinberg is IP and General Counsel at Shapeways.  He is the author of “It Will Be Awesome If They Don’t Screw It Up: 3D Printing, Intellectual Property, and the Fight Over the Next Great Disruptive Technology” (2010), “What’s the Deal with Copyright and 3D Printing?” (2013), and “3 Steps for Licensing Your 3D Printed Stuff” (2015), whitepapers that examine the intersection of 3D printing and intellectual property law. Prior to Shapeways, Michael was Vice President at Public Knowledge, a nonprofit public interest advocacy organization dedicated to representing consumers in technology policy debates in Washington, DC.  Michael regularly discusses 3D printing law and policy issues with the media and at public events and founded 3D/DC, an annual 3D printing policy event in Washington, DC.  He is also the president of the board of the Open Source Hardware Association.

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