I continue to see doom and gloom regarding Stratasys’ patent infringement lawsuit against Bambu Lab, but most of the commentary is nonsense.
As a refresher, Stratasys launched a patent infringement lawsuit against Bambu Lab and Tiertime several months ago. The lawsuit involved five patents covering features such as purging material into purge towers, heated print plates, void infill, clog detection and more.
Since then we haven’t heard a peep about this issue from either party.
But we have heard ongoing commentary from the 3D print community about the lawsuit, and a majority of the comments are complete nonsense. Some say that “Stratasys has never innovated”, or that they are a “patent troll”, or other entirely false claims.
Why so much vitriol? It’s because of some flawed logic by observers. Some seem to believe that because Bambu Lab has been named in the lawsuit, this would enable Stratasys to go after each and every other desktop 3D printer manufacturer. That’s because virtually all of them use something or other in the specified patents.
The fear is that using this legal leverage Stratasys would literally eliminate all these 3D printer manufacturers, destroying an industry and forcing everyone to buy expensive Stratasys equipment.
That’s a ridiculous thought. This absolutely will not happen.
You have to ask the question, “why didn’t Stratasys already sue several other parties earlier that were violating the patent?”
The answer is quite simple: Stratasys is in the business of providing industrial equipment to commercial companies and governments. They haven’t the slightest interest in desktop 3D printing, and in fact ditched their MakerBot acquisition a couple of years ago.
Year ago, MakerBot was once touted as the future leader in desktop 3D printing and because of that they were acquired by Stratasys. Stratasys then believed MakerBot would have had a reasonable chance of becoming a big deal in the future.
That didn’t turn out at all for a number of reasons, and Stratasys has turned away from the highly competitive desktop market and instead focused on the more juicy industrial and manufacturing markets with recent products. Sure, they still hold a minority interest in UltiMaker, the entity currently holding the rights to the MakerBot brand, but I am pretty sure that Stratasys has no strategies or thoughts about that operation.
So why did Stratasys suddenly decide to sue Bambu Lab? And why Bambu Lab? Why not Creality, which is larger and has more money to pay damages?
The answer is very likely that Stratasys foresaw an upcoming Bambu Lab product that overlapped with their commercial and industrial markets.
In other words: Stratasys doesn’t care about desktop 3D printing because they don’t sell any products in to that market. But they DO care when someone else is about to sell into their target market.
Stratasys’ purpose in the lawsuit is likely one of the following possible objectives:
- Prevent Bambu Lab from entering their own industrial market with a directly competing product, or
- Degrade Bambu Lab’s capability in that market by forcing some feature changes on future devices, or
- Allow Bambu Lab to enter the market, but they pay a licensing fee to Stratasys to allow use of the patented features
The first possible objective could be achieved by simply not providing a license to Bambu Lab. This would result in a court order preventing Bambu Lab from selling the relevant product in the jurisdiction of the patent, which in this case is the US. Bambu Lab would be able to sell the product elsewhere, as long as Stratasys doesn’t enforce a patent for a different country.
However, that’s the easy case. From Stratasys’ point of view, this might not be the best outcome. By preventing Bambu Lab from selling this product, would that imply that customers instead buy Stratasys equipment? That’s not likely, as Bambu Lab’s technical reputation and product cost might be quite advantageous over Stratasys’s products.
So we move to the other two goals.
The second goal of degrading a future Bambu Lab product is essentially the same as preventing it from being sold at all. If the product is sufficiently dumbed down (e.g. no heated bed or similar), then no one would buy it.
The third goal is where I believe all this is headed. Stratasys very likely believes that if Bambu Lab announces an industrial product, it will sell very well. Stratasys’ goal is to get in on the action by forcing Bambu Lab to pay a licensing fee for each and every one of those devices sold in the US.
We have no idea what the licensing fee could be. It might be a flat rate, a per machine cost, or something else. But whatever it is, that is almost certainly being discussed behind the scenes right now by the two parties. I expect they will come to some sort of arrangement, and the lawsuit will suddenly disappear. Bambu Lab will announce the new competing machine and Stratasys will be raking in new revenue they would never have obtained otherwise.
Bambu Lab will not disappear. Their US prices might be a tad higher, however, as they would have to recover the licensing fees to be paid to Stratasys.
Also, none of the other 3D printer manufacturers will be affected in any way by this lawsuit. They are not directly competing with Stratasys, so why bother with an expensive lawsuit.
If and when any of the other companies develop products that compete with Stratasys, they will then dust off the patents and threaten a similar lawsuit. However, this time they will simply point out that Bambu Lab paid “X” for licensing, so they must as well.
For 3D printer buyers, there will be almost no noticeable effect, other than nearly invisible price shifts: is that new machine’s price US$2,294, or should it really have been US$2,385? Who could know? All you see is the final price.
