Interesting.

They allege infringement in the first suit for five patents issued 2009, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2020; generally related to FDM manufacturing in general, purge tower, extruder, and heated bed IP.
They allege infringement in the second suit for five patents issued in 2013, 2014, 2020, 2021, 2024; generally related to RFID, networking, and remote control software IP.

Complaint 1: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txed.232140/gov.uscourts.txed.232140.1.0.pdf
Complaint 2: https://insight.rpxcorp.com/litigation_documents/15797606

Quick blurb on it over at ARSTechnica: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/stratasys-sues-bambu-lab-over-patents-used-widely-by-consumer-3d-printers/

It is interesting that they have not sued any other maker, foreign or domestic despite the fact that the first suit covers technology used by every manufacturer of FDM-based 3D printers in the world.

Filed in Marshall, TX with a jury demand. Patent troll heaven. --I'm not saying that Stratasys is a troll, but they could have filed in Delaware where they are incorporated or in Minnesota where they conduct business.--

This'll take a year to get to trial. The eastern district of Texas has a "rocket docket" meaning that many cases are filed and heard within a year. Hopefully Bambu will hire competent legal counsel and prevail. A loss on these claims could cause a chilling effect in an industry that is finally starting to see explosive growth, innovation, and the driving down of prices from global competition.

(new X1C owner here )

My employer has been sued in East TX numerous times on patent grounds.  The plaintiff has always failed to go past discovery.

But, we were dealing with trolls that bought "patents".  It seems that TX is the place to go when you want to make some shady legal claims.

Edit, if this goes further, I'll move my X1C and Mini to local network only .

Its a tough place to go to trial, if it goes to trial. Defendants typically lose and get massive verdicts against them because of poorly educated jurors who hate pharma, large corporations, and foreigners.

Verizon just got an $847M and Micron Semiconductor a $447M judgement against them in the past couple months. Samsung at one point built and maintained an ice rink in Marshall, TX to curry favor with the locals seeing as how it was constantly there defending its patents in the 2000s and 2010s.

I was wondering when this was going to happen. As soon as companies started down the heated chambers either directly or indirectly via heated build plate coupled with the material handling, and other features that have been identified.

My rep is always inviting me to events. When he sees what I am doing with hobbyist equipment they get offended.

As someone with quite a bit of IP myself knowing what went into innovating and developing of it I don't blame them if they are not licensing the tech on the patents. Sorry if that is unpopular but this all is about which side of the fence you are sitting.

I am curious if this stops with them because they are Chinese or if they go after the industry as a whole.

Does this mean I should hurry up and BUY a Bambu, or that I should NOT BUY a Bambu...

BUY. Even if Bambu loses, it'll end up in a licensing contract with Stratasys for the technology. Stratsys doesn't do squat and gets paid by Bambu on their (Bambu's) sales.

If things got really nasty, Stratasys could go to the ITC to block Bambu Lab from importing, but that would take a while... at least a couple of years after these cases filed in EDTX are decided (provided Bambu Lab loses). It is a pretty high bar for them to get that kind of a decision by the ITC.

Heated beds and coated sheets have been a thing for as long as I known about 3d printing. Purge towers have been around for a long time also. Every printer manufacturer uses those technologies. I think Stratasys snoozed and lost on this one.

For some of us more old timers, can't really say I am surprised it was just a matter of time for this to pop back up. All you youngins don't remember the days of people making work arounds for the Ulitmaker, Makerbot, and other older industrial patents.

It is actually the reason CoreXY exists, it was a work around past the gantry system patents that use to be heavily defended.

Think Stratasys is going to have a bit of a hard time on most of their claims as they had not attempted to enforce them before now, and that will shine very poorly on them. But there are a few in there that they may have some merit on, more just because Bambu is doing them very close to how it is laid out in the patents.

Bet it ends up settling, Bambu makes some more slight deviations to the printers to get them a little further from the exact wording of the patents and they will be back to full swing on production.

Patent Trolls. Plain and simple.

Can't really be a troll on patents filled in the mid -late 2000s when much of this was still state of the art..... That said, many of the patents are very close to the end of their 20 years. So this really dose point more towards last minute money grab.

I thought along the same lines until I dug a little deeper. It seems that they built off of their original IP to keep it going. Searching their IP for just mentions of heated chamber returns 3600+ results most of which are from 2010 to 2018-19 which aligns with C19 shutting things down. Improving on the base patent and refiling extends the length of the claim.

I am wondering how Ultimaker got around it with their material handling system which is pretty much a direct copy. It also costs a shit load so they may be paying licensing fees. Theirs is in an environmentally controlled cabinet under the main unit and feeds in a similar fashion.



Stratasys will be in town on the 26th. I have an open invite to attend so I may drop in and see if anyone one the ground knows anything but I tend to doubt it.

Well the current answer to that is pretty simple....

Stratasys is the partial owner of Ultimaker (46%) since 2022 when Makerbot and Ultimaker merged. So even though they are still operating them like separate companies they are one and the same.

That makes sense then. I knew about MakerBot I did not know this about Ultimaker.

Stratasys is fucking garbage from 1997. We have probably close to a million dollars worth of stratasys machines at work and they have a shit user interface, RIDICULOUS subscriptions for machine support (like six figures to even talk to us), and outrageous material costs for their proprietary one time use filament canisters.

Fuck stratasys. I hope they lose big on this.

I saw an old price list at work. $665 for a can of ABS...in 2015 dollars. Want to start printing in a different material, nylon maybe? $25k for the license. Ridiculous numbers, but I also work at a .gov facility so tax dollars at work.

Lots of folks with chameleon filament setups are like, "get bent strat"

Not a super simple 5min setup, but one of the easiest mmu add ons.

ERCF is also going to make arguments hard to enforce.

Prusa is watching this case closely.

Purge towers go back to 2016

So I looked at this in a little more detail and I think that Stratasys is on shaky ground for most of their claims.

The networking shit is a non starter since pretty much every electronic device today has some type of connectivity.

The heated bed is going to get all kinds of "in common usage" retorts. The reason they are going after that is the heated chamber which they never refiled and expired in 2021 so I am pretty sure that is a dead issue.

The purge towers are another non started as they are just a sacrificial addition to the printing process.

The continuous printing issue is relating to the AMS/RFID setup and has merit. This is one area that they might have a point on but the system Bambu is using is not environmentally controlled like Ultimaker/MakerBot and Stratasys.

The camera/lidar sensing also has merit but to what degree I am unsure of. The sensing and adjusting in the firmware could be a snag point depending on how it is argued.

The studio/slicer software claim is another one that I am not sure of. Bambu said they will make it open source if pushed on this one.

I share the common consensus here that Stratasys hasn't really innovated much in this space for quite a while and while they have every right to selectively choose who they go after their case is pretty flimsy. Stating that I also know that China has a history here of over stepping on infringements in the past and it really depends on how the case is argued and the jury selection. The other thing they have in their favor is that they are actively manufacturing to their IP claims so they are not patented trolls so to speak.

This is all speculation on my part based on what I know from filing a ton pf patents in the past for various companies that I have consulted for. When Stratasys was granted these patents was at a time that they let alot of very broad shit past muster. They cracked down hard on that at the patent office about a decade ago and demanded specifics in the claims.

Their product is way over priced and severely lacking. I have dealt with the company directly and indirectly since the 90's. The last quote that I got from them on comparable sized systems was around 80K all in and the consumables were off the chart for what they are. Last time they were in I sent them 4 different difficult parts to demo for me and when they brought them in I had the parts that I had printed on my less than 2K setups. They had the same issues and in some cases they were worse print wise.

I hope they loose and loose big on this one because it could set the industry on it's head if they win on certain claims. The thing with Bambu's offering is that they are focusing on making the printing process easy to succeed and Stratasys has always sold based on turn key for the novice engineer in the office.