I recently had an opportunity to present with Michael Weinberg, Staff Attorney at Public Knowledge (www.publicknowledge.org), at the FARO 3D Documentation Conference in the Americas.
Congratulations to FARO for running a great, well attended event (with nearly 300 participants). http://3d-documentation-conference.com/.
Our topic was"Bringing IP Issues in Digital Documentation into FOCUS." It was great to see an enthusiastic and engaged crowd even though we were batting"clean-up" - after a series of great presentations from the FARO CEO Jay Freeland, the (now) new FARO CTO Bernd-Dietmar Becker (and the man behind the industry shifting FARO FOCUS3D scanner) as well as Gonzalo Martinez (Director of Strategy Research at Autodesk) and Abe Reichental (CEO from 3D Systems).
Sam Pfeifle from SPAR Point Group has several blog posts on the event and among others see: https://www.sparpointgroup.com/FARO-CEO-Number-1.aspx (review of Jay Freeland's presentation); https://www.sparpointgroup.com/News/Vol10No8-Do-you-have-permission-to-scan-that-building-/ (a review of our presentation); and https://www.sparpointgroup.com/Bringing-coloring-book-simplicity-to-3D-printing/ (a review of Abe Reichental's presentation).
Michael and I wanted to give people a general primer on IP law and how it intersects with scene based scanning work flows in the digital documentation process. In the short time we had we were really trying to raise awareness, and issue spot, not necessarily give any clear"answers" (there aren't many to give!). I believe our stated goal of raising awareness was achieved - one attendee commented to me after our presentation"Thanks for the mind f&!k prior to lunch." Mission accomplished! ;-)
I will be speaking again on this topic at the upcoming Develop3D event in Warwick, UK on March 20th (see: http://www.develop3dlive.com/) and expect to be hosting a roundtable at the upcoming SPAR International 2012 taking place between April 15th and 18th in Houston, Texas (see: https://www.sparpointgroup.com/).
Congratulations to FARO for running a great, well attended event (with nearly 300 participants). http://3d-documentation-conference.com/.
You can see Michael at SXSW in Austin on Tuesday March 13th for his discussion titled -"3D Printing, Not Everyone Will Be Excited." His talk is in Salon J, at the Hilton Austin, starting at 11am CST. See: http://schedule.sxsw.com/2012/events/event_IAP9496.
In my next blog posts I will continue stepping through various forms of IP protection and illustrate how vendors are currently dealing with these issues.