> without IP you can’t get capital behind ideas and then everything grinds to a halt

Citation needed. Open source development proves that IP restrictions are not necessary to produce engineering development. And look at 3D printers. Their price went from $50k to $25k after the first ten years on the market, when they were under patent. When the patent expired, development exploded and ten years later the price had dropped to $250. One of the most popular 3D printers in the world, the Prusa i3, is completely open source. Certainly one cannot say that "without IP... everything grinds to a halt" when faced with these examples.

If patents didn't incentivize the development of 3D printing technology in the first place, we might still not have them. You're overlooking the fact that IP drives initial research and development in the first place.

I’m not overlooking it, I just don’t think it’s true. Even when the process was patented multiple groups had the idea (IBM and stratasys both held patents and had to collaborate). Without IP there is still market incentives to sell new technology. I don’t believe the myth that without patents people would not innovate. I think innovation would happen faster!

This is simply objectively wrong. You think the economy can be driven by volunteers? You think capitol allocated with no reward function will produce anything? And 3D printers went down in price because they became a popular diy hobby not because the patents were freed from the shackles of capitalism you dunce…

I’m sorry for being so rude. But I disagree. I was there too I guess, i built my own prusa in 2011. I just don’t believe that patents stopped people from designing and building open source 3D printers. The early printers were just brass nozzles with a heat element, thermistor, motors belts and an arduino. There’s no patent roadblocks in there. There is a correlation, however, with the hobby computer revolution of the early 2010s…

Yes there was a patent roadblock. The very process of laying down layers of filament to build a model was patented until 2009. Before that people could get in trouble for duplicating those designs. But afterward people could openly collaborate. DIY 3D printers exploded once people were allowed to develop them. And I remember being in the 3D printer groups and seeing people unwilling to infringe on the belt 3D printer patent that makerbot had, for example. Hobbyists were aware of patents and weary of infringement. I built my first printer in 2011 too.

EDIT: Here is an interview with the creator of the first hobby 3D printer. In Europe, unlike the US, research projects are allowed to violate patents. He explicitly calls out the expiration of the patents as the thing that allowed them to expand beyond just research. https://www.3dsourced.com/interviews/reprap-dr-adrian-bowyer...

“We never had any problem with Stratasys complaining about what we were doing, there was only one thing that happened: we got a letter, very nice and very polite, very conciliatory, from one of their legal people saying they had a trademark on the term FDM and could we please not use it, so immediately I invented an equivalent term, which was FFF and we just edited everything on the site to that instead. That’s the only time they tried to interfere or anything else with the project. They never complained we were infringing upon their patent, which we weren’t of course [research projects in Europe can research a patented technology for the purpose of improving it without any kind of patent infringement], and we weren’t selling any machines.

“Once the patent expired in 2009, of course the project was free to do whatever it liked. Coincidentally, that was just a few months after we got the first printer working. It all came together fairly nicely in that regard.”