If someone agrees to build something, who needs to be sure the patents/copyrights are adhered to?

NOTE: Anything posted here is not legal advice.

If someone comes to me and asks me to build something for them is it incumbent upon me to make sure the patent(s)/copyrights are adhered to or is it up to the person asking be to build the item?

In particular, I ask this about 3D printing. If someone comes to me and asks me to 3D print something am I the one on the hook if it is violating a patent/copyright (not sure which applies) or is it the person who asked me to print it that must vouch that it is legal to do?

Both of you. One is directly infringing, the other is inducing the infringement. You do not have to be aware that you are infringing to be in the wrong.

Is there a way for the builder to easily (relatively) assess that they are ok to build a given item?

Let’s say you come to me with a figurine you want 3D printed.

It seems impossible to know if that figurine is someone else’s work. How can it be submitted for verification? Maybe it is a copyrighted character but in a different pose so not in a searchable database.

In principle, a 3D print could be covered under many different sorts of intellectual property law: It could be copyrighted, patented, trademarked, or a trade secret, depending on the nature of the item.

In practice, a makerspace finds out if a customer owns a design to be printed by asking them. And yes, the customer could lie, but that would generally be against the makerspace’s terms of service. For someone going to the library to make a plastic toy, that’s probably good enough, because rights owners aren’t likely to make a fuss about the occasional plastic toy. This is especially so given that, for designs customers don’t make themselves, they’re most likely getting them from Thingiverse or someplace similar, where all of the designs are copyleft (that is, they’re technically copyrighted by their owners, but in order to post them on the site, you have to grant a fairly permissive license).

Now, if we’re not just talking about some random kid making one or two toys at the library, but someone making a whole commercial production run of something, then there would probably be lawyers and contracts and so on involved, and the contract would probably include terms that if the design is found to be infringing something, the company that supplied the design would be on the hook for the makerspace’s damages.

:+1:

Everything he said.

Not much different I assume than WalMart and their photo print policy. They refuse to print obviously copyright images (i.e. professional wedding photos). Their terms of service make this explicit, and they take reasonable steps to try and recognize such photos. The key here is the 800-pound gorilla principle; an 800 lb gorilla like Walmart has enough money to be a target of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, unlike Joe the Maker’s hobby shop. If something does squeak by, their defense is that they actively try to prevent such behaviour and generally succeed.

Thing is, Walmart has attorneys on staff. They will happily keep you in court for a decade and cost you millions to get through the case.

Joe Maker…he’s a much, much easier target.

It seems there should be an easy way for makers to determine if the file they are asked to print is properly licensed before they get sued. (IMHO)

For GQ…is there such a way?

There are billions of things in the world. How exactly would you make this easy?

I have no answer. Hence the question.

If you can be held legally responsible for doing a thing shouldn’t there be an easy way to avoid doing that illegal thing?

Let’s say you sit down at your PC and design a figurine and ask me to print it.

@DMC suggested above that we are both on the hook as to whether it is legal.

How can the person making the item know what you designed is ok to make as a legal matter?

Beats me. The law and society haven’t caught up to the new reality and may never do so.

We (the world) went through this with books at the start of the Internet. “All we need is an easy solution to know who the copyright owner of each book and other paper publication is.” But there isn’t one. There never will be one. Not even a hard solution. The information is not out there to collect, no matter how much money you throw at it.

Some things don’t have a solution, easy or hard.

You can’t. I still think @Chronos’ post covers this well, both practically and in principle.

I think you and @Chronos are right but I also think the companies will go after the little guy before anyone with resources.

Games Workshop (makers of Warhammer) have recently put the hammer down on content creators.

Some kind of clearinghouse for what is and is not legal would be great.

You bear some risk of being dragged into court which will not be cheap. You bear considerable risk of never being paid by your client who was taken to the cleaners by Megacorp and now is broke.

If you are the producer / builder then the minimum you should do is to get something in writing from your client that they are lawful owners of the design and hold all relevant copyrights, patents etc. These are in many companies’ standard terms and conditions that are assumed to kick in if you proceed and pay a deposit, but worth getting explicit statements and registrations in writing. And then still doing some checking.

I think I have gone into GD territory. My bad and sorry about that.

But because it’s fundamentally a legally question, i moved this thread to IMHO.

So I guess the question would be, what value is there in due diligence and the customer’s signed statement that nobody else could have a claim to copyright or trademark or patent? I have trouble imagining a court being too harsh on someone who did due diligence. Of course, you have to avoid the appearance of willful blindness too. I would imagine questions like - did you share in profits or simply charge a fee for service? - would also be relevant to any judgement.

the question perhaps would not be “how do I know something is proprietary?” the real question is “how can I reduce my exposure should the item turn out to be proprietary?”

I don’t know about copyright, but when I was working in computer design we were told to never check to see if something we had come up with was patented, because the penalties for knowingly violating a patent were much greater than unknowingly doing so.
Patents are a mess these days. When I got my first patents 40 years ago, and when people in my group filed, the examiners always found some possible prior art. When I got some more 20 years ago they didn’t seem to even make an effort.
Now I worked for gigantic companies, which probably makes a difference, since we no doubt had patents which lots of companies were unknowingly violating.

I think part of having the customer sign something saying they have the rights to the work is to ensure that they do, or to show due diligence. But part of it is likely also to be able to inplead or countersue the customer who fraudulently represented those facts to induce the maker to produce the item.

China is notorious for massive theft of intellectual property, much of which is put in products exported to the U.S., and there doesn’t seem to be much negative consequences for them to do so.

I’ve had machine shops make parts for me in the past, and they’ve never asked whether I had the rights to make them. (We always did, of course, as usually the parts were designed in-house.) It seems to me that it’s really not up to them to verify this.