The author may be biased as a <i>law professor</i> from Emory.<p>It is clear to me, just from the history of the volume printing industry itself, that patents are now hindering progress rather than promoting it.<p>Stratasys, the patent-holder for the fused deposition modeling (FDM) method of volume printing, failed to produce a printer widely accessible to the hobbyist market.  As soon as the patent expired, we got an explosion of open, affordable devices for that market, with varying levels of required customer expertise and professional hand-holding services.<p>I think a similar explosion will occur again when robocasting and laser sintering are fully liberated.<p>I think the major damage to patents will not occur because people will ignore them, but because people will be producing and sharing prior art before the patents can even be filed.  So far, the open source community has been rather more scrupulous than I would have expected regarding avoidance of patented technologies.<p>It&#x27;s almost as if they see patents as damage, and simply route around them.