[Morley Kert] had a problem. He’s a big fan of the lovely Fortune Chair from Heller Furniture. Only, he didn’t want to pay $1,175 for a real one. The solution? He printed his own instead!
The basic concept is simple. Capture or recreate the geometry of the fancy expensive designer chair, and then print it out on a 3D printer. That would be easy, except for scale. Chairs have to be both big enough to seat humans, and strong enough to carry their weight. For the average 3D printer owner, meeting the big requirement is difficult, since most printers are quite small compared to chairs.
[Morley] gets around this in the typical fashion—he prints the chair in multiple segments. Indeed, we’ve seen [Morley] tackle a similar project before, too. Only, last time, he had the benefit of a print farm and some easily-accessible geometry for the target object. This time, he’s working very much more from scratch, and chose to print everything at home. That made things quite a bit harder.
Scaling up is never as easy at it seems at first!
Fun video! I probably would have never seen or heard of these chairs if it weren’t for his videos about recreating them.
I’m too lazy to find the design patent for this chair, but it does look like Heller files for design patents on chairs US-D1041939-S (patent search here https://ppubs.uspto.gov/pubwebapp/static/pages/ppubsbasic.html with “Heller” AND “chair”)
Thanks for doing the legwork for me. I was wondering that. As someone who has many patents of various sorts I am on the fence about this sort of thing. I Personally would think in bad taste to ever litigate this sort of thing and if anything would love it as an artist if someone recognizes my work as wonderful and promotes it. However they are profiting on the video for my work and it doesn’t change the legality of breaking patent law. tricky indeed.
Wait until we can print clothes…
Or a policeman’s helmet.
You wouldn’t print a policeman’s helmet and then go to the toilet in it…
Then send it to the policeman’s grieving widow…
So, the premise “I couldn’t afford this $1200 chair so I printed it” makes me wonder (1) what value he places on his own time (I’m thinking like maybe minimum wage), (2) the alternative use, utility and time value of his equipment usage, and (3) fundamentals and incidentals (power, filament, sandpaper, bondo, etc.).
I kind of tuned out after a while – it seemed like “fun” “nomad” and “fusion” were every third word — does he ever actually say (1) how long this took and (2) his actual real out-of-pocket?
YouTube revenue
This is almost always the answer these days – no matter how stupid the project, the content gods must be appeased with an offering!
Printing that first terrible chair got him sponsorship from 3d printer manufacturer nd a studio. I would say return on investment looks sound.
Putting a text-over saying “please don’t sue me” is really asking for it. You might get away with it (copyright infringement) if you don’t make money off it and do it for yourself – but as soon as you start monetising it, that is where the judge will straight away award the case to the other side.
Basically, the bloke deserves to be sued, and get zero sympathy.
What? Design elements aren’t copyrightable (there are “design patents” in the US but that’s a whole other thing.)
A logo can be copyrighted, but appearing in a third party photograph or video isn’t a copyright violation. To be otherwise would completely remove the point of having a copyrighted logo in the first place. But there’s no logo here.
The sponsorship was for the advertising placement in a video, not for the printed object itself. He’s not making them for sale, he’s not even making the CAD files available. It doesn’t mean he can’t be sued (people can be sued arbitrarily) but it doesn’t mean there’s a valid case.
I can see that – copyright is not the right term (so I got my terms wrong, sue me :) ). As you say, design patents are what is at issue here.
It is a long bow to draw though to say that any revenue raised was solely because of advertising placements – his title “please don’t sue me” with a picture of him sitting on this thing makes the intent pretty damn obvious.
With the state of play in regard to any sort of legal BS in regard to anything in the US, putting up a big sign that might as well say “come and get me” is like I said, asking to be sued. And (in my opinion only), I wouldn’t have an atom of sympathy if he did.
I wouldn’t pay $1200 for a chair that looks like a pair of wax lips either.