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A Teaching Learning Material (TLM) is Made using 3D Printer

Example : A board with some other components which helps the kids to perform Mathematical operations.

Can such a product be patented in India ?

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    You will need to elaborate quite a bit before this can be answered
    – George White
    Commented Feb 3, 2022 at 23:17
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    This site is limited to questions about patents. Copyright questions can be directed to the Law SE site. As for patenting, is the something novel about the design?
    – Eric S
    Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 3:34
  • The question needs to be edited by OPer to focus on patentability alone (without mentioning copyright) and to focus on the vague merits of innovation that might make it patentable (without disclosing the invention). Commented Feb 4, 2022 at 17:13
  • @Nagarjuna Sagar. Based on your input, answer below by Andreas is most apt. You may mark it as accepted. I would suggest, you note down what your product can do which other products can not, and how it is different from other products, basic features of your product that are different from other such products first and than select a patent facilitator of your area (can be found in Patent Office web site ipindia.gov.in/Facilitators-Patents.htm) and contact him/her for best advice free of cost or a nominal affordable fee. Commented Feb 13, 2022 at 0:54

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The main answer to your question (which needs clarification without disclosing the invention itself) is that being manufactured on a 3D printer does not in itself disqualify the invention from patentability. The original question does not clearly specify:

  • whether the object manufactured on the 3D printer is the intended innovation to be patented or
  • whether the innovation to be patented is: the breakthrough in the clever process or clever apparatus of how subsequent newly-manufactured 3D printers can now print a new kind of output than was possible on previously-manufactured 3D printers.

(The latter is easily very very patentable!) Let us assume that it is the former.

If the object being 3D printed is quite pedestrian in manufacturing techniques outside of the 3D printing world (e.g., say, a paper clip), then simply making a 3D printed paper clip per se is likely not patentable:

  1. unless some breakthrough innovation occurred that makes these new 3D-printed paper clips solve a commonplace failure that plagued all/most prior naïve attempts at 3D printing a paper clip, such as the 3D-printed paper clip no longer shatters due to some innovative placement of matter here & there according to some sophisticated planning/mathematics of the 3D-printed design that was quite a clever insight. The claims would focus on the presence of that those points of cleverness that this innovation has that all prior attempts lacked (or that most lacked in part due to lacking the big-breakthrough combination of little innovations accreting to a big innovation when taken together).
  2. unless the 3D-printed paper clip as clever breakthrough can do something that traditionally-manufactured non-3D-printed paper clips cannot do. The claims would focus on the useful features made possible by how the 3D printer can cleverly use additive manufacturing to produce a physical structure of (or surface of) paper clip with previously unforeseen features than traditional nonadditive manufacturing has never previously achieved.

Again, (without disclosing the content of the purported 3D-printed innovation), the original question lacks specificity to give a more specific answer than these categorizations of hypotheticals.

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    Thanks for the information, Commented Feb 11, 2022 at 15:55

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