This looks like a fantastically useful technology and I am reminded of the fact that when FDM 3D printers were under patent, they cost $25,000, and ten years after the patents expired they cost $250. I believe some key metal 3D printing patents recently expired, but I suspect much of this process is still patented, making it unnecessarily expensive. I would love to see this kind of tech become ubiquitous and affordable to everyone, and this will not happen until the patents are fully expired and we see genuine competition in the space.
I guess I should preempt a couple of the most common responses I get to this view:
First, markets provide first mover advantage even without intellectual property restrictions. The idea that governments should provide monopoly protections on ideas is anti-competetive and anti free market. Libertarians at places like the Mises institute recognize this and have some good talks on the subject.
Also, we would not see investment dry up without IP restrictions. We would see the nature of investment change from fewer larger investments to more smaller investments as competitors race to get the latest incremental improvement to market first by seeking investment to upgrade production lines, etc.
Workers absolutely deserve to be compensated for their work, but we see that in most IP restriction regimes, businesses take all the winnings and pay only wages to the workers doing the inventing. Individual inventors can still have first mover advantage, and I would argue that most new invention is not motivated by profit but curiosity. Removing IP restrictions would vastly increase invention by curiosity, as there would be far more places where a curious engineer could tinker and improve something. Imagine that one person invents something and gets a patent. This will prevent 100 other people from tinkering and improving upon it. This is why I say that the sole function of a patent is to reduce innovation - because that is the one literal function of them. The supposed follow on effects are more of a cultural meme that are often disproved by things like the open source movement, which clearly demonstrates that a lot of the assumptions around IP restrictions are not strictly true.
Finally, people in foreign countries who cannot afford expensive machines like medical scanners etc still deserve to build copies of those machines for their own use, but patent harmonization laws like TRIPS prevent these sorts of things. The same goes with medicine.