Ideally you would not want to start from scratch and instead purchase the rights to an old proven printer's design. Anyone know of who you could approach that

Ideally you would not want to start from scratch and instead purchase the rights to an old proven printer's design. Anyone know of who you could approach that would sell this design to you? Then you could probably get on Kickstarer and say "If we raise X dollars we will purchase the rights of this Y printer and open source all of the components"