Puffery is not fraud, says a federal appeals court in upholding dismissal of a securities fraud action over a 3-D printer’s quality.

Eden Prairie, Minnesota-based Stratasys Ltd. acquired MakerBot Industries L.L.C., which manufactures “scaled-down” desktop 3-D printers, in August 2013, as an indirect wholly owned subsidiary that allowed it to expand into the emerging desktop 3-D printer market, according to Tuesday’s ruling by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis in In re: Stratasys Ltd. Shareholder Securities Litigation.

In January 2014, MakerBot introduced a new line of desktop 3-D printers, “5G” printers, each of which had a replaceable print head designed to be swappable, according to the ruling.

The printers’ buyers, though, experienced “significant” clogging issues. Sales declined, and Stratasys’ stock price dropped, resulting in investors filing the securities fraud action.

The shareholders claimed Stratasys’ quality and financial statements were misleading and that the company knew the printers were “essentially inoperable,” according to the ruling, “but still rushed them to market while publicly proclaiming their quality and reliability.”

The shareholders filed suit in U.S. District Court in Minneapolis, which dismissed the case. A three-judge appeals court panel unanimously affirmed the ruling.

“A statement is not material and is mere puffery, if it is ‘so vague and such obvious hyperbole that no reasonable investor would rely upon (it),’” said the ruling, in quoting an earlier ruling.

“Stratasys’s statements that the 5G printers offer ‘unmatched speed, reliability, quality and connectivity’ are vague and unreliable,” said the ruling.

“As the District Court noted, even to the extent the claim of ‘unmatched speed’ could be actionable, the shareholders ‘do not allege any facts demonstrating that the 5G printers are not faster than MakerBot’s other printers, or other desktop 3-D printers on the market,’” the ruling states.

“The material misstatement must be false when made, not just in hindsight,” said the ruling. The “shareholders’ claims fail because their allegations do not adequately tie Stratasys’s knowledge of the product quality issues or their financial repercussions to the timing of the statements,” said the ruling, in affirming the lower court ruling.