3D Printing On Demand 106
Iddo Genuth writes "The Netherlands based company Shapeways is beta testing a new service allowing people to print three-dimensional models. Customers can upload designs or use a creation tool hosted at the Shapeways website, then order a printed model of their designs for less than $3 per square centimeter. The printed items are shipped to the customer in ten days or less, bringing 3D printing to consumers and not just companies large enough to afford their own printers."
Eh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Shouldn't that be cubic centimetres? Y'know... The third dimension.
Not just a dupe, not even news... (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't even vaguely news. There's been 3d printing services like this for years. Just google [google.com] for them...
Re:A new copyright battle? (Score:5, Insightful)
So... what? Now we are going to have 'Miniature cloning is stealing' blurbs on packaging for small-but-expensive items? 'When you cloning this miniature, you are cloning COMMUNISM'.
Interesting times ahead...
Re:A new copyright battle? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Reprap (Score:4, Insightful)
> I don't mean to knock these projects, but the technology isn't really there yet.
I think you will find that is exactly why these projects exist. They are developing the technology.
Re:Eh? (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh, for goodness sake: try to at least catch up to the twentieth century, will you.
Yes, look, I know you're still agonising over whether to teach creationism in school science classes and burn witches over there, but, you must surely realise the consequences of your letting the world leave you behind, right?
Re:A new copyright battle? (Score:4, Insightful)
while i don't think the effect of this particular service will be so drastic, i do think that if we event Star-Trek-style "replicators" the material economy would quickly become an anachronism. that is, if we manage to overcome the rearguard reaction to such an "anti-American" action.
i mean, just look at the situation with IP/copyright/patent law. it costs nothing to replicate digital music, movies, code, etc. but there is still a large legally enforced economy around the trade of such 'free' commodities. this is also the reason why the Google Book Search project was stonewalled by print publishers. it would have been an incredibly boon to humanity for such a digital literary repository to be published for free online, giving children/students unprecedented access to the largest corpus of human knowledge ever assembled. such a digital library would be invaluable in terms of the cultural & academic utility it would provide, possibly revolutionizing our society.
but if we couldn't eliminate the legal & economic barriers preventing such a useful and societally beneficial project form being realized, it's doubtful we'd be able to eliminate our capitalist economy by eliminating the cost of material production. unfortunately, we live in a society where corporate interest outweighs public interest. there's no way our corporate plutocrats will allow us to take away their sole source of power and privilege.
Re:A new copyright battle? (Score:4, Insightful)
No, the whole basis of capitalism is trading something of lesser value for something of greater value. Physical scarcity is based on materials and labor, product scarcity is based on ideas, materials, and labor. This will severely diminish the labor from mass produced items, but there will still be things that require human labor (like repairing these printers, for instance). It will also make the artificial scarcity of reproduceable ideas moot, but the value of knowledge that can't be reproduced, such as a live concert by Coldplay or a conversation with Cory Doctorow, won't see any diminishment of scarcity. The material scarcity will remain, although the limiting factor will be increasingly raw materials rather than manufactured materials.
Capitalism will still function just fine. People will still value the products as much as they ever do, but the manufacturers will value them less - because they can make more of them with the same value of resources - so the price will go down.
Or were you referring to the bastard stepchild that Bush and Paulson and Bernanke and the MAFIAA refer to as "capitalism"?