3D Printing May Face Legal Challenges 316
angry tapir writes "A coming revolution in 3D printing, with average consumers able to copy and create new three-dimensional objects at home, may lead to attempts by patent holders to expand their legal protections, a paper from Public Knowledge says. Patent holders may see 3D printers as threats, and they may try to sue makers of the printers or the distributors of CAD (computer-aided design) blueprints, according to digital rights group Public Knowledge."
Tuff. (Score:2, Interesting)
No doubt governments will try to force the printers to incorporate some sort of DRM that will make them refuse to print out a gun, and this will fail just like every other initiative that involves making equipment refuse to do what it's owner wants to use it for.
What a thing to worry about (Score:3, Interesting)
Just as designs are copyrighted now, the designs to create product knock offs with your replicator will also be subject to those same rules. Owning a replicator and building stuff for yourself won't be a problem, but if you upload a design that is essentially a copy of a product, you will get in trouble. Likewise, if you start replicating such goods and distributing them, you will be in trouble.
There really isn't anything new here. The best analogy isn't books or music, but rather stained glass lamps. Artists who design such lampshades guard the IP very aggressively. They prosecute frequently when someone is creating knockoffs. They hand number each sold design to reduce copying. And they add customer-specific details that make it easy to track down leaked designs.
Same thing can be expected with these replicators.
Re:One industry 3D printers are going to destroy.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Well duh (Score:4, Interesting)
Wherever innovation threatens to become ubiquitous and improve civilization and everyday life, you can bet the patent system will be ready to strangle it. That's what it's for.
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Interesting)
I realize you're joking, but I think it's just as likely that 3D printing becomes the death of entire categories of patents.
Re:Tuff. (Score:3, Interesting)
I think it will be more than a few years. RP as it is now is pretty much limited to low melting point plastics and some niche applications with metals/ceramics where you have to machine the finished parts afterwards: basically the surface finish is terrible and the precision is middling.
If you're talking about edged weapons then it's far easier to just make them by hand. If you mean guns, lots of guns, you'll probably need a CNC milling machine. The trouble is if you can afford one of those you can a) just use it to machine the parts from blanks, or b) just use the big wad of cash you have to go and buy a gun on the black market - assuming you can't buy one legally.
As for your point on DRM I agree: even if people are incapable of designing the simplest of guns (probably generally true), someone may release a design without DRM just for lulz or simply strip the DRM from an existing design for even more lulz.
To throw in my two penneth, 3D scanners go hand-in-hand with RP machines (they're a lot better though) and unlike copying a bank note there would be nothing to stop one filing off any marks that would prevent digitising. Given an adequate 3D printer, a decent 3D scanner and a gun you could probably roll off as many as you want, assuming no-one came knocking to ask what you needed all those bags of metal powder for.
As an aside, when I looked at RP machines I realised that precision would improve with time as a matter of course, I was more interested in finding a machine that didn't require proprietary feedstock. That and being able to get around the problem of casting ceramics - I was quite enamoured of the Toyota(?) adiabatic-ish diesel engine at the time.
Re:Okay... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Tuff. (Score:3, Interesting)
All this implies is that there is still going to be a need for a good mechanic and the need perhaps for resources outside of the realm of what can be directly made by a 3D printer.
There was a toy manufacturer in America (back when such things still were made in America) who made a nearly perfect replica of a Colt .45 handgun out of plastic, complete with plastic bullets. They made hundreds of thousands of these things, and kids who were hooked on Cowboy movies & television shows during the era bought them up and acted like some super-charged John Wayne, sort of like you see in the movie Toy Story.
Anyway, some people with less than honorable intentions discovered that bullets for a real Colt .45 would fit into the chambers of this gun, and the firing mechanism (hammer & trigger) would even work to make it a real gun. It had numerous problems if you wanted to use it for target practice, and there was a tendency for the gun to even blow up in your hand (sending you to the hospital) if you fired the gun, but about 8 times out of 10 times the bullet would leave the gun just like the real thing. It was "good enough" that it was used in a number of bank robberies, and ended up killing a couple of security guards.
If you want to know where the regulations on toy guns come from, it was this incident that started the whole thing. I think something from a 3D printer could easily reproduce this particular toy gun, and getting ammunition for guns isn't all that particularly hard. You could even print out the bullets too, where the trick would be to create the primer & gunpowder with home-made recipes. Obtaining the raw ingredients: sulfer, carbon, and potassium nitrate; aren't all that hard to find, and one of the early sources of KNO3 was manure. In other words, anybody who builds an out-house and has access to some wood could also make a bomb. For awhile in London during the 19th Century, people were actually paid to have their septic system cleaned out for nitrate production, or at least not charged for the service.
I agree it would be a complex process and take somebody with some real initiative, but a basic knowledge of chemistry is all it would really take if you cared. Many 3D printers are also capable of producing metal parts too, or you could print out a machine lathe and some other machining tools to make the stuff if you were so inclined. It isn't that complicated, and what it would take to stop this is to simply outlaw the ability to be human. Somehow I think that violates some civil rights and some other basic principles there too.
Re:Worried? (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, as with paper printers, the quality you get from a rapid prototyping machine tends to be directly proportional to the cost of the machine and the materials. Most rapid prototyping technologies can't produce the tight tolerances needed for parts to fit together, or fine features like threads and snap features. In the end, what you get is a rough part that will often need some finish operations. I mean no offense to the team behind the MakerBot and other projects, but the output from those devices is more like a casting than a finished part.
The class of parts for which rapid prototyping is a suitable manufacturing method is very small. Look around you at the stuff you interact with every day: very little of it can be made at any reasonable cost or quality using rapid prototyping.
And even if rapid prototyping, as a technology, could produce quality imitations of common parts, it only becomes an issue when the technology becomes ubiquitous. I don't mean when every half-assed machine shop has one; I mean when every household has one just like they have a inkjet or laser printer. Even then, I doubt that we'll see much impact, because the cost of the materials will still be high (think of the cost of paper and ink), and the production time is still very long, compared to how things are mass produced today. The cost to duplicate and transmit a CAD model may be low, but the costs to create that CAD model and manipulate it are relatively high, and it still costs a lot, in time and material, to produce it in the real world. When it comes to physical parts, there isn't any comparison to an iPod holding 10,000 CDs' worth of music.
Do people think that music piracy would have taken off if everyone still used CD players, blank CD-Rs cost $5/ea, a music ripping computer cost $2,000, and CD-burners were limited to 0.5x speed? The ubiquity of (paper) printers and the easy availability of soft copies of books hasn't meant that book binders are going out of business. The physical book industry is hurting, true, but not because huge numbers of people are printing off their own pirated copy of the latest best-seller.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe the cost of these printers and their materials will drop like a stone, just as it did for desktop printers. I really doubt it, however.
Not quite (Score:5, Interesting)
the patent system will be ready to strangle it. That's what it's for.
Instead of speculating on other people's motives from your own subjective viewpoint, why not simply observe the reality of the situation?
Fact: the patent system increases the net worth of those with the resources to exploit the system. Patent law is a weapon used to eliminate competitors. Those who have the money to exploit this weapon are rewarded with large returns on the investment.
Fact: the patent system increases the net worth of the business of government, both in revenue and power over the people. It costs billions per year to run this system. Each lawsuit rakes more money through the business of government. From the bottom looking up, it's a waste. From the top looking down, it's an opportunity.
Conclusion: the patent system is a tool for the elite -- both in the "private" and "public" sectors -- used to guarantee and increase their profits. The strangling of innovation isn't a goal here, but merely "collateral damage".
Re:Sue everybody solution (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mafiaa all over again! (Score:1, Interesting)
You're missing the point. Nobody really cares about others using their ideas, their patents or anything.
They're doing *something* that'll make the suers less money. Hence, they get sued. Same happened (with success, sadly) over the past hundreds of years. There was this church thing that limited the creativity of everybody because it might cut into their income, there was a handweavers guild that lobbied to forbid Toyoda weaving machines, there were people claiming cd / floppy / tape copying kills their income stream, and now this is people complaining that they can't ask people to pay for what they can do themselves anymore.
So yes, it's completely ratonal that murder weapons aren't being sued. Not until there's money to be made from not kililng people.
Re:Sue everybody solution (Score:4, Interesting)
Philosophically, I think money should be made for performing work, including intellectual work. If you didn't find a company who would pay you to invent the mega-spoon, you did that work for free. You aren't entitled to anything but recognition that you came up with it first.
The work and cost of *making* a mega-spoon is something you can be paid for if anyone wants one and can't be bothered to perform that work themselves. If you can come up with a way to make it better or more cheaply than someone else, that's where you ought to make your money.
But wait, you say, there is no way to make billions in that hypothetical world of yours. Giganormous ultra-centralized production (do I hear monopoly?) is almost impossible for simple products with large markets. How can you buy lobbyists and governments? If there's a market, production will tend to be local... It will create more jobs overall, these jobs will have a healthy competing market for labour: mega-spoon makers in Michigan don't pay you enough? Move to another maker somewhere else...
Anyway, I'm sure there's a rational argument for an IP centralized world too but as we tend toward one in our current reality, I'm not convinced by it. I'd accept a compromise like putting a pretty short expiration date on all IP. A song/movie is usually only a big hit for a few months, why should copyrights last decades? Bands/artists should be paid to *perform*: either write new stuff, go on tour or go back to being poor. If you can't offset the cost of your patented idea within the first couple years, you aren't innovating right.
Re:Worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
I have heard about some attempts to do some 3D printing of simple integrated circuits... essentially something like the early 7400 series chips. It might be nice to be able to print out a couple 7402 circuits or something similar. There would be some advantage to that, even if a good programmable logic chip of some kind is likely to give you much better performance at a fraction of the cost for any kind of complex circuit.
As far as Lego bricks, I think any sort of patent has experied on them, although there may still be copyright & trademark protections to worry about. As long as you don't claim they are Legos (selling under a different brand) you are likely to be safe to make your own bricks in that way. Some of the more speciailized bricks for the fancy models might have patent protection, but not the basic stackable brick.
As for how much money you will save making your own bricks, I would think that Lego could use scales of economy to undercut any cost savings by making a brick with a 3-D printer, at least for awhile. If it is cheaper to print them, that only shows the profit margin that the company has making them, and something easily fixed.
I'm not saying that such a cost savings is always going to be the case, and 3D printers may get cheap enough to mass produce stuff like Lego bricks to be cheaper than other manufacturing processes, but that seems unlikely in the near future.
Re:Worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
This is also where an "open source" type fabrication model would be even more beneficial, as you would have some people with a little bit of expertise in the area that would look at this bracket and perhaps make some minor tweaks to the design (which would move it out of any patent claims because it is a different part) and make a bracket that would hold out much, much longer including suggested materials that are different than the "planned obsolescence" parts designed to deliberately fall apart.
Then again that sort of "aftermarket" design approach would really get car manufacturers worried too.
Re:Worried? (Score:4, Interesting)
I built one of the MakerBot plastic 3D printers (from the kit). I can print LEGO blocks without a problem (not that I would though, I've got far more important things to build like plastic prototypes before I send the SketchUp file off to be milled from a piece of steel/aluminum).
Re:Worried? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most of the machine shops near where I live right now have 3D printers to make the rough blanks for whatever it is that they are working with. They will print the part and then take it to a lathe or some other machine to do some final milling, but they are already using the process to speed up the fabrication process for more obscure parts. The high precision tolerances aren't necessary in every dimension for every part, and a 3D printer sometimes will provide more consistency for some aspects that traditional machining methods don't always perform.
I can find analogs to this with early CD-R recorders and the expensive blanks like you were talking about here. When blank CD-Rs cost about $5 each (about the upper limit I ever saw, and that was usually just the retail price in a computer store... even then wholesale costs were cheaper) it was still at a price point that a small garage band could burn a copy of their music and hand them out to fans, friends, and perhaps make a little bit of money on the side. It took somebody who was skilled with the equipment to make the CD recordings, but it did happen. That is pretty much where 3D printing is right now.
The problem is that the 3D printers used by these machine shops typically cost in the tens of thousands of dollars range, not just a couple thousand. It also takes more technical skills to use the stuff produced by these printers including access to some more specialized tools as the part coming straight off the printer isn't being used all of the time. Perhaps this will eventually get fixed and the resolution for the "voxels" (3D equivalent of a pixel) will improve over time. I've seen that with 2D scanning technology and printing, so I see that as a definite possibility.
Re:Solution --- only distribute files for PD thing (Score:5, Interesting)
Even more fun than blueprints: http://www.cncguns.com/projects/1911a1frame.html [cncguns.com]
That's right, complete CNC files. No need to translate the blueprints and drawings into instruction lists. And light-duty CNC mills can be had for under $10k new. Sure, that sounds like a lot of money, but how many people have two or three times that in a bass boat? If machinework is your hobby, you can have your "3D printer" right now, and it'll make real metal objects, not plastic toys.
God, I love living in the future!
What about keys? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm surprised no one seems to have mentioned this yet. A lot of keys who's primary copy protection is specialized blanks would suddenly become as easy to copy as a standard house key. Sure integrating an electronic component would deter that, but that's many billions of locks that would need to be upgraded. I wouldn't be surprised if this is killed on some shaky legal grounds as it is an opportunity for an easy-out from this problem.
Re:Worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
I think I am more looking towards the advent of holodeck type work than 3D printers though (and no, I don't mean on the level of Star Trek, but perhaps more along the lines of Paycheck or Minority Report).
Re:Worried? (Score:3, Interesting)
The first DVD recorder that I had access to had a serial number of three digits and cost about $10k. The salesman I talked to at the time said it was one of the first ones sold in the Western USA. The blanks at the time cost the company I was working for about $10 each. There was no mention in terms of the number of discs it would produce, but we had contracts in hand to mass produce DVDs once we had the original data formatted properly to make them for about $1 each in quantities of about 1000 and suggestions that price would go down considerably from there.
I wrote the authoring system being used to make those discs at the time, which is one of the reasons why I had access to such early technology. I don't know if some GST tax or some other costs involved in terms of UK sales, but that at least was my own experience.
The problem here is that I don't see the price dropping as significantly for 3D printers. The Fab@Home printer costs roughly $2k (about 1K GBP, give or take some) and that price has been pretty steady. It also has some strong limitations and most of the stuff created with that printer is mostly plastic stuff or some pastries being done with frosting. The printers that work with metal are still in the tens of thousands of dollars range, and haven't really dropped much in price.