Makerbot's Replicator 2 is among the new cadre of highly capable, low-cost 3D printers fueling a 3D content boom. (Source: Makerbot)
Posted on 10/31/2012 7:20:42 PM PDT by null and void
The consumer 3D printing revolution is coming. That is, of course, if you fully buy into the potential of dozens of startups rolling out increasingly lower-cost 3D printer units along with a burgeoning community of 3D content tool providers, service bureaus, and even retail shops promising to push this technology to the next level.
Caught up in the enthusiasm, thousands, maybe even millions, of hobbyists, do-it-yourself entrepreneurs, and practicing engineers are experimenting with the new 3D print capabilities, churning out 3D designs for everything from coffee cups to iPhone covers to more serious engineered goods like furniture and industrial parts. They are actively sharing their 3D designs on communities like Thingiverse, Cubify.com, and Shapeways, and are anxiously anticipating a time when you find nearly anything you want modeled in 3D and effortlessly print out a copy on your home-based printer, no muss, no fuss, no expensive markup to cover manufacturing costs.
Makerbot's Replicator 2 is among the new cadre of highly capable, low-cost 3D printers fueling a 3D content boom. (Source: Makerbot)
Well, not so fast. There are huge intellectual property and digital rights issues at stake with this scenario. Remember when the music industry, fed up with all the free file-sharing on Napster, started cracking down on regular folks downloading and happily exchanging their copious libraries of free music? It makes sense that beyond the community of happy-to-share 3D enthusiasts will be an even larger pool of 3D content owners (think manufacturers of goods, perhaps) that will eventually call for similar copyright protections to protect what they view as their critical IP assets.
Enter Nathan Myhrvold, former chief technology officer at Microsoft, and the head of Intellectual Ventures, a company promoting what it calls innovation marketplace services, including amassing a huge portfolio of patents. Apparently, Intellectual Ventures thinks there's opportunity in IP protection in the 3D printing market. It has recently been issued a patent by the US Patent & Trademark Office entitled "manufacturing control system," which appears to be technology that delivers on the idea of digital rights management for 3D printing. In addition to additive manufacturing, the patent includes use of digital files in extrusion, ejection, stamping, die casting, and other processes, essentially comprising the range of 3D printing technologies.
The broad patent reportedly covers a copy-protection system that creates a digital wrapper around the 3D design files used by 3D printers, ensuring that the proper permissions are in place and potential licensing fees paid up before the 3D model can be printed out. Of course, there's no guarantee that 3D manufacturers or 3D content tool providers will embrace this or any other digital rights management model. But I suppose it's a sign of market potential, perhaps even maturation, that people are starting to think about the harder issues, including how intellectual property protection applies to 3D printing. Let the games begin.
3-D printer ping.
So long as we control the data on our computers, no amount of DRM or inventive copyrights is going to deter, much less prevent people cracking the protections and printing out whatever they want. Thinking otherwise shows a fundamental lack of technical understanding that the author should’ve had before sitting down at the keyboard.
Sorry - it’s a pet peeve.
SFL...this topic fascinates me....
If the designer charges a reasonable rate why would you go through all that bother just to screw him out of getting paid for his work?
Do you crack the copy protection on a 99¢ song you download from iTunes?
This is like trying to DRM the wheel for crying out loud...
Protecting your intellectual property rights by beating up on computer users is not as good as making lots of money.
Yawn. Another nail in the coffin of the intellectual property mafia.
A real information age won’t happen until the idiocy of IP law is abandoned.
This is going to be a very interesting battle between patents and the ability to create items with 3D. This could be the battle of the century.
This 3D technology is an exceptional advancement and will test the previous standings in court. Gong to be fun watching though...
Yes, that’s absolutely true. The entire concept of Intellectual Property is a relatively recent one, which was made tenable by technology in the first place, and it is now in the process of being made untenable by technology.
You cannot “copyright” something until technology makes it possible to easily copy a thing, and those copyrights are only enforceable while the means to copy the thing are limited and controllable. So, a realistic assessment means that IP is a transitive phenomenon that will gradually have to be abandoned as our technology advances. Of course, since there is money involved, we will struggle to preserve the concept long after it is outdated, no matter how foolish that is.
Yep. The way to insure people do their best work is to make sure they never get paid.
I bet you think food should be free too.
Karl Marx would approve.
A reasonable rate is irrelevant, if the "designer" is simply a common idea predator. Ideas can't be 'copyrighted'; only the implementation of the idea.
Can you imagine scam artists 'copyrighting' the perfect sphere and demanding royalties from ball bearing manufacturers for the shape? That would be absurd.
How about bolt and machine screw threads?
How about independently written programs?
How about arithmetic?
This has generated into the absurd!
I believe you can blame it on Benjamin Franklin, his concept of a temporary legal monopoly on a new ides is the very engine that drove America wealth.
Now even FReepers want artists, engineers and programers to work for free for the collective.
*sigh*
Gold bars made of Tungsten.
Don't be silly.
Growing food is not a copyrightable 'idea', and it involves significant labor and materials to effectuate.
I would support lynching of the first scam artist who seriously proposes that farmers should pay an IP fee for every carrot he produces.
The pursuit of the buck creates some really moronic attempts to abuse the qualities of being human.
Don't be silly.
Growing food is not a copyrightable 'idea', and it involves significant labor and materials to effectuate.
I would support lynching of the first scam artist who seriously proposes that farmers should pay an IP fee for every carrot he produces.
The pursuit of the buck creates some really moronic attempts to abuse the qualities of being human.
I guess we should close all our engineering colleges, everything useful has already been invented.
Hollywood, software publishers, authors and others (think lawyers for presumed "creatives") have extended their rights via lengthened term, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, and such legal precedents are enforced presence of recorded media "in the tray" as videos are played (subverting innovation in the category of multimedia players and servers, for example).
The last two decades have seen the erosion of consumer rights in favor of creatives, changing the equilibrium of over a hundred years of copyright interests between innovators and consumers.
Historical copyright laws allowed for an equilibrium between innovators and consumers, allowing innovators a certain length of time in which to exploit their innovations, after which, reversions of such rights back into the public domain would allow others free access to those earlier innovations and all rights to build upon them.
With recent copyright law changes, however, consumers have lost mobility up the wealth ladder, in favor of vested interests extending their hegemony on intellectual property wealth.
These are onerous developments, not to be lauded.
HF
No, I just don’t support laws enforcing arbitrary supply limits on ideas, which in reality are infinitely reproducible intangible goods.
IP is against free-market principles.
Whereas creating a novel, useful and non-obvious idea involves no effort, no materials, no education, no experience, takes no time and deserves no reward.
And for God's sake, the effort involved in making it possible for anyone to make a part is especially deserving of contempt, if not out-right punishment!
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