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.
**I would support lynching of the first scam artist who seriously proposes that farmers should pay an IP fee for every carrot he produces.**
Start boiling the rope: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plant_breeders%27_rights
I think it’s a reasonable deal to spur development of new varieties—you come up with a new variety, you can profit off your work for 20-25 years, after which it becomes the property of all mankind.
***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.***
EXACTLY. I’m in the publishing trade and we depend on both a) intellectual property to grant us exclusive rights to the books we write and b) the public domain to reprint stuff that has been forgotten. It works very very well. Something similar needs to be worked out with digital files or no one will produce anything.
Used to be that every year we could count on new stuff being available for us to print from the public domain without a rights search. The new copyright law stopped that dead in its tracks.
bkmk
“Believe it or not, it’s quite easy to enforce copyright laws not despite technology, but because of it.”
You’re speaking of technology as it is, not as it will be. People are already developing ideas for 3-d printers that will be able to print new 3-d printers. When things like that become commonplace, then the industry will be cut out of the loop, because any individual will be able to create the means of production themselves, bypassing any built-in security measures easily.
Now, it may be that the industry can adapt and convince people to keep buying their product instead of just duplicating it themselves, if they are able to make purchasing the product more convenient, or offer some additional services along with the product that the consumer won’t get if they just copy it. Those are the kinds of adaptations that are going to be necessary for industries to stay competitive in the future, not cracking down harder and harder on pirates in what is destined to be a losing battle.
It’s not just businesses like yours that are losing because of the extended copyrights, it’s the everyday common person too. If the laws had always been this way, then schools couldn’t put on productions of “Peter Pan”, and kids wouldn’t be learning Beethoven and Mozart from their piano teachers. Our cultural development is now being stunted because we are blocking the absorption of old innovations by the common man.
“Even the best art gallery security systems can be cracked. Yet, most people do not think it’s okay for clever thieves to break into art galleries, and carry out whatever they want.”
No, but most people do think it’s perfectly fine to walk into the art gallery, pull out their cell phone, and take a high-res digital picture of the Mona Lisa, and there isn’t much the art gallery can do about it.
Right. We started out as the everyday common person: me with my dad’s Mac and a desktop publishing program retyping and laying out old books that hadn’t been republished in hundreds of years—or sometimes ever.
One thing this business has taught me is how much forgotten knowledge, wisdom, and art is stored away in old decaying books. If we don’t recommit these things to paper every couple generations or so, they are easily lost to the ravages of time.
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?
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You are 100% right. Affordable 3D printing is an absolute revolution. It is simply wrong to limit it.
Blame somebody in the Republic of Venice, before Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
You realize the British crown introduced the monopoly privilege of patents to exact rents from producers in return for securing their monopoly, right?
Those “state sponsord monopolies” are social compacts between inventors and society and necessary for technological progress.
They're only necessary to impart monopolistic profits on those with the most lawyers these days. I imagine you're aware of the term 'patent trolling'.
Who will invest in invention if their inventions can be stolen, and how can you prevent such theft without laws?
People who want to profit from production, which is what creates wealth. Look at the all the choices in touch screen phones, and this despite the patent wars which do nothing but enrich legions of lawyers at the expense of society who must ultimately bear this cost. Does Apple not have an advantage in being first to market? Can they not charge a premium well in excess of their cost by virtue of their innovation?
Society benefits from production, not measures that curtail production.
I'm saying there is no property right to an idea. Ideas are not analogous to real property. If I make use of the property of your house, you consequently are denied that use. If I make use of the idea that 2+2=4, you are denied nothing.
The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property. - Locke
One can claim to have discovered an idea, but one cannot remove an idea from Nature and make it their own. An idea exists for all, it has no scarcity, except that artificially imposed by monopoly grants from the State. Such artificial scarcity impedes adoption, adaption, implementation, and production, with negative consequences for society by impeding the creation of wealth.
Taylor Swift makes lots and lots and lots and lots of money.
It’s worse than that.
If a farmer’s organic corn crop is contaminated by Monsanto’s GM corn pollen, Monsanto will sue the farmer.
And win.
Oh crap.
They taught them about sex.
We're doomed!
Society benefits when innovators benefit.
By allowing, nay, encouraging, wholesale theft of new ideas, by making it impossible for anyone to profit from their own ideas, you remove any practical incentive for creating and spreading them.
Personal satisfaction is great, but it doesn’t feed the kids.
I'm saying there is no property right to an idea.
Directive 10-289:Your idea of a workers paradise?In the name of the general welfare, to protect the people’s security, to achieve full equality and total stability, it is decreed for the duration of the national emergency that:
Point Three. All patents and copyrights, pertaining to any devices, inventions, formulas, processes and works of any nature whatsoever, shall be turned over to the nation as a patriotic emergency gift by means of Gift Certificates to be signed voluntarily by the owners of all such patents and copyrights. The Unification Board shall then license the use of such patents and copyrights to all applicants, equally and without discrimination, for the purpose of eliminating monopolistic practices, discarding obsolete products and making the best available to the whole nation. No trademarks, brand names or copyrighted titles shall be used. Every formerly patented product shall be known by a new name and sold by all manufacturers under the same name, such name to be selected by the Unification Board. All private trademarks and brand names are hereby abolished.
Got it...
Now you’re just rationalizing — and you know it.
BTW, you can’t take a digital hi-res photo of the Mona Lisa; unless you have pre-arranged permission, and pay a fee.
Not the same thing now, is it? Inventors invent and everyone benefits. The monopolies granted by the crown benefited only the friends of the crown.
They're only necessary to impart monopolistic profits on those with the most lawyers these days. I imagine you're aware of the term 'patent trolling'.
In my business I have protected more small businesses from big business IP thieves than you can imagine, so again you're ignorant.
People who want to profit from production, which is what creates wealth
Creation and innovation also create wealth. Without invention there would be no cell phones, would there.
Society benefits from production, not measures that curtail production.
Society also benefits from rewarding invention, and the debate is long over on this issue.
You have no idea of what you speak.
By the way, our entire patent system is based on Locke's philosophies
One can claim to have discovered an idea, but one cannot remove an idea from Nature and make it their own.
And, FYI, laws of nature are not patentable. Never have been in the US system.
Monsanto is a major douche with this issue, but ironically they are being sued by the organic farmers for contamination of organic crops.
Appeal 12-1298 to be heard before the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit. Briefs were filed a few weeks ago. I, as a patent attorney, am rooting for the organic farmers. From their brief:
'Plaintiffs' real and concrete injury here is the present invasion of their right to use their property. Some of the Plaintiffs have been forced to forgo planting certain crops that are vulnerable to contamination while others have been forced to adopt expensive genetic testing of their products. These injuries could not be more “concrete” and “actual,” as required by Lujan. They are not in any way “hypothetical.” Plaintiffs are not worried about “some day” having to forgo full use of their land. That day has already come. Likewise, Plaintiffs are not worried about “some day” having to adopt expensive genetic testing. That day, too, is here.'
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