3D Printing May Face Legal Challenges

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."

Comments

Re:Okay...

[migla]

Yeah.

Now, I don't remember if bringing up Cory Doctorow is a good or bad idea, but he's written the short "Printcrime" that would be relevant to this topic:

http://craphound.com/?p=573

Re:Worried?

[VolciMaster]

I want a AR-15 full-auto sear and selector assembly, and it seems like it would be way less risky to make one then to buy one.

If 3D printers printed metal, that may be true. Of course, some of the now-entry-level "home" CNC machines can do this

Re:Worried?

[Carnivore]

There are actually 3D printers that can do metal, with a sintering process.

http://www.shapeways.com/about/metal-3d-printing

Re:What a thing to worry about

[smellsofbikes]

Yes those panics were silly, but a Star Trek style replicator would create a gigantic social upheaval, physical tokens of value such as gold and cash would be essentially worthless. The only things left to trade would be time and talent. Now that I think about it, the "gigantic social upheaval" might be a GoodThing(TM)...

If you feel like reading some cool old science fiction, the George O. Smith collection "Venus Equilateral" has a series of stories about exactly this: the hero manages to make (by mistake, as it happens, because they're busy trying to solve a related problem) a matter duplicator that can flawlessly reproduce masterpieces of art, food, whatever, and society pretty much collapses as everyone has to figure out how to become service industry personnel just so they have something to do. There's a resolution of sorts when the engineers who built the machine come up with a way to make things somewhat like batteries, that are in an energetically non-equilibrium state that the matter duplicator, being purely matter-centric, can't duplicate, and using that as money to get a trade system going again, but there's still a huge change in how society is run.

Neal Stephenson also dealt with this somewhat in "Diamond Age" but swept a lot of it under the carpet by essentially saying that you got charged money for building stuff with your matter compiler and somehow there was a verifiable difference between original items and duplicated ones, so maybe he was positing matter compilers that print flawed, detectable copies much like current laser printers add yellow dots to their printouts making them traceable. Since it seems to be working pretty well for laser printers, it's likely something similar would happen with fabricators if/when we get to the point they can print usable mechanical stuff.