Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing), Gun Control, and Patent Law

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Additive Manufacturing (3D Printing), Gun Control, and Patent Law

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @05:01AM from the if-we-outlaw-printers-then-only-outlaws-will-have-printers dept.

retroworks writes "J.D. Tuccille of the conservative think tank Reason Foundation discusses last week's news about the first working 3D-printed gun. According to the original article, the partly plastic '.22-caliber pistol, formed from a 3D-printed AR-15 (M16) lower receiver, and a normal, commercial upper' fired 200 rounds without any sign of wear and tear. Tuccille takes the discovery in the direction of politically topical gun control. '...the development makes it clear that a wide range of bans, restrictions and prohibitions are becoming increasingly unenforcable.' But in my mind, this example of additive-manufacturing technology raises even more questions about patent law enforcement. Will 3D printing be to the Anti-gray-market-alliance what online porn became to neighborhood blue laws?"

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Already happening by jmorris42 · 2012-07-31 05:03 · Score: 5, Insightful

This fight is already happening. What do ya think the whole war over software patents boils down to? Is it a patentable machine or a copyrightable expression in code? Well soon it will be everything is downloadable and where is the line? That is the heart of this argument in a nutshell.

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Democrat delenda est
1. Re:Already happening by oakgrove · 2012-07-31 07:25 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  If you're making millions and millions of widgets that are simple enough to be printed on a Maker Bot, your R&D cost per unit is infinitesimal. Listen, I love the idea of making things at home but it isn't going to replace mass production even a little bit. What it will do is allow people to unleash their creativity. That's the real point so many other people are missing.
  
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  The soylentnews experiment has been a dismal failure.
2. Re:Already happening by nospam007 · 2012-07-31 08:01 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  "They may pass laws forbidding the possession of 3D printers that aren't licensed, like unregistered handguns and fully-automatic firearms. Possessing/using an unlicensed/unauthorized 3D printer would result in a lengthy prison term and huge fines."
  The rich have done this with millstones for centuries. Peasants had to bring the corn to the Lord's mill and he sent his brute squad to find and destroy any 'illegal' millstones.
The UK has some lead time on this by EdgePenguin · 2012-07-31 05:06 · Score: 5, Insightful

As guns are far more strictly controlled over here, and as such you can't obtain the parts that you can't home make, this doesn't really apply to the UK or other countries that don't have everybody armed to the teeth.
...but its only a matter of time really. I actually like gun control laws, but I can't see any way they can be enforced, long term, in light of this kind of technology - without banning the technology outright, which would be like banning home computers in the 1970s. Obviously, the people who have a stake in selling people stuff they may be able to manufacture themselves in the near future are going to love this. Moral panics are always useful for promoting a ruthless, rent seeking economic agenda, as the debate over digital rights has shown.
1. Re:The UK has some lead time on this by Attila+Dimedici · 2012-07-31 05:23 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Improvised firearms have been made by pure amateurs for years. The fact of the matter is that most people don't want a gun bad enough to take the risks involved in making their own. However, the whole problem with gun control laws is that people who want a gun for criminal purposes aren't really bothered by those risks (they want the gun to reduce the risk of an already high risk activity).
  
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  The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
2. Re:The UK has some lead time on this by vlm · 2012-07-31 05:30 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  Doing it with a machine shop requires time, skill, and more importantly a machine shop.
  As a guy with a machine shop, rest assured it doesn't require much of the above.
  If you want minimum weight, maximum reliability, all kinds of nifty features including safeties and such, OR if you want to make a precise exact working replica of a historical piece accurate to the tiniest detail, then it takes huge time, skill, and tools.
  But if you're just trying to make what amounts to a short range inaccurate "zip gun" or little more than a shotgun, its trivial, you don't need a "shop". An imaginative plumber can figure something out without a "shop" or gunsmithing skills.
  The AR-15 aspect is important to those who know anything about the law or gunsmithing (I know just enough about both to be dangerous). There is no single part of a gun that screams "gun" so the legal types selected the receiver, which in most guns is a great decision, HOWEVER the AR-15 lower receiver is a not terribly difficult part to make.
  Making a AR-15 lower is pretty easy (well, compared to making a upper, or a barrel). Making a lower is, legally, making a gun. The hard parts to make are everything that bolts onto a lower. Therefore its really easy to "make a AR-15".
  I'm just a hack of a machinist but if I wanted I could easily make a lower on my CNC mill. There is no way in hell, no way, not gonna happen that I could make a barrel from scratch, thats basically impossible for a guy at home. Making a bolt, bolt carrier or chamber would be right around the absolute peak of my skill on my best day in the shop ever.
  
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  "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
3. Re:The UK has some lead time on this by EdgePenguin · 2012-07-31 05:32 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  You don't hear home-made firearms being used in crimes much - I'm guessing because the discipline required to make something of high enough quality that it can stand firing a bullet is not normally found in the same individual as the kind of impulsiveness normally required to commit a violent crime.
  The issue here is the possibility of obtaining firearms with no requirement for discipline, training, patience, or anything else that might lower a chances person of using that firearm in anger.
4. Re:The UK has some lead time on this by Anonymous Coward · 2012-07-31 05:43 · Score: 5, Informative
  
  You don't because you, along with the rest of Slashdot, live in and pay exclusive attention to, first world countries. This 3D printed gun thing has set off a spate of gun control articles with the attendant hand wringing and claims that people will now be enabled to perpetrate all sorts of violence.
  Meanwhile hundreds of people will be killed this week throughout the middle east and most of Africa with guns that were made in a tent by someone with no formal training in machining, who probably can't read or write, and has never seen even a conventional printer let alone a 3D one. He'll make a dozen AK 47s today and tomorrow and so on until someone kills him or he has to pack up and flee or some similar thing. This has been going on like this for dozens of years. When I was stationed in Africa the bulk of AKs we recovered after fights were made in part or often in whole, in country in the manner described above. An important factor in the design of the AK was that it could be made that way.
  But continue on fretting someone printing an AR lower.
5. Re:The UK has some lead time on this by nschubach · 2012-07-31 05:48 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  I'm pretty pro-gun, but you don't hear of them using homemade weapons because machines weapons are generally easy to get. If they were not, people would be building more pipe bombs and other easy to assemble/deploy weapons. In countries where guns are not as prevalent people resort to other tools to perform crimes. Sadly, as much as guns are portrayed as deadly, other homemade weapons can be far more deadly.
  
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  Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
Re:Why like that? by rufty_tufty · 2012-07-31 05:20 · Score: 5, Insightful

You've got me thinking, could we somehow apply market forces to laws. Only the fittest survive.
I've heard it suggested that there should be a maximum number of laws allowed (and if you want to pass a new one you have to repeal old ones).
How can you have law when it is not possible for even a specialist in the subject to know all the laws and how to apply them correctly. Does not the fact that a lawyer can be a specialist in one area but yet still not know if a law applies to someone not ring that something is fundamentally wrong with the system?
The fact that I am subject to laws that I cannot reasonably be expected to know about sickens me. I can be legitimately expected to be doing illegal things through no fault of my own.
How does that not remove respect for the law?

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"The weirdest thing about a mind, is that every answer that you find, is the basis of a brand new cliche" -
Could shake things up by Experiment+626 · 2012-07-31 05:34 · Score: 5, Insightful

Gun control is to the second amendment what censorship is to the first. These are authoritarian push-backs against the Bill of Rights giving people "too much" freedom. The Internet has shown what happens to such restrictive efforts once an enabling technology is introduced to the masses.