DRM Could Come To 3D Printers

another random user sends this excerpt from TorrentFreak: "Downloading a car – or a pair of sneakers – will be entirely possible, although Ford and Nike won't be particularly happy if people use their designs to do so. A new patent, issued this week by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and titled 'Manufacturing control system', describes a system whereby 3D printer-like machines (the patent actually covers additive, subtractive, extrusion, melting, solidification, and other types of manufacturing) will have to obtain authorization before they are allowed to print items requested by the user. In a nutshell, a digital fingerprint of 'restricted items' will be held externally and printers will be required to compare the plans of the item they're being asked to print against those in a database. If there's a match, printing will be disallowed or restricted."

Comments

Or, is someone patenting it

[hsmith]

So, no one else can patent it, thus disabling "DRM" authorization?

I won't hold my breath.

Kill 'em while their young

[betterunixthanunix]

We can't have disruptive technologies that force us to change how we monetize creativity! Let's make the technologies useless, cumbersome, and expensive, so that later on we can claim they were never really worth what everyone thought!

Oh, and did I mention how terrible it is that we failed to do it with the automobile:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_laws

Re:Shouldn't be patentable

[Joce640k]

You can always rotate it and add a few snap-off tabs to fool the DRM.

You could even make two objects at once, joined by a bit of removable plastic. Let's see how the algorithm copes...