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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."
because it's bloody obvious.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
So, no one else can patent it, thus disabling "DRM" authorization?
I won't hold my breath.
This will require significant bandwidth and processing power, especially to stop circumvention by rotating scaling, cutting (for later assembly) or adding or subtracting insignificant features. This bandwidth and processing power will add significant cost, which I see as fortunate in that it will be a competitive disadvantage for DRM enabled printers.
for rectangles with rounded corners.
a free 3d model of a 3d printer that doesn't have all this crap in it
God, the patent wars are coming to 3d manufacturing. What the heck is the point? I have to check with colgate before I can use my own machine to make myself a custom toothbrush? Is there going to be a DMCA provision for manufacturing at home now? Is it going to be abused like the current process is. I say BULLSHIT!
How can they believe that they can control this in a world where highly advanced 3D printing is possible at home? People will just print their own 3D printers that do not have these restrictions.
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
Palm trees and 8
Looks like the patent protects a technology to implement DRM on printers. So... if you want to implement DRM on your printer, you'll have to pay the owner of this patent licensing fees. Otherwise, no DRM. So, non-DRM printers will be cheaper and more readily available.
Remember guys, a patent is not a law that things must be done this way! It's the opposite -- if things are done this way, you'll have to pay for it.
More likely, this company wants to make money on some future standard that will kill 3D printing. You know, a standard that will be required by law for all 3D printers, which will be so loaded with junk like this that only large industrial operations will be able to use 3D printers. Us little people can buy or rent the products of 3D printers, but to own or operate one in your home will be out of the question.
After all, when we allowed people to have computers in their homes instead of x.25 terminals, look at the disaster that ensued.
Palm trees and 8
do not buy a US made 3D printer, ever.
simple
Now, imagine if there were a 3D printing standard that included this restriction system, and a law (for your safety!) that required all 3D printers to implement the standard. I predict that the standard will create such monstrously bloated 3D printers that only industrial applications will be possible.
Palm trees and 8
All VCRs must be vulnerable to the Macrovision attack, by law. What makes you think that 3D printers won't have a similar problem?
Palm trees and 8
Huh. This is DEFINITELY one of the cases where anyone who reads Sci-Fi knows there's prior art, in the sense of published material describing a system operating in essentially this way. Patent was filed on January 31, 2008... Anyone want to help find stories that mention volumetric printer DRM pre-2008? Cory Doctorow's used the point in several stories - but Makers, at least, wasn't published until 2009. Anything pre-dating? Also, I think I've read an old classic short story that described people surviving a war by use of a synthesis device where they'd disabled the mechanism that prevented the creation of various goods... anyone know what I'm talking about?
This kind of DRM will be about as effective as the copy protection on DVDs or, perhaps, Blu-Ray. That is to say: not very effective at all. Creating machines or software that bypasses this protection will be available to anyone interested not too long after the protection itself has rolled out.
Perhaps the people who have approved decades of "existing idea X, but on a computer" and "existing idea-on-a-computer X, but over the network" claims will decide that "existing idea-on-networked-computers X, but using a 3D printer" claims are where the obviousness line is finally being crossed?
Well *ahem* the solution obviously is to use the excellent Lulzbot AO-100 printer.
On your DRM-enabled 3D printer, 3D-print a DRM-disabled 3D-printer.
Ezekiel 23:20
The idea of downloading and printing a car is absolutely retarded.
Consider what is involved in printing a car that will actually copy a car from a car company.
You will need several tonnes of raw material to feed the printer and thousands of dollars it will cost to buy and ship and store it.
You will need the printer large and robust enough to handle building parts that will weigh at least several hundred pounds and the smallest sized part, which is probably at minimum, enough to print an engine block, transmission, or length of frame of the car. Pretty sure this printer is not going to cost $69.99 at Staples. People thinking they are going to print a copy of a Ford using a bunch of parts that are no bigger than a shoebox are sorely out of touch with reality. You are NEVER going to have some system that print a car from the ground up into some completed and fully functional piece of machinery.
Also consider printing something like a shoe that would be worth wearing. Last I checked my shoes are not made from one material in some unibody design, it contains many components and different types of materials, least of which includes leather which is just not going to be printed out of a machine. I could print something that looks like a shoe, but I am not going to find it enjoyable to wear or as stylish as what Nike is going to sell me.
People seem to think these limitations are going to be improved or resolved in the immediate future, that home 3D printers are just going to get better with time and this will all be magically feasible. People need to apply some basic common sense and actually think of the logistics of what is involved in printing a car at home. The idea of ripping of a $30k car for a few hundred dollars of parts on a home 3D printing system is going to produce something nobody is going to drive in.
Sure, I agree that from an industrial point of view, the ability for one corporation to rip off and steal some other design and the print them in some large multi-million dollar printing system is feasible in the near future, but then why go through all the trouble of ripping off another design when its just as easy to create your own design and build it with this system. I don't think Car Company A is going to get away with making cars that look exactly like Car Company B, fundamentally I have no respect for a company that has to steal someone elses designs. I don't think DRM is required because current patent, trademark, and copyright laws will prevent companies from copying designs verbatim and passing them off as their own.
Some crap industry producing cheap plastic toys or products will be hit hard with home 3D printers, but people got to stop thinking that they are going to have home systems capable reproducing ing ANYTHING with the same quality and standards AND for prices that are significantly cheaper, like Cars or anything else worth owning.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
It's about prior restraint.
If you print something identical to a patented or copyrighted item, you deserve the rights holder's notification and requirement to stop, destroy, and no longer do so. But if you 'own' your printer, and load a file, and it happens to be identical to a protected object, well, you get the same notice, just in advance.
It won't end there.
If you load a file that is 'substantially' identical, DRM will probably work as well as DMCA takedowns are working, which is 'very well for putative rights holders, not well at all for fair use, for example'.
I suspect it will evolve from checking for identical files, to checking for 'very similar', to 'like something else'. Eventually, if I get a sneaker sole file from someone, I'll be unable to print it if it loks 'like' a Nike sole, as in relatively flat, foot-shaped, repeititive design elements on the bottom of it, and intended to perform well on asphalt surfaces. Like all the rest.
Already they want to suppress our ability to print things like firearm lower receivers, under the premise that this is a regulated activity, and you need a license, which in the US is not correct - so long as you are not selling your part either by it self or as part of a working gun. Prior restraint.
This is going to be an important, hugely important fight. We will have to defend our right to create.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
A 3D printer with DRM already exists. There's an "app store" from which you buy designs, and pay per copy. It seems to be aimed at people who want to turn out models of popular-culture objects.
The new thing in this patent is recognizing copies of 3D objects by form, rather than merely having DRM on existing files. This looks like one of Intellectual Ventures' front companies. Note the name and location.
While 3D printing a car is silly, 3D printing replacements for small interior plastic parts is possible now. There are 3D printers big enough to make a car fender, and they're used to make mockups of new car designs.
Anyone here ever run a milling machine? That's a subtractive prototyper.
Apparently they can jack straight into my mind and tell what I'm going to either program on my CNC, or turn handles to make on my manual lathe and mills?
The patent office needs a huge overhaul.
We'd be better off without it and take the position that speed to market of new innovations can keep development income going.
That this is a patent covering 3D printing is a misunderstanding of the patent by TFA. The patent doesn't talk about 3D printers but manufacturing machinery, defined broad enough to include almost anything from CNC machines to casting. They don't have to wait until 3D printers become commonplace, because this patent covers much more.
TL;DR: Moore's law doesn't apply to mechanical manufacturing; the rate of progress in this field is slow and disconnected from the rate of progress in electronics; and "highly advanced 3D printing" won't be possible at home any time in the near future.
Conventional printers are also constrained by mechanical manufacturing. Nonetheless, we've seen a very nice progression from the dot-matrix electromechanical printers of the 1970s to the superphotographic quality of today's cheap inkjet or laser. We thoroughly understood the science involved in both electromechanical impact printing and photographic chemistry. But advances in software and microcontrollers gave us ways to use those technologies more effectively and cheaply, and made practical other technologies that let us do even better. I see no reason to believe that the same thing won't happen with 3D printing.
There is only one way in theory this could work at all and be practical. You'd need the printer itself to essentially just be a mechanical shell of servos, have a good deal of flash and a small ROM onboard with a thin client that dials out to a server to download the bits of the OS it needs as it needs them. You turn it on, chip dials out, authenticates, downloads a minimal OS to non-volatile flash for the current session, and then uses a design authentication phase to check the design file with the server and then, instead of just getting a "Yes" bit sent back the server actually sends back the instruction set necessary to the machine so that it can print just that design, and does so only in small segments, to ensure that a constant internet connection is required throughout the entire manufacturing session for the object to be printed.
From there your printer will do its job, and once the object is done, the thin-client flashes its instruction set and on power-off removes the remaining fragments of its OS. Of course, such a process would likely be so annoying and cumbersome that I can't imagine the entire market adopting it short of Federal law mandating it be done that way. Otherwise all it takes is one person/company to make a regular 3D printer that has all of its software onboard to break that model. Since with the internet being what it is outside of major metro areas why would anyone want to tie the performance of their 3D printer to what could be a spotty connection? It'd be worse than Ubisoft's DRM, and it'd certainly NEED to be, to actually "secure" the maker market.
What is the life of this patent?
Why does this matter - this is a patent NOT a law. All this means is that anyone who wants to implement DRM must pay the patent holder. In effect this is an obstacle to implementing DRM. In fact perhaps this is something people ought to think about. For example if I were the holder of this patent I could presumably set the royalty fee sufficiently high such that nobody could afford to create a printer with DRM effectively blocking DRM for the life of the patent...so I suppose in that case the lifetime would matter because after that anyone could add DRM.
The assignee of this patent is "The Invention Science Fund I, LLC." Sounds like a zany R&D lab, right?
Wrong.
They appear to be a law firm specializing in patent law. I smell an up-and-coming patent troll.
Porquoi?