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Staples To Offer 3D Printing Services
An anonymous reader writes "Mcor and Staples announced today a deal in which Mcor will supply their paper-based 3D printers to Staples Copy Centers worldwide. Staples customers will be able to upload their 3D model and pick up the printed object at their local copy center. The rollout starts in The Netherlands and Belgium in 1Q 2013 and then opens up in other countries."
I'm gonna print me a woman!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
This isn't a problem that differs in any meaningful way between 3D printing traditional 2D printing.
If you want to know specifics about such policies, just Google the terms and conditions for a big-box-store photolab near you.
But, as an anecdote: I used to work in such a photolab, and it was very subjective. We would refuse to print images that made us uneasy because they were grotesque or sexual (although we always did give the negatives back, which always remain property of the customer).
If child porn was discovered, or any thing else blatantly illegal, police would have obviously been involved (we didn't have this issue during my tenure there).
We would refuse to duplicate images that appeared to be professionally done, unless the customer signed a copyright waiver or the image appeared to be old enough that the copyright must have expired.
Exceptions were made: If the customer themselves was a professional photographer and the work appeared to be their own (we had a few of them who used our shop for negative processing and proofs on a very regular basis), we'd do the work.
It was made clear to us that the impetus for judging things things correctly was our own, and that we would be personally responsible for the store's share of any wrong-doing that came from our printing efforts. And I think our guesses were pretty accurate: When you see thousands of different photographs every day for 8 hours (and see each one of them at least twice), anything unique that deserves further scrutiny is immediately obvious.
And again, I don't see how any of this would be different when printing an AR-15 lower (although the plastic one sounds scary enough, and Staples is doing 3D prints with paper!), or a particular rounded rectangle. In very real terms: If it looks iffy, they'll either distance themselves from it, or require verification that you're allowed to print what you're trying to print.
Kid-proof tablet..
Vaugeries of "derivative works"...
I imagine somebody who does miniatures gettng sued by WotC because the female spellcaster he digitally modeled and tried to have printed would compete with authorized minis produced by their partners, and simply being a mini of a popular type would simply be "too close to permit" in their opinion.
The print shop would prohibit production of such items until the legal issue was settled, and in that time, legitimate self-made models would be denied reproduction.
That's a very specific use case, but it could just as easily be miniature cars (like hotwheels), self-sculpted action figures of generic types, and other "hot selling" physical goods items.
For some people in business, "derivative work" has nothing to do whatsoever with a specific item in a product lineup, and has much more in common with a nebulous and poorly defined "category" of items in a product lineup. That is why somebody making a miniature AC Cobra in the hotwheels form factor, using meticulously made measurements and shape editing, might be slapped with a cease and desist from hotwheels company, with them insisting on the name of baby jesus, gandhi, mother theresa, and all the saints that the model in question is a derivative work, and not an independent piece of authorship. (I am just picking on hotwheels rhetorically. No libelous intent is to be assumed here.)
I have had similar problems when trying to get silly one-off posters printed at print shops, that were of my own design, and which were made with royalty free sources. The poster "looking too professional", as another poster earlier asserted, always resulted in failing to have them printed. When the printhouse assumes that you are abusing copyright, and you do all your work under a fictitious pseudonym like I do, you just get fucked. You can't prove you are said fictitious psuedonym to their satisfaction, and you can't easily prove that all the elements in your composition are indeed royalty free, without pulling out an encyclopedia of raw sources at the print house, and holding up the line.
Likewise, a "really well modeled" minitature AC cobra getting 3d printed is going to be very hard to get printed, because of the litigation paranoia.
The result is that skilled and talented people will be locked out of the service, because of false preconceptions that favor big industries that are all to willing to sue for even the slightest perception of a violation.
Cashier hands customer small object warm off the 3D printer.
"That will be $49.95 sir"
Customer points object at cashier: BANG
Walks out of store muttering: "That was easy!"
I am not just writing exciting to say Good Job to Staples but this will be a huge step forward for more than all the tinkerers out there. This is a product that reaches out and touches my heart. I don't know too many people around me who could use this or could even use this. But if Staples stays the course they will develop their own market. I can see a situation where general public use first will be vanity items such as a personalized bobble head but then one day someone will need a replacement part and a company will say "Go to your local staples and pick it up, it should be ready in 45 minute."
A simple example of this would be my Dyson vacuum(I love it) had a dumb little part die and they replaced it without hesitation. I called on Saturday and it came today. But that required my house be dirty for a week and that Dyson warehouse the part, package the part, and ship the part. Wouldn't it have been better if they had just printed up the part locally on demand? Not to mention that as they learn that some part will regularly fail they can instantly "ship" a redesigned part without having to dispose of or guiltily ship the lesser version.
So I hope that someone installs a beer pipeline to the Staples executive who came up with this brilliant idea.
Why? I have a CupCake and a homebrew plastic FDM printer in the works, but I don't share your attitude. Plastic is nice, but other technologies have their benefits. Paper is easy to come by, and cheap. Laminated paper is going to be about as strong as a solid medium-density wood such as birch. It will take paint very nicely. The build volume on the machine in question is basically 3 reams of copier paper. That build volume has your replicator beat by quite a lot. The output would make excelent masters for hot metal casting, if you're into the home foundary scene.
The plastics you'd use in a 3D printer aren't going to work all that well compared to the plastics they use for example in Glocks. Not to mention you'd still need to machine the trigger assembly, magazine well, safety assembly, fire select, etc.
Would be nice to be able to make custom grips and stocks but that plastic crap (relatively speaking) the 3D printers use isn't worth it. We tried making a test Glock grip (solid even, no magazine well) and a 4 lb weight. Snapped the grip in half easily. Perhaps with some heat treatment or additional additives in the plastic (baking it perhaps) might make the plastic work better but right now, it's too ... brittle... I guess is the best term. The problem is the way the printer prints, the bond isn't very good between layers base when force is applied perpendicular to the printing plane. Our test grips all break along the plane of the printing. We did another test where we printed out a grip with an approximate magazine well and fitted in a hollow metal slip in there to see if that would shore it up. It just cracks around the metal slip. I think baking it might help with the layers bonding together better but for those of us hoping to get custom grips, stocks, ammo and magazine containers etc are going to have to wait a bit longer. We even tried rotating the print so the plane was rotate 90 degrees and out test pendulum just kept snapping the grip either to the left or right depending on where it hit.
Once someone figures out how to do a fluro polymer type plastic in a 3D printer then we can get some real utility printing done.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
This is probably more appropriate as a response to the gp, but it also works as agreement with you: don't underestimate the strength of paper saturated with super-glue. I repaired the belt-clip of an Aiwa "walkman" by first super-gluing the parts together, then super-gluing paper across the joint (second attempt: first was just the parts, promptly re-broke). 20 years on, the repair was still solid.
Bill - aka taniwha
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Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak