The Pirate Bay Wants You To Really Download A Car
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Go read it. It will only take a couple of minutes. http://craphound.com/?p=573&title=PrintCrime
(is there a topic which xkcd hadn't nailed already?)
Try and find something about the financing of the costs of German reunification.
http://groups.google.com/group/thingiverse/browse_thread/thr...
This sort of thing will only increase as 3d printers go mainstream.
I, for one, remember watching a video of a man printing and playing a number of different instruments. They didn't work perfectly, but the definitely played.
Of course patent laws apply and there is such thing as a design patent: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent
I would think unless an object is covered by a patent, design or functional, it is fair game to print out
I would bet there is some kind of functional vs. ornamental test. Yes you can copyright a sculpture, but no you can't copyright the bolt pattern of a fuel pump to prevent others from making a replacement part.
If that is true, then I would think a figurine is more ornamental than functional.
I do however think there is probably scope for 3D printing small replacement parts (I'm thinking of things such as plastic pump impellers etc) , if not at home certainly at a main dealer. I doubt this would come cheap but that might be balanced against the reduced turnaround times and ability to maintain a smaller supply chain.
I bet you could manufacture a car if you wanted.
Edit: That wasn't sarcasm. I appreciated the link. No need for downvoting.
You'd still need to pay for the energy/raw materials to run them though. Maybe if LFTR works out, energy will be next-to-free also.
Check out the RepRap project. They're trying to design a cheap, open source 3D printer that can print itself: http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap
See the BOM of non-printed parts: http://reprap.org/wiki/Prusa_Mendel#Non-Printed_Parts_.28.22...
Indeed. Replicators are at roughly the same point today that personal computers were in 1975. So expect that in a few decades everyone will have one in their house, able to make a very wide range of objects.
Video: http://www.markuskayser.com/
Text with photos: http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2011/06/markus-kayser-builds-a...
Even if you had a printer that could machine whatever you wanted, and the plans were available for free (and not licensed to the printer as software,) then you'd still need to pay for a rather large amount of steel, plastic, rubber, copper and all the other materials that go into the manufacture of a car.
The printing machines can only print from plans. People who create those plans may sell them, and those plans may be pirated, but there's still industry. There's still supply and demand.
If nobody is compensated for the manufacture of the plans, you're either on your own to create them or perhaps they'll be donated. Given the state of charity in the world, one can assume that they won't be donated, but given the state of open source, one might assume that they will. Regardless, the plans aren't self-creating and/or limitless.
Why would the governments supply the raw materials for you to purchase a car? If they aren't currently motivated to just buy you a car, why would they be suddenly motivated to pay for all the materials that go into a car's manufacture, even if the labor cost is reduced? If the materials were free, what's to stop everyone from printing out 20 different types of cars and luxury mansions?
Based on the current trend, however, I doubt we'd ever see a post scarcity world: oil, rare-earth metals, gold, silver, and even wood and stone are all scarce at scale. Sunlight may be one of the only things available on earth that humans can't destructively consume.
Haha, yeah that would definitely have to be done by robots. Robots certainly help move us to a post-scarcity world though, don't they?
Anything that makes more stuff with fewer input resources (especially in terms of human time and effort) moves us closer to a post-scarcity world.
Implicit in all of the treatments of a post-scarcity world I've ever seen, though, is the idea that humans will be only doing the jobs that only humans can do, such as acting, painting, programming, advanced mathematics, governing, and so on. Robots certainly help us move towards that.
Specifically, raw material scarcity will actually have a larger impact on price and availability of items than it does at the moment, even though the majority of items will be generally more available as a result of less constraining factors.
Post-scarcity is interesting from the point of view of the necessities of life being so close to free as to make no difference. But it's a long way to go before we truly will have more resources than we know what to do with. Our desires show a clear trend of scaling with our resources; we already have more wealth than any Mesopotamian farm peasant could ever dream of, and most of us could probably easily figure out what to do with another $100,000.
We could be there right now, but (here it comes) 1% of people have the majority of the resources.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_sector...
For the majority of human (art) history, no such concept existed. Ideas were communal (for instance see Bach's famous "Goldberg Variations", which borrowed a lot from popular songs of the time). In what sense is an intangible idea property at all? In what sense do I "own" a riff if I randomly strum it out one day on my guitar? It didn't create it. It existed prior to me playing it.
It has been shown the monetary incentive is not required for great things to be produced. Projects like wikipedia are testament to this, as is the immensity of excellent fiction, music and other art that is available for free on the internet.
The concept of Intellectual Property is outdated, and the world needs to realise this as it adapts to deal with the incredible implications of the developing internet.
Have you considered that you are not paying for materials when buying a car, but also for R&D?
2. I was reply to someone who was talking about intellectual property as a concept. Thus, I was engaging in discussion with him, not with the thread in a more general sense.
What bothers me is that the whole issue is always reduced to the most vulnerable example, which happens to be music. But there is no reason for why the role of IP should be the same for music as it is for movies, or games, or cars, or ... - even copyrights and patents work in different ways.
To name one notable difference, great music can be produced on a hobbyist budget by a single person nowadays, and often is. The R&D that goes into cars cannot. Yet, the results of millions of dollars of R&D are just as "always existent" as an MP3 of Lady Gaga is, so by your logic must not be protected.
The interesting question is, then how do we fund it? What is the incentive for any car company to waste money on crash tests if people will copy their car as soon as they have a matching 3D scanner?
I believe there are four hard truths about information that any solution must address:
(A) Copying is easy, and will continue to get easier. This is the essential to nature of information, and fighting it is not practical.
(B) Creating is hard, and will always be hard. Failing to recognize and compensate creators is not fair.
(C) Creating by improving on a copy is more than just an effective way to create. It is essential to the nature of creativity. Fighting this effect is not practical.
(D) Creative contributions are not additive. Determining the exact value of any one creator's contribution to a project is not practical.
Copyright as a concept fails hard on (A) and (C). I think licensing doesn't handle (D) very well. Fully open solutions have varying problems with (B). The best solution I can think of is academia's system of tenure and elaborate recognition -- and even there, the system's failure on (B) pushes people to resort to secrecy, which damages (C).
I don't have a good answer. I haven't even heard a good answer. I even think it's likely that the best answer will be many answers -- secrecy here, censorship there, openness here, copyright there, depending on the field. But I do know the problem will get a lot harder when the objects in question are not merely valuable for entertainment, but might be highly valuable for survival, highly expensive to produce, and dangerous or even potentially criminal.
Intellectual property isn't something the entertainment industry invented. It's something every six year old independently invents when telling her younger brother to stop being such a copycat. Creating is hard, copying is easy, and making the two equal is not fair.
Nor is the problem limited to art. Engineering design is currently sheltered from the problem by manufacturing, just like music used to be sheltered by physical media. When we can download cars, that won't be true anymore. If you think the argument over what you can do with an MP3 is ugly, just wait until we're arguing about printable handguns, airplanes, medicines, and combine harvesters.
I'm firmly convinced that that future is coming. Not quickly; some manufacturing processes will take centuries to replace, and some may never be replaced. But such a world does seem to get steadily closer with each passing year.
We need to figure out a practical and fair way to deal with information BEFORE it gets here.
I've driven one! http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/5741482536/in/set-7215762... ... same car that was on top gear, too: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yn6rvj08__0
(And by that I mean Heatsync Labs, which is a magical place)
Apps that connect to common personal 3D printers for the pieces and then have a digital board on the screen that recognizes their position.
You still need the raw materials and the energy to construct the object. Wouldn't large factories specialized for certain products be able to produce them faster, cheaper, and in larger quantities, and by such a margin that doing so and then shipping them still requires fewer resources than everyone individually printing their own?
They're really cool for prototyping or in certain niches, but I can't imagine it taking over all manufacturing.
Also, there is a hidden cost to re-tooling factories for new products that goes away if you can create a factory that can produce anything with the same tools, so you can save there as well.
No, it will cost massively more.
The factory that builds millions of the same thing has access to pricing and supply chains that are completely out of reach of the factory that builds 100. This is so different that there is really no reason for the smaller factory to build the same thing. They will likely compete on turnaround time, quality, or something the large producer can't do. Any of these will drive their costs even higher.
It seems infinitely more feasible if you print the car part-by-part, but that kind of kills it for anybody unprepared to assemble a car!
(I know, I know, taking it far too seriously)
Of course, many of those parts might have physical requirements (elastic deformation tolerance, heat resistance, et cetera) that would not be met by 3D-printed materials, so it's not a panacea.
(Which makes me wonder how recyclable printed parts can be made.)
edit: fixed story title, it was knob, not tab.
http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2010/06/04/a-makerbot-self-repl...
Now I know how to make it myself on my printrbot.
I suspect the licensing costs will prevent self made cars from becoming common.
You are correct, of course. One of the things I find amusing about the breathless talk about replicators is that people conveniently ignore such mundane problems as maintaining material inventory, the various types of material in any nontrival product and the ability of the consumer to evaluate the quality of a design they downloaded off the net. If I give you a design for a new replacement part for your car how do you know it won't cause more harm than good? Now we've moved the concept of malware into the physical realm.
3D printers are certainly an exciting technology with a bright future. But it's just another manufacturing method that's better in some ways than what's popular now, and worse in others.
But saying that doesn't get pageviews.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tissue_engineering
http://www.createitreal.com/index.php/en/organ-printing/prin...
Granted there are many issues that would arise regarding pirated and trademarked designs. Research, development, marketing, and other costs go into the price of these products when they are sold to us. The disruption this could cause corporations will make our current worries over music, books, and movies seem trivial. Then again, imagine open source product designs. Platforms for creating physical designs that can be sold, and unparalleled product customization. It should be very interesting.
But it would be lovely, just printing out new blocks for the kids...
Still a very interesting idea, but I'm not seeing something like a car being printed without some major economic shifts.
Seventy-five years ago (1937), in the era of cellulose film, your statement would have been identically applicable to the equipment and materials necessary for recording a "motion-picture".
Move forward seventy-five years to 2012, and you can walk into just about any store, and for a small amount of money walk out with a "motion-picture" recording device, affordable by an individual, that can record a "motion-picture" every bit as good, if not infinitely better, than what the "professionals" had to work with in 1937.
Seventy-five years from now (2087), 3D printing just very well may have advanced to the point where it would be quite feasible to "print" a car, and at a price perfectly affordable to an individual.
We propose a society where scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all physical items can be copied at will, where the idea of "owning" a physical thing is as pointless as the idea of "owning" an idea is, where (as a natural consequence) world hunger is probably a thing of the past, as are poverty, industrial labour, and many other things we take for granted...
And your first question is "How does Ferrari stay in business?"
Worth noting that this is more or less the same thing as what's happening with art at the moment. I could paraphrase it as:
"We propose a society where information scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all information (sound, video, text, etc) can be copied at will and instantly all around the world, where the idea of "owning" a bunch of bytes is as pointless as the idea of owning the shape of a cloud in the sky, where (as a natural consequence) education, art, civilisation and all those things that make mankind worthy of existence are infinitely more powerful than before because of their ubiquity and availability to all, and your first question is... How does Sony Music stay in business?"
The only factor of production eliminated by the introduction of what is, essentially, automated labor is labor. A similarly important factor of production is not - raw materials.
Just because you have some way to produce something doesn't mean you can create the materials to do so. Regardless of whether or not you can produce something when you have the materials, you still need to purchase or otherwise obtain the materials to do so.
I think the more important question is, "How does Ferrari stay in business, when the only thing that they truly control is the code for producing a Ferrari?" What this essentially does is transform everything into an intellectual property issue, much as the Internet has done for digital media.
Information is a completely different animal. If there were actual physical costs to the person downloading copyrighted material illegally, do you think the RIAA and MPAA would be as agitated as they are?
We (as in, the face of the Earth) receive 1.7E17 J of energy from the sun every second. That's 53.6E23 J of energy per year.
Worldwide energy consumption as of 2008 was 4.74E20 J. It's risen a bit since (thanks China!), but not by more than an order of magnitude. So that means we're receiving enough energy from the sun to power today's civilisation a hundred times over. And that's just the energy which lands on the face of the Earth.
My point is, really, that energy (and hence matter) is quite plentiful if you know how to make efficient use of it. By the time we have cornucopia devices, we'll probably have the technology so that accumulating the energy/matter for making a car is just a question of leaving it outside in the sun/rain/air for long enough and/or dumping a bunch of dirt into it.
If you can print cars, you can print open source clothes, homes, appliances, solar panels, greenhouses, robots and more printers. Everyone who currently works a full/part-time job to pay the bills while their real passion lies in painting, or programming, or partying, or golf can stop working. Even the people who want to stay up on the latest DRMed fashion trends without breaking the law will have a hard time finding work to pay for it.
That said, there will still be people with power who can lure others into helping them, by offering in exchange the opportunity at a cut of that power - because you can't print power ... or, well ... with printable smarter than human AIs, can you?
Historically crying out, "That's absurd!" has ruled out actual outcomes. It has done worse than maximum entropy.
So now it might seem prohibitive, but it might be common place before you know it.
Right now most of them work with plastic, but it won't be that long until they can use liquid metal, too. They should become a little more useful then.
Consider that a toy steam engine was built by Heron of Alexandria around 2000 years ago, and yet nobody got the idea of harnessing it to replace human labor. Perhaps this can be explained in part by not-quite advanced metallurgy, but what about the fact that society back then relied on very cheap slave labor? What role did that play?
Think about what the business model for making 3d printers pervasive could be. If you manage to do that, you might become the next generation's Bill Gates. Too bad I don't have an answer there...
Rather than selling the 3d printers (and related technologies), 'sell' a community which requires of you only 4 hours a week of work to participate and all it takes to join is whatever it takes to transport your body there. Maybe its not 4 hours a week, but 8 or 2 - either way its not going to be much and it will only get smaller.
Exactly, it is explained by not quite advanced metallurgy and tools.
The steam engine works thanks to the small tolerances industrial lathes gave us that let a cylinder to carry a piston without fluids getting out. Watt had to create himself special tools for the creation of his engine.
I have a link somewhere in my browser but zotero search is bullsh*t.
A gun is not dangerous per se, it is the man or woman that carry it who is, you could kill other people with knives or invite people to eat poison, or use a DIY bow and arrow, or trow stones or make a bomb with fertilizer or fire a house.
Sneakers for example would be really tough to just print out and assemble due to all the different types of parts.
Scale in assembly continues to beat out lack of scale. It could change, but I think 3d printing is better for custom applications rather than mass market goods.
Fablab is also a very interesting project. They provide free access to 3d printers, scanners and other equipment, provided you share your design. GPL IRL!
However 3D printers potentially do make more kinds of materials buildable, especially when combined with printable electronics.
I'll do it later tonight if I remember, if someone else doesn't do the heavy lifting first.
By that notion, it's not too infeasible to print your own food. If you can print organs, you can probably print muscle meat, or plants. But this sort of thing is a long long ways off.
Stratasys, Inc. NASDAQ:SSYS
Many times, companies can't automate certain jobs (not just in the US) because it would mean one less job for a person and the wages are artificially inflated.
Wages are usually high because of scarcity (IE: not anyone can do it). Unions, like copyright, allow workers that would normally get paid $8/10 to get $20-30 an hour because of government sanctions.
However, many people here on HN hate copyright but are pro-union. Doesn't really make any sense.
Please do not address the "HN Hivemind", that has a strong tendency to be a straw man argument that does not really address any specific points, or anyone.
oh? can GM kick say "no unions"?
I will address the "HN hivemind" when I see fit. Especially when it holds true.