New Scientist on 3D printing piracy | Hacker News Reader

New Scientist on 3D printing piracy

newscientist.com

28 pointszalew20 comments

It's awesome how they are trying to enforce laws that don't exist: it half seems like the point is demonizing the Pirate Bay ("sharing couldn't possibly be legitimate!") Hobbyist 3D printing thus far has only taken off to the extent it has because the designs are available for free and in a format where it is possible to tweak the source. Early programs weren't protected either: the very lack of protection creates a more vibrant user community. It may be that someday 3D printing decides to pivot, that the early adopters aren't needed any more, but the very nature of it may instead imply that such a pivot isn't necessary: the act of creating the printing pattern seems pretty transformative.

Besides, we all know the only DRM that works is to never give the consumer the data in the first place. 3D printers sold by Apple will have access to an App store and only properly-approved patterns will run. If Star Wars were realistic, they'd have had Replicators As A Service.

I think your comparison isn't valid. You seem to be equating open source with an easy ability to pirate. Look at Thingiverse for example. My friends objects and mine are licensed under Attribution - Share Alike - Creative Commons. That's a valid licence that specifically allows modification and redistribution under certain conditions. That's not the same as "Early programs weren't protected either".

>the very lack of protection creates a more vibrant user community

Thingiverse has a vibrant community while not allowing copyright and trademark infringement.

It's awesome how they are trying to enforce laws that don't exist

I'm impressed by how much creativity they're showing to make it harder to use such an amazing tool. One can only wish they'd show as much enthusiasm for getting these tools into the hands of more people. Like, say, hobbyist scientists.

New Scientist seem the very embodiment of "glass half empty."

If printing is significantly cheaper than producing the object, industries that manufacture the products will just switch to printing, and mass printing will surely let them make a cheaper product than the one you'd make at home. At that point, the only advantage printing gives is convenience. And you can compete with convenience.

Or they'll switch to producing the "ink" for the printers, as that's also a pretty non-trivial business from what I've understood (and will even be more so when 3d printers can print more advanced objects).

3d printing will be a win for convenience and personalization, but not for cost, certainly not if you want to produce zillions of equal objects.

As it stands, the printing materials are the main money makers for several processes.

Well mass production works because a singe product is produced a massive scale. With a 3D printer I can print whatever I would like. Sure a factory could be created that would 3D print things on demand, but I would have to imagine that distribution costs would be a big factor even if it was cheaper to mass produce.

I don't think that will happen smoothly. They have massive investments in doing things differently right now. If that that were to happen at all, it would happen gradually, and the ones who will resist it the most will probably try to fight it legally, too.

Remember, they have to be able to beat the cost of printing at home with printing + shipping + retailing, and any other middle-man involved.

And they also have to beat the cost of instant gratification vs shopping/ordering and the time that involves.

3D printing is great because it cuts out so many people I have to deal with, either directly or indirectly.

> printing + shipping + retailing, and any other middle-man involved

> printing

they're going to murder you on cost here. you'll print maybe X things a day. they're going to print a million times that. they'll for sure have more efficient machines, and their supply costs are going to be way lower than theirs.

don't like middle men? think about having to buy small quantities of plastic / copper / miscellaneous raw materials. some middle man is going to sell that to you. the factories won't have to deal with that since they can buy massive quantities directly from producers.

> shipping

you'll have to pay for the shipping costs of small quantities of raw materials. that will likely mitigate any advantage you have here.

> retailing

it may not be a brick and mortar retailer; you might upload your spec to a website and it'd get shipped to you. in that case, if they're smart, their retail costs will be very low. also, you have to pay retail prices for your raw materials.

I'm glad that you posted this. As someone who has a 3D printing startup (CloudFab), we can see that the space is very over hyped right now. 3D printing is an awesome thing, but it's not the panacea that some are making it.

The ink jet printer democratized printing yes, but we still use massive equipment to produce books and newspapers efficiently. Few things are as commodity as computer chips / servers - and really even those aren't really. Engineering is about optimizing for a problem - one-offs are one problem, and mass production is another. There are companies like SinterMask trying to make production grade 3D printing, and the machines are huge in order to do this. Also, no one is mentioning that there are significant materials science issues that come up in making actually consumer products. Apple has set the bar so far that regular mass production hasn't caught up - let alone these new technologies.

They're funny people. They have ideas what to do with people who clone their wares instead of buying them; but I guess they don't have any ideas what to do with people who make their own blueprints, share them, print them and not buying anything.

And that's what's going to happen. Who needs poorly scanned noisy monolithic blueprint when there is a good clean modular and commented community-made one?

That's not just what's going to happen. It's what's happening right now. Though they aren't exactly "not buying anything" they're buying material to put into the printers. There's a rather large community growing because of Makerbot running http://www.thingiverse.com/ to foster exactly what you're talking about. There's a number of rather neat little toys and things up there right now. The current fad seems to be people making balloon powered race cars.

It's what is happening now because that is where the interest for home 3D printing is and what the capabilities of those printers are. 3D printing is popular among the maker crowd, and the printers are mostly capable of doing relatively low resolution, single material prints of models specifically designed to be printable (low overhang, fitting within a small build envelope, no features smaller than a couple of millimeters, etc).

I suspect it won't be that long before home 3D printers are much more capable and there is greater interest from commercial content producers to access that market. Imagine for example a functioning single piece carburetor. Some amount of engineering would go into such a thing, and it would be non-trivial to reverse engineer a copy of it by scanning or other means. It would however be trivial to redistribute the file on the Pirate Bay.

I think what we will see at minimum is objects being sold as signed files containing "compiled" G-code (or some proprietary equivalent) for each specific printer model rather than as solid object files. The G-code could always still be reverse engineered based on the commands arriving at the motor controllers, but it would be less easy to adapt to arbitrary printers.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm being too libertarian on this issue, but I strongly believe I should be able to "scan" and then "reproduce" anything I like for my own personal use, but that then reproducing it to sell or make money off might be crossing a line....

Either way DRM will not go down well with the tech scene if/when "3d replicators" really start to take off!

Speaking for our startup (http://tinkercad.com) the future we see is one where many more people are original 3D content creators compared to for example the music or movie industries. Designers will still have their place and will require some way to capture value but right now we are seeing a lot more users build something for themselves or for a friend.

It's obvious the author of the article hasn't learned anything from the digital revolution either, which is strange since they allude to it.

3D printers are in their infancy as others in this thread have stated, but they are starting with an open source ecosystem which only appeared later in programming and digital media. Now anybody can produce music, video and code with free tools using free samples and resources and share their products with the world however they see fit. Likewise people with 3D printers will only be limited by the current state of the open tech and the materials they can afford.

Just like with open source software and creative commons media the established players wont be able to stop the hackers from making. The only question which remains is how important these "hobbyist" trends become to the mainstream.

Wow, so many people collaborated to make 3D printers affordable (http://reprap.org/wiki/RepRap) sharing their knowledge freely, providing code, design, expertise without any thoughts about compensation. The first of them are just arriving and we already have the talks 'piracy'.

With patents, isn't there a rule that you can freely create/copy the devices within, so long as it's for personal use?

I really do hope I'm wrong, but I'm fairly sure that you can't do that.

EDIT: First section here ( http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/crashcourse/rights/ ).

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