How DRM will infest the 3D printing revolution
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
>...patent holder Intellectual Ventures, has managed to get an expansive patent on 3D printing DRM.
What exactly does that mean? IV has patented a method for performing DRM on printed objects? That is a long way from mandating DRM on all objects. The 3D printing community, and open source hardware community in general has been preparing for this. The Institute for Emerging Innovation at Public Knowledge is an organization at DC that is helping to increase awareness of 3D printing openness and is working with congress people to make sure things like 3D printing DRM cannot happen. Unlike the P2P file sharing fight, we are ready for this one.
Also a quick note about guns since this article, and many about 3D printing now mention it. Yes, there is a group of people working on building 3D printed guns. However, to call this violent and providing new access is baseless and borderline ignorant. People have been able to make real, un regulated weapons out of actual metal for a long time. It's called a CNC mill and they have been around for a lot longer than 3D printers. A friend of mine goes to a trade school where you learn how to work on CNC mills and the first project he ever did was to build a working .45. People being able to build guns is nothing new, and anybody that thinks a plastic gun is going to be so much worse is just fear mongering.
i.e. buying a 3D printer plus material and sending a blueprint file to it is an order of magnitude simpler than acquiring and learning to use a milling machine.
But it's not hard for the terrorist to make a single-use gun now. You could probably make a pretty lethal and reliable single-use gun from $20 dollars in parts from your local hardware store.
What? I'm finding it hard to believe that an odd-looking 3d-printed single-use gun would be useful to terrorists (or criminals in general, actually). What you need as a mugger, for example, is a recognizable threat. The gun doesn't necessarily need to work but it does need to look like a gun. Terrorists have it even worse, as they're generally looking to threaten a whole lobby full of people; what they're waving around had better look really automatic. And had probably better work. I can't imagine that a single-shot weapon that looked unrecognizable would suit their needs.
A single-shot gun might be useful to a murderer, but hardly an ideal choice (what if you miss)? And it might be useful in a self-defense scenario, but the same caveat applies.
In fact, they actually make single-shot guns. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derringer) And they aren't used by terrorists! They're used by pirates in movies. And in real life, generally, women carry them in purses.
Which, to come full circle, means I would support the availability of 3D-printed guns, since I perceive the most likely use would be in a self-defense scenario as a "well, it's better than nothing" option.
It's very unlikely that it will be possible to make a safe, practical, reusable gun from a 3D printer in the foreseeable future.
I'm sorry if I came off as aggressive in my criticism. It just struck me as silly that terrorists -- you know, the guys that buy military hardware from shady international arms dealers and have their own supply and manufacturing chains for explosives -- would be significantly enabled by crappy 3D-printed handguns.
My second point was an attempt to point out that it's probably cheaper and easier to create a single-use weapon now without the use of the 3D printer.
How do you figure that?
They should - anybody trying something out of the AC is likely to kill themselves in the process:
But surely there is a range of things a terrorist could print that we couldn't even begin to conceive of right now, things that would enable terrorism to be carried out more efficiently, covertly, or what have you. But then again, those same things could probably be constructed out of analogous parts from a hardware store anyways, similar to how anyone with access to a machine shop could fabricate their own firearms - so maybe it's not as dire an issue as it sounds.
Do you really think they're going to be able to legislate away people's ability to digitally print consumer goods? Thusfar, they've been unsuccessful at legislating away people's ability to copy data, and the consumer urge to copy a physical good will be orders of magnitude stronger than a bit of audio or video.
In short, anyone who tries to restrict individuals' ability to print goods is on a fool's errand.
It might even be easy to argue that legislature was a very minor goal compared to enforcement, which seems to be where copyright enforcement pairs very closely with general law enforcement and broad-sweeping monitoring of the general populace.
The penalties are for sharing and distribution, and in those areas only the stupid get caught.
Tell that to the thousands of people who got sued several years ago, or the Pirate Bay guys who are either in prison or facing prison sentences.
compared to the 10s, 100s of millions who still share, download and copy copyrighted media everyday?
In order for the DRM to work it needs to be decoded at the last moment and would therefore need to be implemented directly into the electronics of the printer. In order for that to work the printer itself will need to be able to decode the 3D files and plan the tool route, a job that is better done by the PC. I think it will be cost prohibitive to implement in a secure manor.
With Blu Ray and HDMI there were massive multi billion dollar companies driving the direction of the design. That just isn't the case with 3D printing and is unlikely to be the case until far to long after consumer 3D printing is established.
I guess my point is that we are really in the halcyon days of 3d printing. This is an emerging technology. It's exciting, it's about experimentation, and it's a genuinely open-source user environment. But this phase has a shelf-life, and once 3d printing reaches critical mass, the Maker hackers will move onto the next thing of interest (rightly so) and the corporations will swoop in on the huge money making opportunities. It is just the way the world works.
Still ... DRM will never work. Whether it be a case of torrents for the Ikea desk, or firmware hacks to re-route your printer from phoning home to the corporation - hackers will find a way.
I always thought that once the government mandates the use of a specific technology, it should automatically force the patent into the public domain. Anything else sets up a set of incentives that are just a bit more than way too perverse for the public good.
Perhaps good examples were analog cassette and video tapes. They enabled easy infringement. But they had so many beneficial uses, the courts were not persuaded by the incumbent industries. And Congress even created exceptions for personal use copying ("home taping") in the statute.
There is nothing inherently infringing about P2P, or even inherently enabling. Nothing says you have to use it to share bits with thousands of people or more. Back in the analog days millions of people made recordings and shared them with each other (i.e. people they knew: friends, colleagues, etc.), without being sued. It's only when some people tried to started businesses selling mass produced copies to the public (i.e. people they didn't know: customers) without authorization that they were sued. These "bootleggers" were, as I remember it, a very small percentage of total number of people using the available recording technology.
Not quite enough to keep an enormously useful technology like audio and video recording out of reach from the public.
- lego machine that lets you create your own legos? check. - style-it-yourself house furniture? check. - toys/dolls creator for kids? check. I could go on forever.
1. It's improving very quickly, both in terms of the materials you can print and affordability of the hardware. It's possible to 3d print powdered metal composites, for example, not just cheap plastic.
2. It makes possible entirely new manufacturing business models. Traditional factories will probably always be cheaper for mass-market goods, but there are likely to be lots of opportunities for niche-market goods that simply aren't economic under a big-scale factory model. Maybe even more importantly, the existence of 3d printing makes it easier to bootstrap a manufactured product -- you can start out 3d printed, and only go to big-factory-mode much later when demand dictates.
3. By bridging the worlds of software and physical goods, it holds the promise of unleashing open-source methods for the design of things, not just software and information.
Because I couldn't already create "brass knuckles" out of wood in 10 minutes?