Copy Protection for 3-D Printing Aims to Prevent a Piracy Plague

If the design were that time consuming, then scanning/printing a copy of the original to ~2mm tolerances (which some of the better scanners and printers can achieve) will still be out of tolerance. Do this with a precise mechanical part and it'll wear out or break faster, or impair performance, etc. So just taking a scan will be inadequate and the "pirate" would have to reproduce the tolerances of the engineered part. Which would also take a really long time.

And arguably, how do you determine artistic value except by what people are willing to pay? What will you do, upload the CAD file to the cloud to determine if it is near enough to any registered works of art? What tolerances will be used to determine "fair use" or "derivative work" statuses?

I'm just trying to point out that physical DRM is nuts. If I BOUGHT a figurine and wanted to duplicate it, then nothing should stop me from doing so. (First-Sale Doctrine[1] in the US protects physical ownership.) But distributing said plans for a product, copyrighted/trademarked ones, is wrong. So you hit distribution, not the product-owner's rights.

That's just my 2¢.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine