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I think that humans have an inherent problem with seeing piracy as theft unless they are the victims. Theft in a traditional sense is almost always zero-sum, and piracy isn't. We weren't really built to deal with this. The closest thing that I can think of is having someone sleep with your spouse—it's kind of like stealing, but it's not zero-sum. And it's not illegal.

It also doesn't help that our intellectual property laws have a lot of inconsistencies. If I steal your ideas for a startup, that's ok unless you have patented technology. But if I make a copy of something that I own and share it with a friend, that's illegal.

Up until now there had never been a way to take a material possession and duplicate it at essentially no cost. I think that we have a long way to go before we develop strong cultural norms on how to deal with intellectual property.




Duplicate it at no cost to anyone except yourself, I think you mean.

It often does cost time and money to pirate things.

And now that RepRap and similar 3D object printers are becoming more popular, they will continue to come down in price. It won't be long before printing physical items is a possibility, and then wholesale pirating of things that used to be protected by patents will start.

And if you're having trouble imagining that happening, don't worry. It was just as hard to imagine music piracy before MP3s. It happened on a VERY small scale before that due to difficulty and media cost.


Can you actually think of any examples where "printing" 3D objects that are protected by patents is likely to be a problem in the foreseeable future?


I think that it depends on your definition of 'foreseeable'.

One of the first markets I can see this disrupting are things like war-gaming miniatures, and board gaming pieces, which have a HUGE markup, but could be reproduced in plastic relatively easily after a more few generations of this tech. I'm not sure about patents per-se, but it's certainly an intellectual property issue.

Once these printers gain the ability to draw circuits and build or insert basic electronic components, things will really take off, but even before then there are some big markets for what are basically hunks of plastic and metal that are only expensive because they're well designed/marketed.

Will you be printing off an iPhone in 5 years? Of course not. But that fancy $60 paperweight on your boss's desk? There's a big market for those too.


This made me think of what is potentially a very large market - kids toys. As any parent will tell you, an awful lot of toys (especially for young kids) are cheap bits of plastic where the only "value" is the associated licensing of a brand/character from someone like Disney.


The relevant patents on Lego® bricks expired decades ago, and you would think clone bricks would have flooded the market by now. And yet Legos still sell—even the sets that aren’t licensed brands. My experience with Mega Blocks, cheaper bricks that are supposed to interlock with Legos, is that they don’t interlock very well—the tolerances are just far off enough to cause frustration. There must be something in Lego’s manufacturing process that keeps their quality high even though, on paper, nothing could be easier than replicating their technology.


Lego bricks are easy to replicate on current-generation 3d printers. It's nothing to do with the manufacturing process, it's just that making the molds a bit looser makes them much easier to separate, and cheaper. They also tend to round the peg size up to 5mm, when actual legos are around 4.9. This http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1005 is a lego-compatible part designed from scratch that describes the issue. Using that, it's easy to make custom parts that attach to legos. Here's one that I designed and someone else printed: http://www.thingiverse.com/derivative:5042


There was also an attempt by Lego to trademark the blocks. That would have prevented competitors from creating compatible designs. However this was recently struck down by the European Court, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/eu-judges-rul...


Execution is everything, even in something as apparently simple (it isn't!) as a lego brick.

The tolerances, the plastics used, the pigments, all add up to a quality product. The difference is so large that you can tell the 'real' from the 'imitation' just by looking at them, you don't even need to do a trial fit to see which one is which.


Yes, yes. It's not patents that will be the issue for 3D replicas, but branding/trademark/licensing. I can make the Toy Story action figures for my kids, rather than pay Pixar for the rights. I can make Thomas the Train toys.

It's not that there's anything patentable in these items, but the licensing deals associated with things like TV shows and movies takes a serious hit.


In the transformers toy world I have been watching this and wondering what it will do. What does it mean to collectors when anyone can just print off that old toy they had as a kid? How about the brand new toy that just came out? On the flip side it opens the world for accessories and addons to existing toys like never before. Or even for all new toys that fit into the existing toy worlds, enhancing the brand if you will.

More down to earth and something you can make today with any of those: cookie cutters in any shape you want.


Games Workshop already asserts things like this, they get really touchy if you talk about casting models, and they only allow 'official' plastic in tournaments, etc...


The next version of RepRap will supposedly draw circuit traces. It is designed to have interchangeable extruders.


The current one can do that already, with a sharpie. It has managed to replicate its own electronics in this way.


The technology is further along than I'd realized. Probably not economically feasible except for the most marked-up items.

http://www.shapeways.com


It depends on how you define 'problem', but here's one small example ( http://fabathome.org/?q=node/110 ) and I've been reading recently about others. e.g. all kinds of small kitchen, bathroom, and utility items that are currently sold at relatively high margins in stores.

I remember when mp3s were too big to store or move easily, and couldn't be played portably. Piracy was purely a geek thing then. That situation changed incredibly fast.


How about the Glif? http://www.theglif.com/ - They were a Kickstarter project and the actual prototype was made on a 3d printer. The costs to pirate one don't quite make sense yet (I'm pretty certain that even with markup it will be cheaper to buy one from them than print your own currently), but the threat is clearly there.

I also wonder about things like: if you downloaded a file to print your own Glif, but tweaked it for your android phone and made it a different color you're starting to get a transformative work out of the thing.

Maybe the future is mixed atoms and bits (like when you buy a BluRay and it also has a "digital copy" on it for use on your PMP). Maybe when you buy a Glif they'll email you the plan to print your own that you can tweak up.


I don't know, but the underlying problem is very real: counterfeit goods.


If the Consumer Is Not Deceived, It's Not "Counterfeit"

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/if-the-co...


I agree in general, however there are circumstances where it's rather a different story: http://news.thomasnet.com/IMT/archives/2009/04/closing-the-d...


I don't see traditional counterfeit goods like watches and perfumes being printed any time soon.


The economic harm caused by both actions is analogous; "printing" goods is basically a more sophisticated way of counterfeiting them.


Counterfeiting implies the intent to deceive the customer. I'm not counterfeiting when I burn a copy of legal music to put in my car's CD changer. If I made many copies and sold them at a flea market, that would be counterfeiting.


"The closest thing that I can think of is having someone sleep with your spouse"

That's a pretty horrible analogy. It's not like you have a deal with the RIAA/MPAA equivalent to a marriage contract. The sole idea of that scares me. Also, if you ripoff your spouse and make her pay extra to get anything from you and only on terms that lets you control you forever, I think you deserve the cheating. You can go on exploiting your spouse like that and no expect issues.

In retrospect, might not be such a bad analogy ;p


I think most humans default to disregarding the other end of most relationships unless something urges them to.


I disagree, it's the same as any other situation where people act unethically just because there's low risk of getting caught.

People steal items from hotel rooms, catch a train without buying a ticket, hack cable TV circuits, use others' unprotected wifi, keep a 20 when they were expecting a 10, insure items after they're damaged, etc etc. My last two flatmates have left without paying their share of the utility bills and ignored my messages. None of this is piracy but it's similar behaviour.

A lot of people just have no spine and only the threat of prosecution keeps them in line. Which makes it hard to swallow any of these elaborate justifications of media/software piracy.


There is a fundamental difference: copying, in itself, renders no such harm as normal property infractions. Consider the underlying necessary facts. If you take a material object from me, you have deprived me. If you copy that object, you have done no such harm. The 'harm' of copying/infringement depends solely on the laws. If we didn't have the laws there wouldn't be the harm.

People know this unconsciously. A few million years of evolution have made us want to communicate. People copy because of the natural tendency to do something that is good for all of us.


My point was that, in response to the GP, plenty of folk have 'inherent difficulty' respecting other peoples' property in many situations outwith the copying/piracy issue. Which is to say, the lowest common denominator is simply 'can I easily get away with this?' Piracy, regardless of anything else, is incredibly easy to get away with.

But as far as the broader issue of copyright violation, to my mind it's really no different from any other type of property violation. Property is stuff we control and use to make a living, if we lose control chances are we can't make a living - which is why the law enforces your property rights. Whether it's stealing a possession, or renting something then straying from the terms of use, or copying a film, it's all the same. Property isn't the object itself, its your right of disposal (which sometimes might mean consuming, which physical deprivation would make impossible, or sometimes might mean distributing, which copying would make impossible, or sometimes mean privacy, which trespassing would make impossible, etc.)


> if we lose control chances are we can't make a living - which is why the law enforces your property rights

That is a circular justification. People can only make a living from IP because of the law, so one cannot then justify the existence of the law because it helps people make a living.

IP law, by definition, invents an artificial obstruction of other people's rights to copy. There must be a good reason for that.

Consider if you made a living selling tea, but then a personal tea-making gadget is invented. Are you then justified in stopping people walking home with their newly bought tea-makers and removing them -- because they are impeding you in earning a living? No. You just have to make a living in a different way. People's general fundamental freedom trumps your right to particular commercial advantage.

Because IP is so long-standing we have become accustomed to expect it, to assume it as a fundamental right. This is mistaken. It is provisional and must answer to real fundamental rights.

There is a rational case for IP: that it is pragmatic. It does harm by restricting people's freedom to communicate, but overall it increases production and so serves the public's interest -- that is the proposition at least. This is the only argument for IP. But given the changes in technological circumstance it must be radically reassessed, probably best replaced.


It's only a circular argument if you take property as an arbitrary axiom that can't be investigated further.

People need to use their mind to survive --> people must be able to reap the benefits of their mind/creativity to survive --> people must control the produce of their work/creativity to survive --> people should have property rights protected by the government

Property, including IP, is just a natural extension of freedom and living, it's about as fundamental as it gets. Of course it's hard to protect IP, but that's one of the benefits of having a highly civilized nation. They have the right to benefit from their creativity, and you're obliged to respect that. The law allows them to make a living, yes, just like the law allows most of us to make a living without people ripping us off or stealing, thank goodness. It makes perfect sense to have these laws.

The point of IP is that it's the produce of someone's mind, as direct a product as you can get. If you copy it without permission you know without doubt that you're undermining somebody's ability to benefit from their creativity, ultimately undermining their livelihood. That basically makes you a hypocrite.

The pragmatic argument (that without copyright/patents, innovation and investment would dry up) is secondary.


> people must be able to reap the benefits of their mind/creativity to survive --> people must control the produce of their work/creativity to survive

There is the flaw: the second does not follow from the first. There is no necessary requirement that produce -- in this context copies -- be controlled.

Consider the basic logic/physics of abstract goods. There is no necessary dependence of production on subsequent copies. In fact it is the opposite: the copies depend on production. It is perfectly conceivable that things be produced -- and the producers paid for that -- without any restriction of copies.

And this is clear in practice. Take an architect for example. They are commissioned and then design a building: they have done intellectual work and been paid for it, and so 'reaped the benefits' of their creativity to survive. Yet there has been no need for restriction on copies of their designs.

> The point of IP is that it's the produce of someone's mind, . . . If you copy it without permission . . . you're undermining somebody's ability to benefit from their creativity

But as explained above, this is not essential: it is only true for a particular, contingent, commercial arrangement.

You see that production is good, and also that copies are good too. What I ask is that you see that there is no essential need that one should restrict the other. And since both do us good, surely we would want to do both. What we want is a system that supports people to produce and allows freedom of copying.

This is why the pragmatic argument is the only plausible one. If we don't need, for practical reasons, to restrict copies, why would we? How can it be moral? What good does it do us? The idea that people have some intrinsic right to interfere with others, based merely on creatorship, is nonsensical and utterly self-destructive.

Just compare the limit cases (and since it is already established there is no necessary dependence of production on copies, we can look just at the copying aspect). Either: with free copying/sharing, we all greatly magnify our access to good stuff, at no cost to anyone. In a group of 100, if each of us makes some music, everyone has 100 pieces of music to listen to. Or: with absolutist IP, we all keep our own stuff (our own 'property') to ourselves, and so we all have much less stuff available to us. If each of us makes some music, everyone has only one piece of music to listen to. -- And what could be the justification there? that we 'know without doubt' we are doing the right thing? -- Which community to join is an easy choice.

It is not possible to say a priori what particular structures of organisation or commerce are efficient. But it is possible to say the moral essentials mean we should prefer free-sharing rather than copy-restricting.


You seem to be suggesting we should learn to submit to IP and its restriction on copying. This would be a sad and very wrong direction.

We should have cultural norms that encourage and support both production and copying -- they are both good, and mutually reinforcing. And we should build commercial systems around that, not warp our innate moral sense to fit some arbitrary market arrangement. If certain corporations don't like it they are the ones that need to reform themselves.


Ideas for a startup are just ideas. Music and books, regardless of form, are implementations and execution. I say that the actual execution of the idea is what's important. Code piracy's probably a better comparison.

That said, as an artist I'm not too worried if somebody rips off my work to print for a personal hanging.


It reminds me of some welfare recipients claiming welfare should be cut for others. As long as it's someone else benefiting from an action it's ripe for cutting but if I'm benefiting then it's justified.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/210904

>"I'm anti-spending and anti-government," crows David, as scooter-bound Janice looks on. "The welfare state is out of control."

>"OK," I say. "And what do you do for a living?"

>"Me?" he says proudly. "Oh, I'm a property appraiser. Have been my whole life."

>I frown. "Are either of you on Medicare?"

>Silence: Then Janice, a nice enough woman, it seems, slowly raises her hand, offering a faint smile, as if to say, You got me!




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