

As 3D Printing Becomes More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise - danso
http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2013/02/19/171912826/as-3-d-printing-become-more-accessible-copyright-questions-arise

======
betterunix
Oh heaven forbid! A new technology that would let people manufacture goods in
their home might push the copyright industries further into obsolescence! We
must need a new set of laws to stop this monstrosity, before it is too late
and the balance of power shifts yet again!

Businesses need to wake up: new technologies mean changes to the market.
Governments need to stop trying to stave off the death of old businesses, and
just let those businesses die. Greater harm is done to society when we try to
stop the progress of technology than when we let obsolete businesses kick the
bucket.

~~~
jonascopenhagen
Copyright isn't a bad thing per se. Millions of businesses - not just
large/old ones - depend on it in order to avoid the design they've spent
countless hours and dollars on being copied.

~~~
betterunix
That would be a fine argument in a world where the means of copying are heavy
industrial equipment or otherwise uncommon in the home. That was the reality
of the world from the invention of the movable type printing press until the
PC. Now the means of copying books, music, movies, and software are a common
household appliance, and yet we continue to cling to laws that were passed
when only an industrial operation could make copies rapidly, all for the sake
of keeping those industrial operations alive.

Times have changed, and businesses need to change with the times. Kodak went
out of business because they failed to adapt when digital cameras became
small, cheap, and easy to use. New businesses now exist that make money
_because_ of digital photography.

New businesses will rise to prominence because of 3D printing, assuming we do
not kill 3D printing because of laughably dated concerns about copyright.
Someone is going to sell you the raw materials that your 3D printer uses.
Someone is going to run a search engine that finds the 3D models you are
looking for and will tell you what materials you need (hopefully there will be
many search engines competing with each other). Until we can manufacture
integrated circuits in our homes, we will depend on Intel, AMD, TI, and others
to make the electronics that run our 3D printers.

Sometimes we just need to accept that the old ways of doing things are not
profitable anymore. If we always worried about the businesses that are harmed
by new technologies, we would still be using Roman numerals:

<http://www.storyofmathematics.com/medieval_fibonacci.html>

(Edit: the ban on positional number systems was issued mainly due to pressure
from businessmen who favored Roman numerals and general doubts about a
numbering system that allows values to be inflated by tacking digits onto
them:

<http://www.stevesachs.com/papers/paper_90a.html>

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/2490013>)

~~~
forrestthewoods
We live in a supply/demand economy. This world does not function properly when
supply goes to infinity. Copyright is mandatory to maximize the public good.
Finding the correct balance of limitations is difficult and ever changing.

~~~
betterunix
So says a person who carelessly breathes the effectively unlimited supply of
air.

~~~
forrestthewoods
Are you shitting me? That's one of the stupidest things I've ever heard in a
discussion pertaining to copyright. Ever. I'm not even going to feign apology
that's how terrible of a statement it is. I award you no points and may God
have mercy on your soul.

I'm going to copy and paste a block of text from "A Economic Analysis of
Copyright Law" by Richard Posner. He's a highly respected judge amongst tech
geeks at the moment due to his publicly declared war against patents. Please,
please read this entire block of text.

"A distinguishing characteristic of intellectual property is its "public good"
aspect. While the cost of creating a work subject to copyright protection—for
example, a book, movie, song, ballet, lithograph, map, business directory, or
computer software program—is often high, the cost of reproducing the work,
whether by the creator or by those to whom he has made it available, is often
low. And once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for
these users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of
the work are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged
from making copies, but the creator’s total revenues may not be sufficient to
cover the cost of creating the work. Copyright protection—the right of the
copyright’s owner to prevent others from making copies—trades off the costs of
limiting access to a work against the benefits of providing incentives to
create the work in the first place. Striking the correct balance between
access and incentives is the central problem in copyright law. For copyright
law to promote economic efficiency, its principal legal doctrines must, at
least approximately, maximize the benefits from creating additional works
minus both the losses from limiting access and the costs of administering
copyright protection."

<http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/IPCoop/89land1.html>

~~~
betterunix
Posner's argument basically falls apart here:

"...once copies are available to others, it is often inexpensive for these
users to make additional copies. If the copies made by the creator of the work
are priced at or close to marginal cost, others may be discouraged from making
copies..."

On the one hand, he is saying that once people get copies, they are inclined
to make more copies. On the other, he says that the price charged by the
author will somehow influence whether or not people make copies. That second
statement basically ignores the reality of both modern life, with computers
and the Internet, and ancient life, where books were frequently copied
regardless of what the author of the book wanted to be paid. People receive
files at exactly the marginal cost of copying this files all the time, but
that in no way discourages them from making more copies; people routinely make
copies of creative works that are freely distributed by their authors.

In reality, copyright has only ever been about authors at a superficial level.
The first copyright law, the Licensing of the Press Act, was passed for the
purpose of censoring authors by giving a specific guild a legal monopoly on
printing, allowing the government to control the legal distribution channels
of written work. When that law expired, the printers whose income was inflated
by it began a lobbying campaign to restore their monopoly position, which was
helped by a few authors; this led to the first modern copyright law, which
served as the model for US copyright law (ironically copied from the English
law). For all the claims about copyright paying the creators of copyrighted
works, the biggest financial beneficiaries of US copyrights have been the
businesses that sell copies of those works; that is as true today as it was
200 years ago. It was only recently that authors and musicians even gained the
ability to distribute copies of their works _without_ those industries.

The public good served by copyright is not the entertainment or research works
being created, but the distribution of those works. The point is not to pay
authors, it is to ensure that printing remains a profitable business. The most
extreme example of this is academic publishing, where not only are authors
volunteers, but so are reviewers and editors. It is overwhelmingly common for
authors, musicians, and actors of all kinds to have "day jobs" despite the
financial success of their creative work; only a handful can live on royalty
payments alone. Even if the point of copyright is to reward creative work and
encourage its creation, the system as it exists today is a monumental failure.

The article you link to actually combines the publishers and the authors of
creative works into a single hypothetical entity:

"To simplify the analysis, we ignore any distinction between costs incurred by
authors and by publishers, and therefore use the term "author" (or "creator")
to mean both author and publisher."

My point here and elsewhere is this: the publishers are not needed anymore. We
have much better ways to distribute creative work to the general population;
we should be encouraging their use rather than trying to legislate them out of
existence. Creative work is not dependent on profit (if it was, there would be
almost no music in existence right now), nor is a market system strictly
necessary to fund creative work (e.g. scientific research, which is funded by
grants given to researchers or institutions regardless of the profitability of
the work).

------
SEMW
Interesting they use a Star Wars example. There was a major copyright case on
my side of the pond - in the UK - in 2011 about whether a Star Wars
stormtrooper helmet was a sculpture, covered by copyright, or just a movie
prop (so covered only be industrial design rights, which unlike copyright only
last 10-15 years).

It was held not to be a sculpture. So if you're in the UK, you can 3D-print
stormtrooper armour without worrying about being sued by Lucasfilm.

The court didn't give a concise definition of 'sculpture' - they listed some
relevant factors, but mostly left it to the common sense of the trial judge.
Quote: "it is inappropriate to stray too far from what would normally be
regarded as sculpture. ... Not every three dimensional representation of a
concept qualifies".

[http://www.supremecourt.gov.uk/decided-
cases/docs/UKSC_2010_...](http://www.supremecourt.gov.uk/decided-
cases/docs/UKSC_2010_0015_PressSummary.pdf)

(Emphasis: this is under UK law, not US. I _think_ the opposite result was
reached in the US, but don't quote me on that. IANAL).

------
jrockway
They are certainly quick to use the word "illegal" where others would say
"fair use".

I'd be more interested in the answer to the question, "what are you going to
do about it". Sue someone who made Yoda into a vase? Sue Thingverse for
letting people copy your precious, precious innovations? Sue Makerbot for
being popular enough to register on your radar, even though 3D printing and
CNC machines have been available for decades?

It should be interesting to see. But like creators of music and movies,
creators of physical items may be disappointed with the law's effectiveness in
this area.

~~~
monochromatic
In what way does printing a bust of Yoda involve fair use at all?

~~~
jrockway
In the same way that taking a snapshot of a building does not infringe on the
building designer's copyright.

~~~
monochromatic
That's... not much of an analogy.

~~~
summerdown2
I can sit at home and sculpt a block of wax into Yoda. Then I can make that
wax into a resin model, all perfectly legally.

Or, I can get a machine to make me a resin model. Why should there be a
difference?

------
belorn
A rather interesting podcast/video is Adam savage talking about recasting
([http://www.tested.com/art/movies/451613-still-untitled-
adam-...](http://www.tested.com/art/movies/451613-still-untitled-adam-savage-
project-recasting-11272012/)).

Recasting and the legal issues around 3D printing is close to, or is exactly
the same thing. Thus listening to someone who has copying stuff from movies as
a hobby, work professional with people who produce movies, and who's income is
depended on creating stuff on the screen, its a very interesting podcast to
listen to.

------
Nrsolis
Why is this a thing?

The CAD files that serve as the input to the 3D printers are closer to
deserving patent or trade secret protection than copyright. Copyright protects
"creative, intellectual, or artistic forms", not inventions or tangible
things. (Don't get me started on "design patents").

We're definitely in new territory here, but 3D printers dont change anything
other than the speed/ease by which a "thing" can be created. Before the
Internet, there was tape-dubbing and the Xerox machine. Are there fewer songs
or shows now? Fewer Books? Why are 3D printers any different?

A little primer on intellectual property law for the laymen would be
instructive here.

~~~
SEMW
The theory is:

\- Sculpture is generally protected by copyright in Berne convention
countries.

\- Copying includes reproducing a work in any material form. The fact that the
process of making a copy involves CAD files isn't relevant: the result is a
material reproduction of yoda.

\- Speed & ease isn't relevant either - hewing a copy of a copyrighted
sculpture one from stone over a decade is just as much an infringement as
3d-printing is. A copy is a copy.

(The difficult legal issue is what exactly a sculpture is. E.g. the UK has a
narrower definition than the US, and in the UK yoda may not qualify as a
sculpture - see my other comment).

IANAL, just a UK law student

~~~
Nrsolis
IANAL, either. But sculpture somehow brings to mind the idea that a "work" had
an artistic component as opposed to a functional one.

For instance, it might be infringement to "print" a copy of Michelangelo's
David, but not a part of a handle to a door. In the latter, it's not a work of
art, so merits no protection vs. design protection that it might get if it was
a patentable invention.

~~~
SEMW
I've commented on that issue elsewhere in this thread (about a case on whether
Star Wars stormtrooper helmets are copyrightable in the UK):
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5250739>

------
otibom
I hope we fix copyright before we can 3D print food and organs.

~~~
runarb
They are all ready printing out candy: [http://www.good.is/posts/3d-candy-
printing-an-interview-with...](http://www.good.is/posts/3d-candy-printing-an-
interview-with-designer-marcelo-coelho/)

------
rangibaby
TPB has had a "physibles" category for more than a year now :-)

<https://thepiratebay.se/blog/203>

------
cma
As 2-D Printing Becomes More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise

------
digitalengineer
I'd love to see what 'Banksy' could do with 3D printing.
<http://www.banksy.co.uk/indoors/Crb.html>

------
jonemo
For anyone who wants to read in detail about the legal aspects of 3D printing,
I'd suggest "What's the deal with copyright and 3D printing" by Michael
Weinberg of Public Knowledge. He only gets a short soundbite in OP's link, but
really deserves a full segment. Free download:
[http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/so-what-deal-
copyright-a...](http://www.publicknowledge.org/blog/so-what-deal-copyright-
and-3d-printing)

------
snarfy
Copyright is to "promote the useful science and arts". When it stops doing
that, its purpose is in question.

------
notmarkus
You wouldn't download and 3D-print a car.

~~~
phren0logy
Why not? Serious question. Maybe not today, but one of the new 3D printers
includes arms to assemble the parts produced. I wouldn't be ready today to
trust my safety to extruded plastic doo-dads, but I don't wee why I wouldn't
eventually use a car 3D printed out of the proper materials.

~~~
Kliment
I believe this is a reference to the absolutely idiotic advertising that the
copyright industry shows exclusively to its paying customers.

------
spullara
My guess is the first thing to be locked down is the printing of 3D printers.

------
andyzweb
"You can't stop the signal"

~~~
gtt
With enough money, you can. Unfortunately.

~~~
leoedin
Is that the case? Piracy is still a fairly rampant problem for the music and
film industry. Any reduction in piracy seems to be due to convenient and cheap
digital music stores presenting a better option than piracy, rather than any
progress in actually stamping out piracy.

You could stop piracy almost completely - deep packet monitoring, extensive
web filtering, fast and harsh penalties and the complete cooperation of the
government probably could cut it to essentially zero. I think most governments
(and even rights holders) recognised that taking it to that level wasn't worth
the consequences. Maybe 3D printing will be different, but I'd imagine that
like with music, there will be very little public appetite for harsh penalties
for downloaders, and so they probably won't happen.

~~~
betterunix
Sure, they still claim "piracy" is a problem. Yet I cannot help but notice the
fundamental shift that occurred over the past decade: fully decentralized
systems are basically dead, everything now involves central servers that large
numbers of downloaders depend on in one way or another. I think the RIAA and
MPAA can safely count that as a win, because it gives them a single point of
failure to attack.

The biggest threat to the RIAA and MPAA was fully decentralized peer to peer
(e.g. Gnutella); those systems could not just be sued out of existence like
Napster or removed from existence by government action like Megaupload. By
scaring everyone away from such systems and towards Bittorrent (with its
trackers) and cloud storage, the industries contained the threat. Just
centralizing the _search_ systems was a big victory for them -- they can
effectively use the DMCA to make it harder to even find the files you are
looking for. Cultivating a producer-consumer mindset, even if it involves TPB,
is good for the RIAA and MPAA: it makes it much easier to introduce their own
download services.

To put it another way, the copyright industries have _always_ had to deal with
infringement. What they feared most in the early 2000s was not infringement,
but infringement that did not require any heavy-duty equipment. Coypright, the
DMCA, and related laws are designed to be used against businesses, not hoards
of individual people. "Happy Birthday to You" is routinely heard in homes and
offices, but never in restaurant chains or movies, for that reason: the
copyright on it cannot be effectively enforced against small gatherings of
people, but it is easily enforced in the case of business use.

~~~
leoedin
I think you're giving the MPAA/RIAA more credit then they're due. The driving
force behind centralised peer to peer systems has always been convenience,
curation and quality rather than fear. Gnutella and similar couldn't provide
the same experience that bittorrent based systems did. Users got tired of not
getting what they thought they were getting, and so when a technology with a
superior user interface (torrents) came along, they adopted it. Although
recently there have been successes in removing torrent sites, a large number
ran for many, many years with no real challenges.

I don't think the RIAA/MPAA are advanced enough to "cultivate a
producer/consumer mindset". Their actions in the last 10 years against all
sorts of infringement methods (napster, kazaa, TPB, suprnova, Jammie Thomas-
Rasset and others) are demonstrative of a rights organisation which didn't
really know how to react to the huge piracy increase in the early 2000s. The
record companies realised that their business model (sell CDs) was being
obliterated by piracy. It took them years (and the lobbying of Apple and
Amazon) to get to a point (todays DRM free digital download market) that they
could compete. It wasn't so much that they managed to get rid of piracy, but
that they provided a more convenient solution to consumers' demand (getting
music) than piracy.

My original comment was made because, in reply to "You can't stop the signal",
gtt said "With enough money, you can. Unfortunately". I would consider the
results of the last decade of music piracy to be a fairly good indication that
in fact you truly can't stop the signal. The only way that rights
organisations have made any progress against piracy is by providing their own,
higher quality, signal. That is something that I believe will translate into
the 3D printing domain.

~~~
betterunix
I do not think it is accurate to say that Gnutella could not provide the same
"experience;" at the height of its popularity, Gnutella was basically the same
experience as we have with TPB and file hosting services today. People still
have to navigate around trojan horses when they download illegally, people
still have to deal with long wait times, people still encounter seemingly good
results that fail to deliver what they want (with torrents and file hosting).
"Curating" is only relevant with the officially endorsed services, and those
services would never have been able to compete in a world where people thought
of things in terms of peer-to-peer sharing.

The reason you saw Gnutella and the like die was the wave of lawsuits from the
RIAA, which led to people being terrified to upload anything. Peer to peer
does not work if people are unwilling to share. The RIAA also successfully
killed the companies that were trying to make peer to peer more usable by
developing spam filters and improving robustness (e.g. Limewire).

It is not as though the concept of people downloading music was introduced to
the RIAA by Napster. Several months before Napster started, the RIAA began
work on SDMI, an attempt to thwart music downloading. The RIAA knew that
people were downloading music over the Internet: anonymous FTP, IRC, Usenet,
etc. It is not that the RIAA did not know how to react to the increase in
copyright infringement; they were already working on a way to fight
downloading.

The record companies did not think for a moment that their business model was
being "obliterated" by downloading. They were working on DRM because they
believed that downloading was the next technological change that they would
need to exploit to stay in business. Home taping had been dealt with years
earlier, after all, so why do you think they were afraid of downloading in and
of itself?

What the RIAA was really afraid of was peer to peer. The RIAA's executives
view the world in terms of one-to-many interactions: one producer serving the
needs of many consumers. What made them panic was the idea that music could be
spread without any centralization at all. With nobody to sue, buy out, tax, or
otherwise deal with, the RIAA was basically left with none of the weapons it
previously wielded. The only strategy left to them was to kill the idea of
peer to peer sharing, by scaring people away, and get people to think like
customers again. The point of suing college students, grandmothers, and other
people whose net worth was not even a blip on the RIAA's RADAR was to scare
people away from peer to peer, and back to systems that allowed the RIAA to
use its legal weapons.

That they eventually managed to create competitive download services is a
separate issue; they were going to do that anyway, just like they eventually
exploited FM radio and eventually exploited cassette tapes. They understood
that computers could be music players long before peer to peer, they just
needed a few years to figure out how they could make money from that. As long
as people believe they require the services of some industrial-scale operation
to obtain their music, the RIAA is not afraid.

As for stopping the signal with sufficient money, I think you absolutely can
do that, and I think you are going to see it happen within your lifetime.
Eventually, you are going to buy a locked-down device that can only connect to
your ISP's movie and music streaming sites, and a few other "approved"
websites, and only use "approved" protocols; in exchange, you'll pay less for
an Internet connection (anyone who wants more will be directed to "business
class service," which will cost twice as much for half the throughput). Your
computer will not allow you to download anything you did not get permission to
download, and will not be able to upload anything audio or video related. You
will not be allowed to run unapproved software. Shortsighted people will say
it is more secure and will say that their grandmother does not need anything
else. Yes, there will be jailbreaks, but you'll have to know someone who has a
computer that can even download and run the jailbreaking software (think mod
chips).

That's what money can buy. Lots of corporations with lots of money are working
to make that a reality, and in the absence of a "killer app" for uninhibited
Internet use (like, say, a peer to peer network) it will only be matter of
finding the right price point and features.

------
danso
I wonder what the impact will be on bespoke craftspersons, such as those who
make their living on Etsy? I would think that as the "essential" products in
life and home living become trivially cheap to manufacture and get-on-demand,
those who can produce high quality one-of-a-kind items -- and who can repair
them -- will be in higher demand, in the same way that top developers still
command high salaries despite the glut of offshore programmers.

~~~
betterunix
3D printers cannot knit a sweater. 3D printers cannot carve wood. That may
change some day, and we can cross that bridge when we come to it.

What I see 3D printers doing is replacing foreign labor for the production of
cheap parts. "Made in China" will be as old-fashioned as sending a letter via
postal mail. Toys will be printed at home, that obscure nut that your car
maker insisted on using will be printed in your garage, etc. Your home
decorations will be printed, and you'll be able to replace them at will.

Despite the availability of cheap goods made by low-paid child laborers in
developing nations, people still pay top dollar for crafts. I doubt that will
change because of 3D printers.

~~~
noptic
Depends on the printer. Not all use plastic. Soem use a lasr to cut the modell
from a solid block. You can 3D print a complete chess set out of steel this
way :). This is far to expensive for home use, but I gues you could use it to
create fake car parts, and sell them for half the price.

~~~
lutorm
There are also machines that assemble metal parts from powder by distributing
powder and then using a laser to melt it, layer by layer:
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selective_laser_sintering>

(If you used laser cutting, it seems it would be hard to make non-convex
parts, since you can't stop the laser at a certain depth.)

