

Copy Protection for 3-D Printing Aims to Prevent a Piracy Plague - graeham
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/518591/copy-protection-for-3-d-printing-aims-to-prevent-a-piracy-plague/

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trebor
I don't find the physical design of a product to be unique or worth
protecting. If the "pirate" wants to go through the trouble to scan, touch-up,
and print something they could've bought then let them go through the trouble.
How is the "pirate" working to reproduce, reverse engineer, a physical product
piracy?

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graeham
I think what is trying to be protected is the time of the person who designed
the part. There could well be unique artistic or engineering contained in the
physical design of a product, worth far more that the materials and machine
time.

~~~
trebor
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-sale_doctrine)

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kumarski
If you have a 3d printer, I encourage you to violate any of the 3000+ patents
held by trolls. Print away.

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graeham
What do people think about this? Certainly an interesting concept, but also
something I think that could be hacked around if someone was highly interested
in reproducing a design.

