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posted by CoolHand on Friday May 08 2015, @12:02PM   Printer-friendly
from the right-to-make-arms dept.

THIS WEEK MARKS the two-year anniversary since Cody Wilson, the inventor of the world’s first 3-D printable gun, received a letter from the State Department demanding that he remove the blueprints for his plastic-printed firearm from the internet. The alternative: face possible prosecution for violating regulations that forbid the international export of unapproved arms.

Now Wilson is challenging that letter. And in doing so, he’s picking a fight that could pit proponents of gun control and defenders of free speech against each other in an age when the line between a lethal weapon and a collection of bits is blurrier than ever before.

Wilson’s gun manufacturing advocacy group Defense Distributed, along with the gun rights group the Second Amendment Foundation, on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against the State Department and several of its officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry. In their complaint, they claim that a State Department agency called the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls (DDTC) violated their first amendment right to free speech by telling Defense Distributed that it couldn’t publish a 3-D printable file for its one-shot plastic pistol known as the Liberator, along with a collection of other printable gun parts, on its website.

In its 2013 letter to Defense Distributed, the DDTC cited a long-controversial set of regulations known as the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), which controls whether and how Americans can sell weapons beyond U.S. borders. By merely posting a 3-D-printable file to a website, in other words, the DDTC claimed Defense Distributed had potentially violated arms export controls—just as if it had shipped a crate of AR-15s to, say, Mexico. But the group’s lawsuit now argues that whether or not the Liberator is a weapon, its blueprints are “speech,” and that Americans’ freedom of speech is protected online—even when that speech can be used to make a gun with just a few clicks.

http://www.wired.com/2015/05/3-d-printed-gun-lawsuit-starts-war-arms-control-free-speech/

Here’s the full complaint from Defense Distributed: https://www.scribd.com/doc/264435890/Defense-Distributed-et-al-v-U-S-Dept-of-State

 
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  • (Score: 2) by c0lo on Friday May 08 2015, @01:31PM

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Friday May 08 2015, @01:31PM (#180303) Journal

    I think they are going to have as much success keeping 'files' inside national boundaries as they have had ridding the internet of porn.

    mmm... ridding? The result is closer to riding the porn... maybe in an illegal (in Japan), 3D-printed, pussy boat [theguardian.com].

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