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from the printster-will-be-the-new-napster dept.
Remember Napster or Grokster? Both services allowed users to share computer files – usually digital music – that infringed the copyrights for those songs.
Now imagine that, instead of music, you could download a physical object. Sounds like something from a sci-fi movie – push a button and there's the item! But that scenario is already becoming a reality. With a 3D printer, someone can download a computer file, called a computer-aided design (CAD) file, that instructs the printer to make a physical, three-dimensional object.
Because CAD files are digital, they can be shared across the internet on file-sharing services, just like movies and music. Just as digital media challenged the copyright system with rampant copyright infringement, the patent system likely will encounter widespread infringement of patented inventions through 3D printing. The problem is, however, that the patent system is even more ill-equipped to deal with this situation than copyright law was, posing a challenge to a key component of our innovation system.
If 3-D printing at home happened fast enough it would cut China off at the knees.
(Score: 1) by driverless on Friday January 08 2016, @09:57AM
We are a long way from that. 3D printing still uses materials that can't hold a candle to the gun that is supposed to be printed or whatever. Basically you can make toys.
+1. 3D printing is basically for doing crude prototypes of a very restricted range of items. One very obvious problem is that you can have either speed (for relatively slothful definitions of "speed") or quality, not both. In fact given that the whole thing is governed by how much material you can lay down in a given time unit, it's more like "speed, quality, robustness, choose any one". When I can get a powder injection moulding machine for a few thousand dollars that does what a 3D printer now does, and that doesn't cost something like a thousand times as much to DIY than it would to just buy the original item from the manufacturer, then we're talking.
In any case, as you point out, it won't have any effect on patents.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Friday January 08 2016, @01:39PM
That's the case now, but what will it be when you can throw the broken plastic item into a hopper, see it shredded and re-printed as a good-as-new version? What about when you can throw all your cast-off items into that hopper, which will crunch them up, sort them, and return as feedstock for the printer? They have large sorting machines now for various classes of materials, so it's not inconceivable that smaller desktop versions should come about, too.
That is a much different world than the centralized, 19th-century-based one we're still living in.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by frojack on Saturday January 09 2016, @01:43AM
Even if the media were cheap, how many things do you use in real life that are made out of exactly one part, or one type of material? Sitting here at my cluttered desk the only such thing within reach is a ceramic coffee cut coaster. Everything else has parts, wires, circuit boards, springs, knobs, screws, glass, metal, and plastic mixed together.
In my garage I have a few things like box wrenches and nails made of one substance.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.