I don't disagree with your statements, but I don't think they're the most important factor. 3D printing will never be free, but it doesn't need to be. It only n

I don't disagree with your statements, but I don't think they're the most important factor. 3D printing will never be free, but it doesn't need to be. It only needs to be cost competitive with purchasing the physical good from the traditional provider. There are still a lot of parallels with digital media, because the cost for a media provider to duplicate digital media is the same as it is for a consumer: free. The costs to the media provider are in production, marketing, and promotion. Additionally, media rights holders sell their content at a healthy profit (far exceeding the total costs of all the production cost components) because they're able to artificially limit supply. Scarcity is enforced only by legal frameworks, not by limits of production. The consumer avoids these costs by duplicating the content on their own, which just happens to be free. That is the disruption. The same factors apply to many physical goods. The significant costs are in design, marketing, and logistics (moving things around). Manufacturing the physical product is frequently an equal or smaller cost component in the greater scheme of things. This is especially true of simple physical goods that are sold at a high price because of trademark exclusivity or brand value (action figures are a great example). The consumer can avoid the design, marketing, and trademark/brand costs by 3D printing their own physical product. Logistical costs are offset somewhat by the fact that bulk material is easier and cheaper to transport than a finished product. This mechanism of disruption -- avoidance of major cost components through self-production -- is very similar to the one we see in digital media. 3D printing costs don't need to drop to free, they only need to beat the retail price, which includes many non-manufacturing related costs.