Generally, I think ubiquitous, cheap, personal manufacturing is a good thing. If we have a number of Open Source products we can print out. That will substantia

Generally, I think ubiquitous, cheap, personal manufacturing is a good thing. If we have a number of Open Source products we can print out. That will substantially lower the cost of living for everyone. Hopefully, the vast majority of retailers will turn into service providers. There may still be folks who want to license designs out. Nobody trusts a corporation to enforce their DRM mechanism because they get to be the final arbiter of what is "fair". What is fair is always good for the corporation, never mind the user. They may die and kill off access to those goods. The other extreme is hypocritical, simply because we run our digital goods through hardware -- all resting on the notion of allocation of resources. Besides, content creators want to eat, too. A reasonable compromise is to have the DRM enforced by someone other than the seller. An escrow service is an improvement, but is not much better. And no one wants to depend on the government to host DRM servers. A peer-to-peer DRM might work. Bitcoin is an example of a technology that can be modified for this: http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bitcoin/ http://codinginmysleep.com/exotic-transaction-types-with-bit... The mediation is done peer-to-peer. You can, for example, sign a bitcoin contract saying you are lending an ebook to a friend, and have it published elsewhere. Granted, this would all be on an honor system -- if you can play back media, then you have access to the content, no amount of clever algorithms or coding can change that -- but so is much of the enforcement for civilized interaction. A small group will "cheat", the same way there are breakage in a retail store. If the voluntary participation of such a scheme benefits everyone involved and is not too inconvenient (centralized DRM servers that crash or gets taken down when the company dies, or requires a constant internet connection), I think most people will go for it. It's best we experiment this kind of transaction with digital products, before 3D technologies get good enough that people start buying design licenses for goods. Better yet, we make sure we have Open Source versions of products that people can download and print out.