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Copy Protection for 3-D Printing Aims to Prevent a Piracy Plague

3 points by graeham 13y ago

graeham 13y ago
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.
trebor 13y ago
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?
- graeham 13y ago
  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 13y ago
    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
kumarski 13y ago
If you have a 3d printer, I encourage you to violate any of the 3000+ patents held by trolls. Print away.

3 points by graeham 13y ago

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.

trebor 13y ago

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?

graeham 13y ago
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 13y ago
  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

kumarski 13y ago

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