stories filed under: "3d printing"

Free Software Foundation Certifies 3D Printer -- And Why That Matters

from the I'm-sorry,-Dave,-I'm-afraid-I-can't-do-that dept

Fri, Oct 19th 2012 12:06am — Glyn Moody

Last week Mike wrote about a new patent from Intellectual Ventures that seeks to assert ownership of the idea of DRM for 3D printing. The article in Technology Review that Techdirt linked to explains how things would work:

"You load a file into your printer, then your printer checks to make sure it has the rights to make the object, to make it out of what material, how many times, and so on," says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at the nonprofit Public Knowledge, who reviewed the patent at the request of Technology Review. "It’s a very broad patent."

That's a pretty obvious approach, which any halfway competent engineer would come up with, so it's hard to see how it was ever granted a patent. But leaving aside this familiar problem with the patent system, there's an important issue skated over in the above explanation. It assumes that the printer has the power to disobey you -- that is, to refuse to print out an object that you want, because of the DRM in the file describing it, or because it doesn't have DRM at all. This parallels the situation for computers, where DRM is based on the assumption that your computer is not fully under your control, and has the ability to ignore your commands. That's one of the reasons why free software is so important: it is predicated on the idea that the user is always in control.

Against the background of the new 3D-printing patent, this announcement from the Free Software Foundation (FSF) that it has recently certified a 3D printer made by Aleph Objects as "respecting the user's freedom", takes on a particular significance:

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today awarded its first Respects Your Freedom (RYF) certification to the LulzBot AO-100 3D Printer sold by Aleph Objects, Inc. The RYF certification mark means that the product meets the FSF's standards in regard to users' freedom, control over the product, and privacy.

Here are the FSF's criteria for making the award: The desire to own a computer or device and have full control over it, to know that you are not being spied on or tracked, to run any software you wish without asking permission, and to share with friends without worrying about Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) -- these are the desires of millions of people who care about the future of technology and our society. Unfortunately, hardware manufacturers have until now relied on close cooperation with proprietary software companies that demanded control over their users. As citizens and their customers, we need to promote our desires for a new class of hardware -- hardware that anyone can support because it respects your freedom.
That is, in making the award, the FSF has established that the LulzBot remains fully under the user's control.

Until now, that hasn't been an issue -- there's no practical way to stop someone from simply downloading a file and then printing it out on a compatible 3D printer. But the patent from Intellectual Ventures is the first step towards a time when users of 3D printers will be confronted with issues of control in exactly the same way that computer users are today.

Once 3D printing becomes more widespread, we can certainly expect pressure from manufacturers to bring in laws against unauthorized copying of physical objects and circumvention of 3D DRM schemes, just as the copyright industries have pushed for ever-harsher laws against file sharing. They may even try to get open hardware systems like the LulzBot made illegal on the grounds that the user is fully in control – just as media companies would doubtless love to make computers running free software illegal. That's a battle they lost, largely because free software existed long before digital media files were sold to consumers. We may not be so lucky next time.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: 3d printing, free software, open source, user freedom

35 Comments

Just As Key 3D Printing Patents Get Closer To Expiring, Intellectual Ventures Patents 3D Printing DRM

Patents

from the good-luck-with-that dept

Fri, Oct 12th 2012 5:34pm — Mike Masnick

3D printing is on the verge of really going mainstream, in part because of improvements in the technology, but in large part because the key patents that have limited that advancement are getting close to expiring. Of course, as it takes off, though, expect a ton of people to try to "tax" the success with new patents of their own. And, of course, it comes as little surprise that Intellectual Ventures will be a player in that space. Though its first attempt might backfire... Technology Review has a story about Intellectual Ventures getting a new patent on DRM for 3D printing. You can see the patent (8,286,236) yourself. It's a pretty broad patent that seems to cover a broad array of "authorization" measures for manufacturing based on a data file.

We've talked in the past about how patents too often get granted for taking something known or common and basically saying "on the internet" on it. Perhaps the next wave of patents will be the same kinda thing, but "... with 3D printing." Of course, patenting DRM might actually have a good, if unintended, result: perhaps it will scare people and companies away from making the mistake of trying to DRM up 3D printing files, and leave the system much more open. Though, given the historical comparisons, that seems unlikely...

Filed Under: 3d printing, drm, patents
Companies: intellectual ventures

34 Comments

Teenage Engineering: If Our Parts Are Too Expensive, Here's How To Print Your Own

Bleeding Edge

from the think-small dept

Wed, Oct 3rd 2012 3:46pm — Glyn Moody

There's plenty of breathless writing about the imminent 3D-printing revolution, but realistically, what is it likely to mean for most people? They probably won't all be printing out their own planes, but they may well be printing out small replacement parts for goods they own. Here's an early example of that from the world of electronics, spotted by the Shapeways site:

Teenage Engineering not only make one of the sexiest synthesizers but also get the prize for being the first electronics company to offer their replacement parts as downloadable 3D Printed files.

Teenage Engineering's explanation for the move is as follows: We work hard to make our OP-1 [synthesizer] users happy with free OS updates and added functionality. But sometimes we fail. As some have noted, the shipping cost of the OP-1 accessories is very high. This is because we can't find a good delivery service for small items. Meanwhile, we have decided to put all CAD files of the parts in our library section for you to download. The files are provided in both STEP and STL format. Just download the files and 3D print as many as you want.
Worth noting that this is about serving customers by helping them avoid high shipping costs -- not something every company cares about. Notice, too, that Teenage Engineering explicitly encourages people to print as many replacement parts as they want -- no attempt to limit this to "one-offs" through stupid licensing agreements, for example.

Of course, that's exactly as it should be -- but too often isn't. However, it's also a shrewd move. It means that customers are likely to use their synthesizers for longer, and to become more attached to them. Building customer loyalty in this way is likely to turn them into good ambassadors for the company, and makes the next sale more likely, so Teenage Engineering's generosity is also good business. Similarly, making the CAD files available encourages users to modify and customize the parts, again building loyalty to the brand, and enriching the ecosystem that grows up around the product.

It would be surprising if this kind of approach did not become more widespread among manufacturers of many categories of goods, given the clear advantages it offers. It's not quite as exciting as printing out a car or a plane, but is a practical application of 3D printers that might well help drive their wider use thanks to the direct, everyday savings they can bring.

Follow me @glynmoody on Twitter or identi.ca, and on Google+

Filed Under: 3d printing, accessories, parts, print your own
Companies: teenage engineering

34 Comments

Highlights Of The Pirate Bay's 'Physibles' Section: The 3D-Printable Chris Dodd

Too Much Free Time

from the internet-infamy dept

Thu, Mar 29th 2012 7:06am — Leigh Beadon

The other day it occurred to me to have a look at the Pirate Bay's 'Physibles' category for 3D printer plans, to see what's been added since it launched with a 3D pirate ship model earlier this year. Among the odds and ends (both useful and just-for-fun) like a whistle, a stylus for touch-screens and a Guy Fawkes mask, there is one particularly amusing item: a 3D-printable portrait of MPAA CEO Chris Dodd:

A crude little 3D printable portrait of a crude little man - Chris Dodd emblazoned with the 09F9 AACS encryption key.

Print it, and behold the visage of yesteryear.

Yay Physibles!

As many will recall, the AACS encryption key (used in decrypting HD DVDs and Blu-ray discs) was at the center of a controversy in 2007, when aggressive MPAA takedowns of the hexadecimal series sparked a massive Streisand Effect that plastered the key all over popular websites like Digg. While this was hardly the only time that Dodd and the MPAA have clashed with the Pirate Bay community, it has since been commonly used as a symbol of the unstoppable nature of information online.

So if you have a 3D printer and would like a constant reminder of "the visage of yesteryear", go ahead and extrude yourself one today. And if you're a former Senator who took over a major lobbying organization despite your promise not to become a lobbyist, go ahead and continue waging war with the internet community—they'll just keep finding creative ways to rub it in your face (or a 3D replica thereof).

Filed Under: 3d printing, aacs, chris dodd, printables
Companies: the pirate bay

29 Comments

Free 3D-Printable Kit To Connect Different Toy Construction Sets Released -- But Partially Blocked Due To Patents

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the think-of-the-IP-lawyers dept

Tue, Mar 20th 2012 7:06am — Mike Masnick

I've been hearing about this project for a few months now, and I'm excited to see that it's finally been released. F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab have officially released their Free Universal Construction Kit, a set of 3D printer instructions for creating nearly 80 awesome "adapter" bricks that let you connect ten (sort of) popular children's construction playsets:

Included are connectors between the following sets: Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob. There's also a giant universal adapter block. I'll admit I'm a bit disappointed that Megabloks didn't make the cut, as my son tends to go back and forth between those and Duplos. If you want them, they're available at Thingverse, though you'll obviously need a 3D printer to actually do anything with them. Here are some of the photos they've put up of the kit in action:

The general idea is really cool. Kids don't care if Lego and Tinkertoys come from the same company. They want them to work together nicely. That's part of the fun of tinkering. But, of course, the toy companies want to "control" the market and pretend that only their toys exist. Acknowledging anyone else's toys is seen as a mistake -- even though it actually adds value to the toys by letting you do more with them. In the past we've seen Lego, in particular, be particularly aggressive in trying to lock out competitors.

Of course, that raises the big question: what about intellectual property law with this offering? The non-commercial nature of it likely protects them against trademark issues, though it does seem silly that actually offering such useful connector blocks for sale might put you in legal hot water. Either way, I know the guys who put this together spent a ridiculous amount of time exploring the different legal issues involved here, and have put up a detailed discussion on them -- with a clear recognition that even after being as careful as possible to not infringe on anyone's rights, they still have to note:

Some may express concern that the Free Universal Construction Kit infringes such corporate prerogatives as copyright, design right, trade dress, trademarks or patents of the supported toy systems. We encourage those eager to enforce these rights to please think of the children — and we assert that the home printing of the Free Universal Construction Kit constitutes protected fair use.

Furthermore, they have a pretty full discussion on how the use of IP here is not about protecting rights at all, but about attempting to gain market dominance:

Today’s manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else’s. Indeed—despite obvious benefits to users everywhere—the implementation of cross-brand interoperability can be nearly impossible, given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, and trademarks involved in doing so. So we stepped up. The Free Universal Construction Kit is the VLC of children’s playsets.

As we can see from the example above, interoperability is a question of power and market dominance. Most market leaders regard interoperability as an anti-competitive nuisance, a regulatory check on their ambition, or a concession to the whining of lesser players. Quite simply, interoperability is the request of the disenfranchised. And which end-user, in so many ways, is less enfranchised than a preliterate child?

The simple fact is that no toy company would ever make the Free Universal Construction Kit. Instead, each construction toy wants (and indeed, pretends) to be your only playset. Within this worldview, the other manufacturers’ construction sets are just so many elephants in the room, competing for your attention on the shelves of Toys-R-Us. No longer. The Free Universal Construction Kit presents what no manufacturer could: a remedy providing extensible, post-facto syntactic interoperability for construction toys. Let the fun begin!

Of course, there's still the issue of patents... and there the folks behind this project also did something interesting. In that list of supported toys are two -- Zoob and Zome -- that are technically still under patent protection. To deal with those two, the kit actually does not include connectors to either of those toys. Instead, both have a pending date, to be released on the day those patents expire. In other words, progress and the ability to interoperate with those toys must wait until the monopolies expire. Progress is being hindered, not promoted here.

We've discussed in the past how 3D printing is an upcoming legal battle, as many of the issues that previously arose solely the digital realm will be crossing over into the physical. We've also noted how The Pirate Bay has already stepped up with plans to offer a place to share 3D printable plans -- and, indeed, the folks behind this project note that it will soon be up on that site, when it's ready.

The more you look at this, the more it makes you wonder what else simply isn't being done today due to over-aggressive desire for control via IP laws, rather than recognition that making a product more valuable and useful is actually a good thing.

Filed Under: 3d printing, adapters, bristle blocks, construction sets, copyrights, duplo, fischertechnik, gears, innovation, krinkles, lego, lincoln logs, patents, playsets, tinkertoys, toys, trademarks, universal construction kit, zome, zoob

40 Comments

How Patents Have Held Back 3D Printing

Patents

from the retarding-the-progress dept

Tue, Jan 31st 2012 3:52pm — Mike Masnick

The purpose of the intellectual property system that we have is to promote the progress. When there is strong evidence that certain elements of it hold back the progress, it seems like something that should be explored. Glyn recently wrote about the plans to make 3D object plan files available on the Pirate Bay. In that post, he pointed to a great interview with Michael Weinberg from Public Knowledge, who had really been at the forefront of getting people to think about the legal consequences associated with 3D printing. However, there was also one interesting side note in that interview that didn't get nearly enough attention. It's that development and innovation has been held up for the last couple decades -- not because the technology wasn't available, but because of key patents that are apparently needed to build 3d printers. Those patents have started (but aren't entirely set) to expire, leading to the sudden interest and growing affordability of such printers.

We've seen this before, but here it's a modern example: work simply wasn't done on many of these efforts in part because there was no competition. And, in fact, there are still a few patents that really do hinder things, and this is a problem. Considering just how much good these 3D printers can do -- especially as they provide more power, do multi-color, and a variety of other features, it kind of makes you wonder just how much we've lost by having tons of researchers just sitting on their printer projects out of a fear of getting sued.

Filed Under: 3d printing, patents

65 Comments

NY Times Discovers The Coming Legal Battle Over 3D Printing

Predictions

from the it's-coming... dept

Thu, Nov 17th 2011 1:33am — Mike Masnick

We've been discussing 3D printing for over a decade, including warning that some of the disrupted companies/industries are likely to go ballistic and talk about how they're being "robbed" by this form of competition. Hopefully, enough people realize this is crazy, but it seems doubtful. Take a look at this NY Times article about the legal questions surrounding 3D printing, and note that the author seems surprised that it's mostly legal to make a copy of something using a 3D printer:

Suppose you covet a lovely new mug at a friend�s house. So you snap a few pictures of it. Software renders those photos into designs that you use to print copies of the mug on your home 3-D printer.

Did you break the law by doing this? You might think so, but surprisingly, you didn�t....

When I posed my mug scenario to Mr. Weinberg, he responded: �If you took that mug and went to a pottery class and remade it, would you be asking me the same questions about breaking a copyright law? No.� Just because new tools arrive, like 3-D printers and digital files that make it easier to recreate an object, he said, it doesn�t mean people break the law when using them.

Of course, that's not quite the whole story. There may be trademark/patent issues to deal with separately. But, more importantly, given what we've seen of lots of industries in the past, the incumbents are going to fight long and hard to claim exactly the opposite: that such uses of 3D printing are entirely illegal. Hopefully, they'll fail, but there's almost certainly going to be a series of long and drawn out cases, leaving us at the mercy of a judge recognizing the statements above are correct.

Filed Under: 3d printing, copyright, infringement

71 Comments

Prop Wars: Can Paramount Prevent People From Offering Up Plans To 3D Print Movie Props?

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the freedom-to-build dept

Thu, Jun 30th 2011 12:30pm — Mike Masnick

It wasn't difficult to predict that this was coming. Late last year, we noted that it was only a matter of time until certain industries started to freak out about 3D printing, and how it would allow people to print physical items that others would claim "infringed" on original works. And, it shouldn't be much of a surprise that it's the entertainment industry that is the first to freak out. We had already noted that Gene Roddenberry's son was claiming that anyone who did a 3D printing of a Star Trek prop was infringing his rights (kinda ironic, given the nature of the Replicator device in the Star Trek universe...).

However, Paramount Pictures, a subsidiary of Viacom, has taken this even further. The studio apparently sent a cease-and-desist to Todd Blatt, a mechanical engineer, who has been making 3D printable models of various movie props, sending them off to the popular 3D printing service Shapeways, and offering up the products. In this case, Paramount freaked out that he was offering a 3D printed version of the weird cube-like figure in the movie Super 8.

Blatt, not wanting to get into a legal fight, took down the offered object... but the whole thing is raising questions as to whether or not Paramount has a legitimate legal claim here. As Eriq Gardner notes, this is like the Mike Tyson tattoo/Warner Bros. case in reverse.

Obviously, the creator of such a product might run into trouble depending on how the technology is packaged. "Bring home a character from Transformers" might imply a false endorsement. "Look like Angelina Jolie" might constitute a violation of the actress' publicity rights. But copyright? Is a physical re-creation of an object on-screen a derivative?

It definitely seems like a stretch, but if the entertainment industry is good at anything these days, it's stretching the meaning of copyright laws. While nothing more is likely to happen in this case, you can rest assured that this issue isn't going away, and there will almost certainly be court cases in the near future.

Filed Under: 3d printing, copyright, infringement, super 8
Companies: paramount

46 Comments

Be Your Own Souvenir

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the 3d-printing dept

Tue, Apr 26th 2011 9:07pm — Mike Masnick

We've been interested in the potential legal implications of 3D printing for a while, but that shouldn't blind us to the fact that some of the natural uses of 3D printing can be pretty cool as well. There's something really remarkable about this new project, from blablabLAB, posted on Notcot, about the idea of being your own souvenir. Rather than just getting a little plastic trinket from a souvenir stand, you can pose yourself however you want, get a 3D scan, and then a 3D printing of yourself. There's a photo below and then a pretty cool video of the process in action.

Image courtesy of Notcot

Filed Under: 3d printing, souvenir

18 Comments

DailyDirt: 3D Printing Doesn't Require Dorky Glasses

Bleeding Edge

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Fri, Jan 7th 2011 5:00pm — Michael Ho

Every so often, there's a catchy gadget label that tries to make things sound cooler than they are. For example, I've actually seen sunglasses that advertised that they provided "HD vision" -- even though they were non-prescription. The "HD" fad may be dying down, but the "3D" train might just be boarding. The development of 3D printing technology, though, is legitimately cool. Here are just a few examples.

Growing certain simple human organs from scratch is possible, and more complex organs are on the way. "I just do eyes, ju-, ju-, just eyes... just genetic design, just eyes. You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes." [url]
A 3D-printed flute took 15 hours to print -- with some assembly required. Maybe musical instruments will get a lot cheaper -- and encourage more kids to play them (interactively with video games, perhaps?). [url]
Printed food could be made from soylent green ink. Actually, it's not people, but it could be -- if it were combined with the human organ printing project. [url]

Filed Under: 3d printing, human organs

11 Comments

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Free Software Foundation Certifies 3D Printer -- And Why That Matters

from the I'm-sorry,-Dave,-I'm-afraid-I-can't-do-that dept