In the days before Hulu, Netflix, and iTunes made Internet time-shifting of media easy and legal, and one might have resorted to using a technology called BitTorrent to download free copies of TV shows and movies. And if one was doing that–one would never admit it, of course–the first place one would look for this illicit bounty was a site called The Pirate Bay , which hosts torrent files. Now, The Pirate Bay has begun hosting torrents of actual, physical stuff, not just electronic media. How? 3-D printing: You encode the data file of a thing, upload it as a torrent, and bam, anyone with a Makerbot can gank it right out of the Internet-ether.

Editor’s Note At Fast Company, Kit Eaten mulls whether physical design can be protected under IP law.

The Pirate Bay is calling these ghost-essences of objects “physibles”: “Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.” Right now that means simple stuff like lawn darts and lenses. But the Pirates have grander visions for physibles. “The benefit to society is huge,” they write. “No more shipping huge amounts of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people.”

As Christopher Mims brutally argues at Technology Review, this kind of techno-magical thinking is basically B.S. But the idea of encoding an industrial design as a pirate-able torrent does open up intriguing variations on traditional copyright infringement and corporate espionage. What if some enterprising blackhat was able to create a physible of the iPhone 5, and put it on The Pirate Bay for anyone to 3-D print? Who cares if an actual working iPhone wouldn’t come out of the printer–simply revealing the form factor and physical specs of the device in this tangible, detailed way could be massively damaging to the holder of that IP, much more than a blurry photograph. And a torrent is much easier to smuggle than a physical prototype anyway. (Yes, I’m skipping over the part about how and where the physible actually gets created. I’m not sure how you could do that without attracting attention in Cupertino. But cut me a break here.)

In any case, even if 3-D printing isn’t going to save the world, 3-D object piracy isn’t going to destroy it either. But this kind of mutating, amoral innovation–and the unpredictable effect it may have–is what makes the real world more interesting than any Cory Doctorow novel.

[via New Scientist]

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