Last week, while unloading my dishwasher, I had a “eureka!” moment in which I suddenly understood why the machine had not been adequately cleaning up the cups and baby bottles in the upper rack: a small rubber tube had split open, and much of the water meant for the upper rack was spilling over the plates below instead.

In the dark ages before the Internet, this might have meant an expensive house call from an appliance repair company. Today, it means going to the manufacturer's website, digging up the complete parts list for a decade-old appliance, and then placing an online order for the small rubber part, which will arrive in a box on your doorstep within the week. Magical!

For now, anyway. In the future, even this approach will seem unbearably primitive. What if I could simply download a three-dimensional design file for the part I needed from the Internet and then print it immediately on my household 3D printer? Thirty minutes later my dishwasher could be back in business with a good-as-new plastic replacement part, though I could potentially be on the hook for a huge damage award. That's because, as the physical world gets digitized, it will face all the same intellectual property issues that have so far affected digital content like music and movies.

As 3D scanners and 3D printers plunge in cost, designers and manufacturers are going to get worried. Once they get worried, they go either to courts or to Congress. When this happened in the 1990s with digital media, the result was the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), and those on the cutting edge of home three-dimensional fabrication want to make sure that they're ready this time when a similar full-court press tries to convince Congress to increase intellectual property protection in the US.

“Just as with the printing press, the copy machine, and the personal computer before it, some people will see 3D printing as a disruptive threat,” says a new report (PDF) out today from the group Public Knowledge. “Similarly, just as with the printing press, the copy machine, and the personal computer, some people will see 3D printing is a groundbreaking tool to spread creativity and knowledge. It is critical that those who fear not stop those who are inspired.”

"If the 3D printing community waits until that day to organize, it will be too late."

Meet the RepRap



The community is already preparing for the battle. Dr. Adrian Bowyer of the UK was the brains behind the RepRap, the "Replicating Rapid Prototyper" that can make many of the key parts needed to build another RepRap. Before devices like RepRap, commercial 3D printers cost upwards (sometimes far upwards) of $250,000.

"I changed that," says Bowyer. With the six-year-old RepRap, hackers can build a basic 3D printer for a few hundred dollars. The project has been a success, spawning RepRap hobbyist groups around the world, and there are more RepRaps in operation now than all commercial 3D printers sold over the last three decades.

The first design, called Darwin, was top-heavy and could be tricky to build. A simplified second-generation RepRap called Mendel appeared last year. (See it in the video below.)

Bowyer is fully aware of the fact that his devices, by democratizing 3D printing, have "radical implications for intellectual property law," and he has delved into the subject of IP law as a result of his creation's success.

Different laws in different parts of the world will have real effects on 3D printing hobbyists as the movement grows. Say your kid's birthday is coming up, so you visit a site like Thingiverse, where people upload and alter 3D designs for these printers. You download a frictionless UFO toy file, you customize it with little Johnny's name, you print it out in plastic and color it, and you give it to little Johnny for his birthday.

Fine—unless the UFO design was made from a patented toy. In Europe, Bowyer says that patent law allows people to privately copy patented devices, so long as they don't try to sell it. But in the US, that's not the case, and patent law has no "fair use" exemptions.

"Big Toy" is unlikely to kick down your door searching for patent infringement, but companies are much more likely to eventually file suit against sites like Thingiverse if users start uploading patented designs. And one can only imagine what the sites that don't even care about legality will look like.

In a paper published earlier this year, Bowyer illustrates just how broad these questions will be: "Tempting as it may be to copy and use a picture of a well-known cartoon character, the resulting cards would very likely be an infringement of the copyright and perhaps trade marks owned by the relevant rights holder. But what if someone uses a printer capable of producing a mobile phone cover bearing such an image? Or reproducing a distinctively-styled piece of kitchenware? What about printing out a spare wing-mirror mount for your car? Do these uses infringe IP rights?"

Companies have little to worry about so far from projects like RepRap, which prints in plastic that can cost $10 per kilogram. But Bowyer is already at work on a scheme to let his RepRaps use "home-recycled plastic," and he sees a day not far off where rightsholders try to use DRM to lock down design files and demand that machines like RepRap somehow respect rightsholder restrictions.

The new new thing



Tiffany Rad works with a hackerspace lab in Herndon, Virginia, which has two commercial 3D printers—one in monochrome and one in color. While the ABS plastic products coming off a RepRap can take half an hour to make and can be a bit crude, the full-color commercial 3D printers are marvels to behold (see video below).

Couple such a 3D printer with a 3D scanner and you've got all the tools you need to do some serious copying of industrial designs. Rad sees this as a type of format shifting, and she notes that most patents cover only the "utility" of an object, not its design. Copying the shape of a particularly cool lamp stand, for instance, would probably not get you into trouble; replicating the way a patented device functions (and commercial 3D printers can already do things like produce working ball bearing joints) and you could be in real trouble.

"I haven't seen a great deal of litigation," says Rad, but she too worries about the issues and doesn't want to be caught unprepared as rightsholders push the courts and Congress to extend protections to offer great protection to designs. Such design protections do exist—the DMCA itself included the Vessel Hull Design Protection Act for boats—and there has sometimes been talk of extending design protections to things like fashion.

Public Knowledge attorney Michael Weinberg admits he "doesn't have an easy answer" about how the law should answer all of these emerging questions, but he suggests that much will depend on the analogies that win out. Is a 3D CAD file more like a blueprint, which has limited copyright protection, or more like a photograph, which has tremendous protection, even from derivative works, the moment it's taken?

Back in 2007, when we covered the Fab@Home 3D printer project out of Cornell University (also on its second model now), we wrapped up the piece by pondering just what the democratization of objects might mean for the world: "If it can do for plastic products what cheap digital tools have done for music and film creators, then the future will be a world filled with very cool toys, gadgets, and action figures. It will also be a future in which creative inventors in developing nations, the kind of people who would never have had access to fabrication plants, can suddenly turn their ideas in reality. It will be a future in which the real world becomes a set of digital downloads, and it's not too great a stretch to imagine that iTunes one day will sell 3D models alongside its other digital goodies."

That's the future that Public Knowledge wants to preserve, but its "access to knowledge" approach is sure to run into complaints from IP rightsholders, just as it does today over digital media issues. Still, when that happens, the 3D fabbers want to be prepared—and they want to make sure that Congress actually understands the tech in question and its potential before it hears the horror stories about piracy.

"The community must work to educate policy makers and the public about the benefit of widespread access," Weinberg concludes in his report. "That way, when legacy industries portray 3D printing as a hobby for pirates and scofflaws, their claims will fall on ears too wise to destroy the new new thing."