Attorneys general from 20 states celebrated on Monday when a district court judge in Seattle extended an injunction against the sharing of 3-D printed gun blueprints online. But their victory lap was short-lived. On Tuesday afternoon, Cody Wilson, founder of the open-source gun-printing advocacy group Defense Distributed, announced he would begin selling the blueprints directly to people who want them.

Wilson said that while the preliminary injunction forbade him to share the files online for free, it expressly allowed him to sell them. At a news conference Tuesday, Wilson periodically stopped talking to check his phone when a new sale came through.

This technicality, legal experts say, really does allow Wilson to sell his blueprints. The legally tricky part is verifying that his customers are all US citizens; if not, he'll be in violation of US export law.

But the distinction between selling the blueprints and uploading them online for free underscores the problems with the current legal battle against DIY guns. The current injunction came after a last-ditch effort to ban the plans, but was never the optimal way to prevent 3-D printed gun proliferation. To do that will require legislation, state or federal, expressly forbidding the downloading and sharing of DIY blueprints, as well as the actual printing of plastic guns.

The Limits of Lawsuits

The government’s case against Defense Distributed centers on export law, and a deal Wilson struck with the State Department back in July. Until July, DIY gun blueprints were considered a “deemed export” by the Department of Defense, which meant that uploading them online was the same as exporting them internationally. Wilson had argued that defining online data as an arms export violated free speech. Physical publications that make information freely available aren't treated the same as online content; if Wilson had just published the blueprints in a magazine before uploading them, the State Department would have had no room for complaint.

But Wilson, a devoted cryptoanarchist, didn’t do that. His blueprints were removed from his website during a four-year legal scuffle with the State Department until this summer, when the government effectively caved by transferring the export licensing of DIY gun blueprints to the Commerce Department, which defines online data in a way that allows for Wilson to distribute his plans.

This was a huge victory for Wilson, who immediately reuploaded the blueprints to his website. But his success likely had more to do with ongoing export law reform than his long-running suit.

'Selling the blueprints isn't an exercise of First Amendment freedoms, but rather a subversion of a lawful judicial order.' Lawrence Gostin, Georgetown Law School

“Wilson wasn’t likely to win, and the only thing that caused the change here was export control reform in moving .50 caliber or less arms to the Commerce Department,” says Clif Burns, an attorney specializing in export controls in the DC office of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, who has followed the case from the beginning. “There is no reason for us to have two export agencies. Every other country in the world has one agency that does them all,” says Burns.

Unlike the State Department, Commerce doesn’t define online posts as exports, and never has. With small firearms exports moving out of its jurisdiction, Burns says, the State Department had no reason to keep fighting the case.

“Why fight a battle that was going to be pointless in a matter of months? So just go ahead and settle it,” Burns says. “But they were a little bit sloppy about how they settled it.”

Specifically, in July State approved the Defense Distributed blueprints for public release, and it temporarily removed them from the category of small firearms below .50 calibers. That second part opened the door to the case brought by 20 attorneys general, who argued—in addition to noting the security threats—that because of the category change, State had to give Congress notice before implementing the deal.

On Monday, US District Judge Robert Lasnik in Seattle found both aspects of that argument compelling enough to extend an injunction against the publication of the blueprints online. "The instability and inaccuracy of 3-D printed firearms pose threats to the citizens of the plaintiff States,” Lasnik wrote.