Badges?! Badges?! We don't need no stinkin' badges!Like those new Nike's - but don't want to pay the retail price? How about that bling you saw on the fashion runway? But you can't afford the designers' premium for you and your BFF? Just make your own with 3D Printing!
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Remember what it was like when consumers could open Napster and then download any song they wanted … for free? Well, the recording industry sure does; it’s never fully recovered from its transition to digital even after Napster has come and gone.
Now, the manufacturing world in general — essentially any company that builds and sells a physical product — is beginning to wake up to the potential of 3D printing to wreak similar havoc on their business.
3D Printing is a process of making a three-dimensional solid object of virtually any shape from a digital model. 3D printing is achieved using an additive process, where successive layers of material are laid down in different shapes. 3D printing is considered distinct from traditional machining techniques, which mostly rely on the removal of material by methods such as cutting or drilling (subtractive processes).
Since the start of the twenty-first century there has been a large growth in the sales of these machines, and their price has dropped substantially.
A disruptor like no other
Though still in its infancy, personal 3D printing technology already shows the same disruptive potential as the original printing press. Just as moveable type spread across Europe and democratized knowledge, the proliferation of 3D printers eventually promises to democratize creation. Broken dishwasher part? Download the relevant CAD file and print it out in plastic. While Amazon made trips to the store seem dated, 3D printing will make ordering (some) things online feel positively quaint.
Most people think of “printing” as a strictly 2D affair, but 3D printing works much like its 2D cousin, the inkjet printer, though it builds up a succession of layers to form its objects. Such printers can cost between thousands and hundreds of thousands of dollars (a build-it-yourself model, the RepRap, can be assembled for a few hundred bucks).
Because 3D printers don’t need to carve material from preexisting blocks (as in sculpture), the process allows for elaborate and visually stunning shapes to be created in a matter of hours with no manual labor. The size of these shapes is only limited by the size of the printer making them.
All that is well and good, but any technology that allows users to digitize and replicate objects is bound to have some Intellectual Property implications. And it’s precisely because of its potential as a game changer that 3D printing presents challenging legal questions best addressed before the technology becomes ubiquitous.
Gutenberg didn’t have to worry much about intellectual property laws, but he had to compete with an array of other legal and societal challenges to his invention. Eventually copyright, a novel concept in the 16th century, emerged as a means to regulate Gutenberg’s disruptive technology. 3D printing is especially intriguing from a legal perspective because, like the printing press, it has broad implications for the existing legal regime (including all three areas of Intellectual Property- patent, copyright, and trademark), but it also presents issues that may warrant broad changes to existing law—or require new laws entirely.
Sources:
1. Masable, Topics: 3D Printing
2. Peter Hanna, "The Next Napster?" ArsTEchnica, April 6, 2011
3. Peter owak, "Will 2013 be the year 3D printing sparks a patent law armageddon?" Canadian Business, January 9, 2013
3. Wikipedia: 3D Printing
