Will 3D Printing Fuel Forgery?

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.

 

The reaction, predictably, is a growing movement to shackle 3D printers — machines that use a digital blueprint to “print” a three-dimensional, physical object by repeatedly layering materials — before the horse is out of the barn. 

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).

The fabrication process begins with a 3D design file, created from scratch or drawn from a 3D scan of an object. Software deconstructs the 3D image into a series of 2D cross-sectional slices and the printer deposits layers of material, typically plastic or metal, one atop the other in the shape of each 2D slice. The layers are fused, and the fabricated object is treated and hardened.
 
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

Pinterest: Pinning, Sharing and Challenging Copyright Laws




Getty Images pinned and re-pinned - some in hi-res 

 

Is Pinterest the new Napster or a Wake-Up Call for a Better Copyright Idea?

The headline in The Wall Street Journal asked, "Is Pinterest the Next Napster?" It's a good question, but perhaps the wrong one.

The story focuses on a blog post written by Kristin Kowalski titled, "Why I Tearfully Deleted My Pinterest Inspiration Boards" that went viral.

Pinterest is a social site for image sharing around themes that launched in March 2010. It gained a considerable following and was one of Time's "50 Best Websites of 2011." In January 2012 it drove more referral traffic to retailers than YouTube, Google+ and LinkedIn combined and became the fasted site to ever break 10 million unique visitors.

As its popularity increases, so have concerns about whether its users aren't just sharing their favorite things, but engaging one another in the web's largest copyright infringement platform.

Ms. Kowalski, a photographer/lawyer, feels pretty strongly that it's infringement to re-pin work from others. Kowalski turned to federal copyright laws and found a section allowing fair use without permission when someone is criticizing it, commenting on it or conducting research. Re-pinning doesn't fall under any of those categories. She concludes that the only option is to either pin your own work or get off Pinterest altogether.

In a recent TechCrunch interview, Jonathan Klein, co-founder and CEO of Getty Images, discussed photo sharing on the Internet. As the world's largest stock agency, he is focused on protecting the photographs that belong to his company -- and making sure that Getty and its affiliated photographers get paid.



Mr. Klein is not concerned about people playing with Getty photos; teenagers using for school projects and folks putting them up on their personal blogs -- or, at the moment, even Pinterest.

So when does Getty snap into action? The moment a website starts running ads alongside those images. As Klein told TechCrunch in the interview above: "We're comfortable with people using our images to build traffic. The point in time when they have a business model, they have to have some sort of license."

This is why Pinterest has a big problem on its hands. When they start generating revenue, which they have not done so far, this will spotlight copyright issues and the lawyers will pounce. The site has certainly built immense traffic by allowing people to share and collect as many photos as they want -- many of which inevitably don't belong to them in the legal sense.  However, the moment that Pinterest starts making money on its own, intellectual property owners such as Getty Images will have the right to ask that Pinterest pay up -- or start deleting pinboards.

But could it be instead that pinning other people's images -- the way Pinterest intends and the way most people use the site -- is fair use? Courts have held that search engine thumbnails are sufficiently transformative to not be infringing. In that context, are Pinterest boards likewise transformative?

Pinterest is probably counting on that -- being considered like a search engine were this ever come to a courtroom, since pins link back to the original site. Pinterest may also have concluded that its users' creation of "boards" is use of content in ways that is akin to collages and mashups, which many consider transformative and therefore lawful.

So there are understandably different opions on the issue of copyright legality. However, beyond questions of copyright, underlying all of this is a huge problem to which the only solution is a mass recognition of the cultural shift occurring. Simply put, the Internet is built on a culture of sharing.

Creatives of all types are often surprised to find their photos shared or their designs copied by others. All art is ultimately derivative -- from the great masters like Karsh or Hemingway or Matisse -- whether the artist wants to admit it or not. We build on those who came before us. That's not a bad thing -- it's just art.

Sources:

1. Therese Poletti, "Is Pinterest the Next Napster," The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2012

2. Collen Taylor, "For Pinterest, Revenue Will Turn Copyright Questions Into Real Problems," TechCrunch, March 22, 2012

3. Anthony Wing Kosner, "Pinterste: Napster for Housewives or Wake Up Call for a Better Copyright Idea?", Forbes, March 15, 2012

4. Ruth Suehle, "Pinteerest and Copyright: Why You Should Keep Sharing -- and Keep Pinning," Opensource.com, March 7, 2012