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| People could soon make their own keyboard keys |
Legal
battles could soon emerge as digital sharing moves beyond copying media to
taking files and transforming them into physical objects.
The
controversial website The Pirate Bay announced this week that it would begin
hosting digital files for visitors to download and print out on their 3D
printers. The site has coined a new word - "Physibles" - for data
objects capable and feasible of becoming physical.
"We
believe that things like three-dimensional printers, scanners and such are just
the first," the group wrote on its website. "We believe that in the
nearby future you will print your spare parts for your vehicles."
The site
has faced extensive legal battles in its home country of Sweden over potential
intellectual property infringement of digital content. The concern for many
intellectual property owners is that just as there is piracy in the digital
world, so too will there be in the physical world.
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| The Pirate Bay has waded into controversial territory before |
3D
printing, which has long existed in the industrial world, has started to make
it into the hobbyist community in recent years. "Fablabs" have sprung
up in cities worldwide that teach people how to print physical objects, ranging
from spare parts to art, and even edible objects.
The process
is an "additive" manufacturing technique that essentially takes
digital data and, with the help of a robotic arm, forms a physical object by
"printing" or releasing a hardening substance like plastic in thin
layers without a mold.
As utopian
as data-to-object manufacturing may sound, it's a development rapidly gaining
momentum and one that poses unprecedented implications for intellectual
property law, encompassing patents, copyrights and trademarks.
An unclear
judicial landscape
Last year,
Dutch designer Ulrich Schwanitz developed a 3D object, called "impossible
triangle," which he sold through the 3D design company Shapeways. He later
forced Thingiverse, an open-source repository site for 3D models, to remove
instructions of how to recreate the shape, which was delivered by a former
Shapeways intern.
Schwanitz
made was is believed to be the first formal attempt to apply copyright law to
3D content.
In the
months and years ahead, scores of patent lawyers and open source advocates will
explore to what extent existing IP legislation impacts 3D printing and other
new technologies that digital data into objects.
'The next
great disruptive technology'
Some views
are already emerging. Michael Weinberg, staff attorney at Public Knowledge
Organization, wrote a white paper on the issue in 2010, called "It will be
awesome if they don't screw it up: 3D printing, intellectual property and the
fight over the next great disruptive technology."
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| Last year, a UK team built a 3D-printed model plane |
"Once
an object has been patented, all copies, regardless of the copier's knowledge
of the patent, infringe upon that patent," he wrote. "Simply stated,
if you are using a 3D printer to reproduce a patented object, you are
infringing on the patent. Even using the patented device without authorization
infringes on the patent. Furthermore, unlike in copyright, there is no fair use
in patent. There is also no exception for home use, or for copying objects for
purely personal use."
#b#But not
all legal scholars agree on potential looming litigation.
Another
2010 paper published by a British law professor, a British engineering
professor, and a German biometrics professor say that current fair use law, at
least in the United Kingdom, does allow for 3D printing.
"It is
clear that – within the UK at least – personal use of 3D printing technology
does not infringe the majority of IP rights," thy wrote. "Registered
design and patent explicitly exempt personal use, trade mark law has been
interpreted as doing so and UDR (Unregistered Design Right) is only applicable
to commercial use."
The authors
go on to argue that, "unlike music file-sharing, personal 3D printing does
not produce an exact copy that can be digitally signed or protected with DRM
(Digital Rights Management). It is the sharing of reverse-engineered designs
that is the issue, not the original design documents."
Author: John Blau
Editor: Cyrus Farivar
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