I’m certainly not the first to write about this particular topic, and, as they say, I won’t be the last. Over the past two weeks or so, I’ve seen a number of technologies which point to a not-unexpected trend. Indeed, it has been extrapolated by many from cases which are only slightly analogous.

File sharing—and I use the generic term intentionally—is a boon to culture but nevertheless illegal. Due to its ease of conversion between digital and analogue forms, art has been the cyber pirates’ booty for a number of years now. The inevitable question follows: what happens when anything can be downloaded?

With present technology, there has not yet been a method devised to download actual matter. That’s not to say it won’t ever happen, but that as of now, while we can theorize about it all day, we can’t so much as build a prototype, save extremely complex laboratory experiments. But in the sense that matter can be stored as information (on a coarse enough level that the information doesn’t take up more room than the object being described—see my previous rambling on the subject), the information can, necessarily, be downloaded.

The two devices I’ve mentioned are 3-dimensional printers. Both work on different principles; one is nothing more than a computer controlled router. The other exists (as information no less) only as a do-it-yourself kit, but prints by laying down various syrupy materials. The idea is that objects can be prototyped rapidly, in ones own home—a process which, currently, takes many hours and thousands of dollars. The makers of the home kit, in particular, hope to start a revolution similar to what the Altair did for computing in the 1970’s. In other words, it will start off being driven by advanced hobbyists, eventually working its way into a more consumer-friendly, mainstream iteration.

I shouldn’t be speculating about the future, here. Lord knows I make fun of enough other people for doing the same thing. But assuming the engineering difficulties don’t make this a pipe dream, I suspect printers will eventually be developed which would be capable of manufacturing rough copies of many different kinds of objects.

The problem with suggesting this sort of thing is that, in the future, there’s always the “out of left field” development. What is the “out of left field” development that will derail the 3D printer? I can’t say; that’s part of the problem of predicting the future. However, if I had to make a prediction based on today’s current technology and extrapolate—and I do have to do this, now that I’ve gotten this far—the least I can do is take into account varience in current levels of technology.

Let’s look at regular printers. I have one on my desk. It cost sixty bucks (in buying power terms, that’s about half a day’s worth of work for me), and it can print pages and images that completely blow away the quality seen from presses even fifty years ago.

Kinda.

The color reproduction is amazing—at least compared to full color presses of the 1950s. But there are still some things these old presses could do that my printer can’t. For one thing, it can’t print larger than 8.5″ x 11″ paper. I can’t print a broadsheet newspaper. I also can’t print spot color; I’m stuck with the lousy CMYK gamut, and even then it’s not true press CMYK, it’s whatever lowerer quality version Lexmark puts in their cartridges. While I can print on some materials such as cardboard, I can’t print on large enough pieces of these materials for me to put together, for example, my own boxes. Also, the per-copy cost of me printing full color pages is much higher with this little printer than if I would pay to have a professional print job done. Of course, it only makes sense to do thousands of copies, in that case. My printer is only good for small print runs of small-sized compositions—but this it does really well.

File sharing is also like this. In theory, we could all share original masters for all our favorite songs. (Not really, because they would be fiendishly hard to get, I imagine. But assuming the demand was there, someone could probably get ahold of them.) We could be sharing huge, original theater digital masters, or scans of paintings and artwork so large that every tiny brushstroke could be maginified to fill the screen with no pixelation. We could share this data—but we don’t. Instead, we share highly compressed MP3s, horrible looking shot-with-the-vomit-cam bootlegs of movies (or DVD rips which are better, but nowhere near theater quality), and copywritten artwork gets scanned from a calandar or other copy-of-a-copy and emailed around as a tiny, ultra-compressed JPEG one quarter the size (or less) of the original piece. What we’re sharing (except in the case of music ripped from a CD or a movie ripped from a DVD) is usually of very inferior quality from the original. I’ve watched documentaries on Google video, for example. The quality sucks, but it’s good enough.

The files I consume often suck, compared to the original, but they’re good enough. (Also, you have to consider that originals of these files, such as theater master digital prints, are so huge and involve so much data that there’s no way you’d be able to play it on any kind of home computer.) The pages that I print from my printer are terrible quality, compared to a professional print job—but they’re good enough. I already wrote about why HDTV resolution doesn’t matter for a lot of people: beacuse YouTube quality is, often, good enough.

What are the sort of objects that we’re going to be printing with our 3D printers? Simple. Objects that are just good enough.

Professional 3D prototyping businesses will always have an advantage over the machine you can stick in your home in the same way that professional recordings are always better than the CD that’s made, or how theater masters are better than DVDs, or how Heidelberg presses print better than the Lexmark on my desk. That’s not to say that we’ll never be able to print an exact replica of a keyboard or a phone from a 3D printer on our desk, but indications are that we’ll be happy to settle with something inferior if it’s good enough.

One thing a lot of people are into is customization and remixing. If we get physical objects that are good enough, they’ll probably be remixed into new objects. Nothing Earth-shattering there, except to say that we don’t need perfect replicas of objects in order to do this satisfactorily.

Which raises an interesting intellectual property question: is the shape and form-factor of various objects intellectual property? The answer to this is quite clear now: yes. It certainly is. If you design a specific handle that is highly erogonomic, you can patent that. It might not be easy to defend in court, but you can claim proprietary intellectual property on a three dimentional form. The Frisbee is an example.

The Frisbee is a great example, actually, because it’s one of those objects that would be small enough to print in a desktop 3D printer and it doesn’t have to be very accurate. “Fairly close” is, quite literally, good enough when it comes to flying discs. But what happens when all the ultimate Frisbee teams and all their pals start printing out their own frisbees and stop buying them?

Technically speaking this would be illegal, because you’d be infrining on a patent which, fundementally, is nothing more than a three dimensional shape. And like now, many people will violate it. They might do so for different reasons: say, molding their own logo into the surface of the disc. But the fact is, we’re going to have rampent patent infringement because now, rather than needing to get dies cut and manufacturing infrastructure in place, you just go make one yourself. There’s no way to police this. Cutco knife handles (and blades) are another example of patented geometry. Given a 3D printer, you could replicate this and infringe their patents.

3D printers will allow further copying of intellectual property in forms that are just good enough. Efforts to curtail illegal sharing of music and movies online have had almost zero effect. Physical objects have the advantage of requiring more energy, time, and precision in their manufacture, but when, as I’ve been saying, it becomes a simple matter to replicate physical objects to a point that’s just acceptable, that’s going to be “stolen”, as well.

At this point, the courts will need to make a decision: is sharing the information the crime, or is making the object the crime? If making the object (or art) is the crime, it would not be illegal to download songs so long as one does not play them. But if sharing information is a crime, how can society operate? After all, there are many instances of multiple people inventing the same solution to a given problem—but only one gets the patent. Currently patents are public, but this is information which is shared. Simply having the object in some cases gives you enough information to copy it. If patents are secret, does it still make sense to punish someone for violating one? After all, could they not also have come up with the solution themselves?

With the advent of 3D printers, one of two things must happen: either the concept of “intellectual property” must be modified to be a significantly tighter definition than it is now, or almost every single member of society will be made criminals.

Although the way things stand today, the second is already true.

-Ted