Of all the examples in this list, copying patent design is probably the most illegal. There is hardly a space on Earth where it is legal to rip off someone else's idea once it has been registered with a competent authority as a legitimate design. That, naturally, is its greatest weakness. The point about patent design is that you broadcast to the world what your great idea is and get it recorded so people are in absolutely no doubt as to who owns the intellectual rights to the object. We have even heard of companies, such as light bulb manufacturers, that find out how to create items that can go on forever. These are then registered as patents so that no one else can use them, thus potentially undermining their business. No, I do not know if these actually exist, either, but I sure don't know of an everlasting light bulb. I got an expensive 'eco-bulb' from a shop only last month that was guaranteed to last ten years. It lasted three weeks in my conservatory where it got switched on no more than ten times before it blew! Coincidence? Anyhow, I digress slightly. The patents are publicly accessible by necessity, so what's to stop me just trawling the database and getting the designs myself? Anyone that doesn't care about the legality of copying other people's good ideas in order to make a swift buck, or even just to use at home for personal reasons, is certainly not going to pass up such a brilliant repository of useful resources. My conclusion in all this is that 3-D printing is not so much about the technology it's about the information. In the way that the Industrial Revolutions marked a sea change in manufacturing, so the 3-D printing revolution and the Democratisation that goes with it will bring about similar changes. No industry is sacrosanct and it is no use established commercial giants complaining that it's not fair. Back then we got steam-powered boats, ships and railways, the large scale manufacture of machine tools and the increasing use of steam powered factories. That spelled an inevitable end to older, more manual cottage industries and power shifted away from the local trader to the industrialist. It is nothing new to remark that the computer age and other technology has empowered many to attain what would have been impossible before it had arrived. Just because outrageously illegal solutions are within many people's grasp now, does not mean to say that acting that way will be any more attractive than it used to be. Nowadays, most of the world has entered the publishing industry through Facebook and Twitter. The newest crop of writers are as subject now to the laws of slander and libel as the Editor-in-Chief of The Times was for generations before them. Similarly, the users of home 3-D printers are just as subject to laws affecting whatever activity they want to involve themselves in. One other thing is certain, too. Anyone still wondering how to wind back the clock by gathering up all the evils of the world and replacing them in Pandora's Box is already some way behind the curve when it comes to 3-D printing.
Hello, I'm Paul Hammans, terminal 'Who' obsessive, F1 fan, reader of arcane literature about ideas and generalist scribbler. To paraphrase someone much better at aphorisms than I: I strive to write something worth reading and when I cannot do that I try to do something worth writing. I have my own Dr Who oriented blog at http://www.exanima.co.uk
