Do we want open source manufacturing? of guns?

When the technology for downloading musical audio files was first introduced, many visionaries thought this would open up a whole new relationship between musicians and their audience.  No longer would musicians be dependent on record companies, broadcasters and other intermediaries to reach a mass audience.  They could do it themselves, though the Internet.

This didn’t happen, because of intellectual property law enforced through, among other things, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Now the new technology of 3-D printing promises to do the same thing for physical objects that an audio file did for music.  Download a blueprint for anything whatsoever, and a 3-D printer will someday be able to make a copy of it.  The technology is kind-of, sort-of, but not really like making a xerographic copy.   A Xerox printer binds the toner to a sheet of paper.  A 3-D printer binds tiny particles of plastic to each other.

The promise of 3-D printing is that industrial designers could sell their designs directly to customers to be produced in home 3-D printers, bypassing factories and distribution channels.  But once again, intellectual property law will get in the way.

Cody Wilson with flag from Texas War of Independence

The legal test case will be a U.S. government order to a 25-year-old Texas law student named Cody Wilson to cease distributing plans for printing a 3-D gun.   This is not, at least for now, as scary as it seems.  Printed plastic guns are likely to fail after a few rounds are fired.   Why bother with them when guns made of foundry-produced parts are readily available?

I can imagine an episode of CSI where someone commits a murder with a 3-D printed gun, and then grinds up the plastic and prints out something else.   And the CSI team figures out that a plastic lawn ornament was really the murder weapon because it has a signature trace of the gunpowder found in the bullet.  But I can’t imagine this actually happening.

For the U.S. government, as for Cody Wilson, what’s important is the principle of the thing.   They will go to court, and the decision will shape the future not just of gun rights, but of a whole new manufacturing technology.   I sympathize with what Wilson trying to do and I like his style, but I think there would be a better chance of getting a dispassionate ruling if the advocate of open source manufacturing were an MIT professor or a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

LINKS

Click on Defense Distributed for Cody Wilson’s home page and WikiWep DevBlog for his web log.

Click on Juanjo Pina | Scoops de JP for a web log devoted to 3-D manufacturing technology.  [Added 5/27/13]

Click on 3D printed guns are going to create big legal precedents by Cory Doctorow in The Guardian, for a thoughtful view of the technical and legal issues.

Click on The 3-D Printed Future and Its Enemies by Peter Frase in Jacobin magazine, giving the case for open source manufacturing and against the use of intellectual property law to restrict it.

Click on The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class by Jaron Lanier for Salon, making the case against open source manufacturing and the whole Internet economy.