3D Printing and its social and organisational impacts: Piracy now comes in 3D!

Don't rush to get your 3D glasses just yet, this article is not about the newest part of The Pirates of the Caribbean!

The term piracy used as a shorthand for infringement of exclusive rights in creative works predates not only the Internet but even the statutory copyright law itself. As it can be seen in The Wonderfull Yeare by Thomas Dekker, those who violated the charter were labeled pirates as early as 1603. In our days however the famous software freedom activist Richard Stallman argues that this term might not be as correct as it is habitual. In his essay Words to Avoid Because They Are Loaded or Confusing Stallman escalates:

Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them.

One might agree with one side or another but the fact is that if you are ever being called a pirate in the XXI century, most likely you have been caught downloading illegal content via torrent or similar file sharing service srather than taking over trade ships by abordage.

The history of modern piracy

The way multimedia was distributed when the Internet was not yet a thing did not allow for easy copying of data. I.e. if one wanted to copy a vinyl record of his favorite album, the equipment required to do just that would cost a fortune. The situation had slowly began to change in mid 60s with the Reel-to-Reel tape players and recorders dropping down in cost and beginning to find their ways to people homes. They were shortly replaced by Compact Cassette players and recorders who then managed to hold the title of one of the two most common formats for prerecorded music up to late 90s.

Those that are old enough to remember the life without the Internet have most probably had the home studio experience of recording their favorite songs from the radio (oh the frustration when you miss a couple of seconds of the beginning of the song!). The same was true with video content when first VCRs started to become widespread in mid 80s effectively making major part or the wealthier western population unwillingly laying the foundation for piracy.

By then copying a couple of records that one liked still was not perceived as a huge threat by studios and record companies, the records were of quite a poor quality and the approach had another drawback - if one wanted a copy of a music album or a movie, he would have to find someone else that has a copy of that very same record, limiting the magnitude of copying quite dramatically.

By mid 90s computers became convenient tools for sharing data. With technological advances such as the Internet, writable CD-ROMs, USB drives and convenient file encoding standards like MPEG and MP3 finding their way to homes of the consumers, P2P file sharing networks became the new reality for record companies to deal with. Their inability to cope with this multimedia distribution paradigm shift resulted in such companies reporting their first losses due to Internet piracy. I recommend checking out this infograph by go-gulf.com to get a better insight of an extent the Internet piracy has grown to.

Entering the new realm

Rather a decent while ago, 23^rd of Jan 2012 The Pirate Bay announced something astonishing on their blog:

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

All of a sudden piracy had this whole new axis to go along by. At the time of writing of this post, aforementioned category holds only 162 downloads under it which is not a very large number at all. Though having in mind the 3D printing itself is at its infancy - this might as well change in the near future.

Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at Public Knowledge, an advocacy group in Washington states:

In many ways, today’s 3D printing community resembles the personal computing community of the early 1990s.

For all it's worth 3D printing will remain a minor threat to copyright holders for some time, massively loosing out to counterfeit item manufacturers in China. However if the industry can claim it ever learned a lesson, adequate measures should be considered upfront, before the 3D printing quality increases and production cost and time consumption decreases. Some of the measures being designed might result us having holograms on coins such as this commemorative $1 Sydney Holographic Coin.

References:

3D Printing and its social and organisational impacts

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Piracy now comes in 3D!

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