During the next 20 years the 3D printer will be the bogeyman affecting industries both far and wide and large and small, by giving the man in the street the ability to print physical objects as easily as he can print a family photo today.

Downloading a car – or a pair of sneakers – will be entirely possible, although Ford and Nike won’t be particularly happy if people use their designs to do so. However, if The Pirate Bay have their way, that’s exactly what will happen.

“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,” said The Pirate Bay earlier this year announcing a new 3D printing section of their site.

But The Pirate Bay aren’t the only ones predicting a 3D printing free-for-all, and already steps are being taken to ensure that people of tomorrow are denied the freedom to print whatever they want.

A new patent, issued this week by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office and titled ‘Manufacturing control system’, describes a system whereby 3D printer-like machines (the patent actually covers additive, subtractive, extrusion, melting, solidification, and other types of manufacturing) will have to obtain authorization before they are allowed to print items requested by the user.

In a nutshell, a digital fingerprint of “restricted items” will be held externally and printers will be required to compare the plans of the item they’re being asked to print against those in a database. If there’s a match, printing will be disallowed or restricted. Japanese rightsholders are already pushing an ISP-level version of the same kind of system to nuke unauthorized music uploads.

“This is an attempt to assert ownership over DRM for 3D printing. It’s ‘Let’s use DRM to stop unauthorized copying of things’,” says Michael Weinberg, a staff lawyer at the non-profit Public Knowledge, who reviewed the patent for Technology Review.

While owners of intellectual property might welcome such a system, the patent – which is registered to Intellectual Ventures, a patent-hoarding company run by former Microsoft CTO Nathan Myhrvold – also covers even more controversial items.

In their announcement in January, The Pirate Bay saw a situation where hunger could be eliminated. “We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal,” they said.

But even that eventuality could be restricted. As well as more predictable substances such as ABS and polycarbonate, the printer DRM patent also covers edible substances. It even includes skin.

Of course, the wonders of 3D printing don’t only exist to satisfy consumer demand for the latest products at the flick of a switch. They can be used for very human applications, such as helping this little girl get over a crippling disability and printing blood vessel networks for medical research.

That people are already trying to squeeze themselves between this wonderful technology and creative minds is a serious concern and bound to have an effect on its future development and application. However, for now nothing is forcing printer manufacturers to utilize the DRM, at least until they come under massive pressure from some of the most powerful product manufacturers in the world that is….

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.

Similarly, the developing movie and music industries could not have envisioned their hefty inflammable film reels and cumbersome wax phonograph cylinders being subjected to the same treatment. Times and capabilities change, and with that come new challenges for existing business models.

While the movie industry frets over modern-day illicit digital access to its movies, another relatively small but important front has just opened – the unauthorized amateur creation of related merchandising. These items aren’t being mass-produced by sweat-shops in the Far East, but by creative individuals utilizing the latest in cutting-edge replication equipment – 3D printers.

One such individual, Todd Blatt, a mechanical engineer from Baltimore, offers some rather interesting items featured in the movie Inception, such as the spinning top used by lead character Cobb to test reality.

Blatt makes digital models of the items he sees in movies and sends them off to 3D printing site Shapeways. They recreate the items in a range of materials from plastic to metal and offer them for sale online.

But while the Inception items appear to have flown under the radar, a model Blatt made of another movie prop grabbed the attention of a rather large movie studio.

On June 8th Blatt announced on theRPF.com movie prop fansite that he was recreating the distinctive cube-shaped items from the Stephen Spielberg movie ‘Super 8‘. On June 9th he uploaded the files to Shapeways.

By June 10th, Blatt had received unwelcome contact from Hollywood lawyers and all his posts on theRPF were quickly edited out. [Art Andrews, owner of theRPF asked us to point out that Blatt edited his own posts, the site's operators had no part in that]

“Paramount Pictures’ lawyers sent me a cease and desist letter on Friday for a model I uploaded on Thursday night, and told me to take it down,” Blatt explained.

“It was a replica white funky cube shaped object from their new movie. I complied. I don’t want to sit in a courtroom for the rest of the year. I am no longer offering these for sale, and am complying with Paramount’s demands.”

“It’s purely just a fan creation and only one exists, which I ordered for myself before receiving the C&D letter,” Blatt explains. “There is a company called Quantum Mechanix (QMx) which will be selling licensed replicas soon, and if you’re a fan you should order one from them.”

Sending a cease and desist for this kind of item produced in this fashion is certainly unusual, but it raises interesting points. Currently only creative people like Todd Blatt who are skilled at design by trade are easily able to replicate a complex design. Equally, only companies like Shapeways can pull off the hardware side with the required cost-effective ease.

However, just as technology eventually morphed to allow physical film reels and waxy cylinders to be transmitted and reproduced by anyone, in their own homes and with close to zero training, history tells us that we should be prepared for further surprises.

We will all have 3D printers connected to our computers in the not too distant future but when Star Trek-style replicators have already whetted the appetite, man won’t be happy until science-fiction becomes science fact.

Hollywood created the replicator, but will they and other rightsholders be able to kill it? Only stricter copyright laws can provide the solution, or so they would have us believe.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and anonymous VPN services.