While many manufacturers are skeptical about this threatening development, Porsche is cleverly using it for a promotional campaign, dispelling the MPAA’s famous “you wouldn’t download a car” mantra.

The car company is offering 3D blueprints for its Cayman S model, which can be downloaded for free through Porsche’s official site. This allows anyone to print a copy of the car in real size or as a miniature.

“A dream can only come true, if you give it a shape. Why not with your 3D printer? We offer you the Cayman S as 3D printing data. Feel free to get creative,” Porsche writes. “Create, print and colorize your personal Cayman S. We would love to see the results.”

The blueprints are limited to the exterior of the car, but it’s a nice gesture nonetheless, and one that’s being well received by 3D print fanatics around the globe.

On Twitter several people are showing off their own versions of the car using the hashtag 3DCayman. Shown below is an overview of the most recent creations of cars printed in various sizes and colors.

Whether Porsche’s move has been inspired by the iconic anti-piracy PSA will remain unknown. However, it is clear that the people at the Motion Picture Association are not the most visionary out there.

Interestingly, Hollywood has also recently come to the realization that allowing people to download something for free can actually be a good thing.

Last week Microsoft and Warner Bros. teamed up to release a 3D blueprint of the “Key to Erebor” for the movie premiere of The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. Typically, however, these blueprints were not offered without a bunch of unnecessary restrictions.

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

In a response Defense Distributed, the people behind the first 3D printable gun, threw up a website to host the designs that had been banned at Thingiverse. This included the popular blueprints of their own gun “The Liberator.”

The worldwide release of the prints did not sit well with the State Department’s Office of Defense Trade Controls who kindly requested that DEFCAD remove the availability of the 3D printable gun documents, citing a possible violation of International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

The files in question were removed, but at the same time DEFCAD was already working on a new project that would be harder to censor. Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson had started to raise funds for a separate meta-search engine, the first to focus on 3D print models.

“In March of this year, seeing an opportunity to expand the DEFCAD concept to fight the prevailing ideas about intellectual property in the entire physible space, I split Defense Distributed and DEFCAD and turned the latter into another company,” Wilson tells TorrentFreak.

“The idea was to move away from direct hosting to employ the first amendment victories won by Google in the courts and become a meta-search engine as a more robust way of spreading and preserving physibles. We hope to build a piece of infrastructure to help stem the next wave of the IP wars in advance, if you will.”

DEFCAD raised a significant amount of funds and has now quietly rolled out the meta-search engine to the public on DEFCAD.com. While still labeled as an Alpha release the site already indexes more than 74,000 files, all stored on external sites.

DEFCAD has been labeled the “Pirate Bay of 3D printing” as Wilson and his team previously pledged not to take any content down. Those who take a good look at the site will also notice some other Pirate Bay references, including the “kopimi” logo at the bottom and the use of magnet links. In addition, many of the files linked on DEFCAD are hosted on the Bayfiles hosting site which was launched by two Pirate Bay founders.

While DEFCAD doesn’t mind being linked to The Pirate Bay, Wilson believes that the title doesn’t apply as much after they were forced by the authorities to censor their own work. He sees the Pirate Bay comparison mostly as “convenient headline writing,” which we were kind enough to make use of.

“After the State Department came after Defense Distributed and our hand was forced, I believe the Pirate Bay is still the Pirate Bay of 3D sharing. But nothing would be better than building complementary structures in the spirit of TPB,” Wilson says.

The involvement of government changed a few things, and unlike The Pirate Bay, the company has registered Wilson as DMCA agent to deal with takedown requests. While they initially received some complaints from Thingiverse users, DEFCAD has not yet received a single official DMCA takedown notice.

“There was some dissatisfaction with our public testing earlier in the summer. A handful of makers felt like we were taking advantage of Thingiverse’s bandwidth or not adequately respecting their ‘rights’ to their ‘property,’ but since we’ve appointed a DMCA agent we’ve received no takedown requests.”

Of course it is still early days for 3D printing and at the moment the scale of 3D print piracy is rather minimal. This is bound to change in the years to come, but DEFCAD’s founder doubts that it will ever compete with the size and prevalence of more traditional forms of piracy, such as sharing movies and music.

“I’m of two minds about this right now. Having grasped the state of 3D printing at the top and the bottom, I think the deck is stacked against movement physible piracy,” Wilson tells us.

“What I mean is that I don’t see the same passions being exercised to liberate copyrighted design as I see used to liberate entertainment media. This is probably obvious, and it may mean nothing for the future political defense of the physible, but I think the distinction is worthwhile.”

Wilson expects that when the ball starts rolling the entertainment industry might be the first to jump in to protect their 3D designs, as they have done already on a small scale.

“It’s interesting that the old movie and film giants were the first to issue physible takedown notices. It’s quite likely entertainment-related physibles are going to be the battleground in the near future,” Wilson says.

Earlier this year HBO was one of the first to issue a 3D print takedown request for a Game of Thrones iPhone cover. Those who search DEFCAD for the name of the popular series will see that they have plenty of work to do.

For now, however, the most downloaded files on the new meta-search engine are, perhaps fittingly, guns. With more than 6,000 downloads The Liberator v1.1 is the most popular, followed by other gun designs, the FOSSCAD Atlas SSR and DMR Shanrilivan with over 5,000 downloads.

Of course there are thousands of other designs available as well, and for the pacifist pirates out there DEFCAD also has plenty of booty.

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

In the coming years another revolution is destined to unfold, that of 3D printing. While the 3D printer opens up a lot of possibilities to the public it also poses a major threat to dozens of industries.

Downloading a car is a serious possibility, and leeching the latest cover for your smartphone will soon be reality. The manufacturers, however, are not going to provide these copies for free, and that’s where the trouble starts.

To address the concerns of companies who plan to offer products as 3D designs, a new startup from California has developed a DRM-type system to make it harder to copy these files. Instead of allowing customers to download the designs, Authentise will be streamed to the 3D printer, allowing objects to be printed only once.

The technology goes live at SendShapes next month and more services are expected to appear in the future.

“We’re already talking to a number of people about using the technology to enable buying of designs online, with an iTunes-like functionality,” Authentise CEO Andre Wegner told Technology Review.

While the technology may be effective, it wont be perfect. History has taught us that there will always be cracks, circumvention tools, and people who want to share unauthorized copies.

The Pirate Bay has already prepared itself for these 3D pirates when it added a Physibles section last year. However, Pirate Bay founder Tobias Andersson told us earlier this month that he’s not certain whether the site can cope with the pressure this will bring along.

“The coming copy fights will be on a totally other level. I’m talking about the 3D printing revolution. In a few years, millions of blueprints of tools, car parts, clothing and weapons will be up for download. If there is a safe platform.”

“The Pirate Bay in its current form can withstand the pressure from quite harmless industries like the movie and music industries. But when car, oil, and weapons industries and all the countries that depend on them start to feel threatened, we can’t depend on a few people to sacrifice themselves.”

Whether it will be through The Pirate Bay or its eventual successor, one thing is for certain. 3D designs will be copied, both with and without the authorization of their makers.

Authentise is also prepared for this eventuality as the company has a marking technology that will print unique identifiers into each copy. These hallmarks can lead straight back to the person who initially bought the design, allowing sellers to pin down the leak.

“Instead of hoping to stop the creation of a digitally manufactured objects, each object printed will include one or multiple identifiers that enable investigators to trace any party along the value chain; the designer, the printer, and any intermediary,” writes the company in its forensics paper.

“Inserted hallmarks are designed to identify both the digitally manufactured object and any object produced by it. This opportunity turns traditional forensics on its head. The bullet casing might act as a fingerprint leading investigators directly to the person who printed the object.”

And so a new cat and mouse game is about to begin, and history will repeat itself once again.

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

As one of the older torrent sites around, The Pirate Bay has been at the forefront of this copy revolution. But according to the people behind the torrent site, copying bits is just the beginning. The next step is to download stuff you can hold in your hands.

“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 last month when they announced a new 3D printing section of their site.

To give people something to work with, a 3D model of The Pirate Bay ship designed by Todd Blatt was one of the first items put up for download. Since then several people have printed it out and have now become the proud owner of a cute 3D printed ship.

The copy above belongs to Canadian Charles Randall. After he read the announcement on TorrentFreak he downloaded the torrent and went straight to Shapeways.com to print a copy for personal use.

“I was entertained by telling shapeways.com that I owned the copyright on the design though, something they force you to accept in order to have the model printed. But I guess, in a way, we all do,” Randall told TorrentFreak. “I debated just putting it up for sale on the site, but despite the Pirate Bay sensibilities, I didn’t want to entangle myself in any weird controversy for trying to sell it.”

Unlike regular downloads on BitTorrent, 3D objects come with a hefty price tag. Using the cheapest materials available, 3D pirates have to invest roughly $100 to get their new toy made.

“The raw price was about $80 for the material, $6.50 for the shipping, and then I had to pay $15 in Canadian duties,” Randall said

What this process has in common with copying bytes, is that it can be quite addictive.

“As for doing more 3D printing, I am tempted to learn Blender in order to start making interesting little things,” Randall told us. “The build quality is super detailed and fairly solid. You can see the patterns from where it was printed, but if I were to build small model pieces it would probably be easy enough to sand them down.”

“The whole thing is an amazing process and just knowing it’s possible has opened the floodgates of my imagination.”

The above response of one of the first 3D ‘pirates’ is just what The Pirate Bay were looking for when they launched their new category. Since the announcement the 3D printing category has grown to 26 torrents, ranging from a 3D printable MPAA Boss Chris Dodd to a Teddy Bear.

These are the first steps in discovering a new future that will one day allow people to print a perfect set of sneakers and spare car parts for a few dollars. The auto industry should be very worried.

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