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.

Enter DEFCAD, a site dedicated to hosting designs that have been banned at Thingiverse. Namely, the entirely printable 3D gun design which clocked up more than 100,000 downloads within its first two days of release.

This did not sit well with the Department of State Office of Defense Trade Controls who kindly requested that DEFCAD remove the availability of the 3D printable gun documents, enthusiastically named “The Liberator,” citing a possible violation of International Traffic in Arms Regulations.

In the letter from the State Department, which can be read in full at Forbes, the Government explains that it wants to review whether the designs are in compliance with arms export control laws.

While the attempted censorship of the 3D gun blueprints may come as no surprise, the popularity of these files is a vivid example of the daunting task faced by those charged with censorship of information.

While DEFCAD promptly complied with the request to remove access to the design, it was shared so widely during the short window of availability that it is now virtually impossible to prevent any further distribution. Currently, there appears to be several torrents available for the design at The Pirate Bay and the site informs us that these will not be censored.

“TPB has for close to 10 years been operating without taking down one single torrent due to pressure from the outside. And it will never start doing that,” A Pirate Bay insider told TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay is not out to promote guns, but they do have a great interest in 3D printing.

“We think the whole idea of a printable object is interesting. You can print guns for sure, but even better you can print plowshares and other things as well. The problem is not the object but what you do with it. Just as with a cooking knife.”

The torrent site also says it welcomes Defense Distributed founder Cody Wilson to start publishing designs on The Pirate Bay. A year ago TPB launched a 3D print section where the blueprints would fit nicely.

“When Defcad is closed down there is still TPB. Cody is welcome to upload everything on Defcad to TPB as well, so the users can comment on the crap.”

“Cody Wilson’s site has been branded ‘A Pirate Bay for 3D objects’ which is kind of funny, since TPB has had its physibles section more than a year already, with lots of objects in there. And since the whole idea behind TPB is to not let outside pressure judge, TPB is prepared for things like that.”

The Pirate Bay insider welcomes a debate on gun laws and U.S. oppression of free speech. “We laugh at their gun love since it’s so obviously the wrong way to go.”

“We think that the good thing about the discussion about 3D printers and their gun laws might bring more focus on the double standards that the U.S. is having and hopefully – people will start printing signs to protest against the guns, the corruption and the threats against freedom of speech that the U.S. is pushing on us.”

For now the 3D gun links posted on The Pirate Bay are from unverified sources. Printing those might not be such a good idea, but it is clear that the original designs are not going away. All one needs in order to access these files is a hash, there is no longer a central source that can be shut down to prevent public access to these files.

This BitTorrent connection also gives the term Defense Distributed a whole new meaning.

The takedown of the blueprints could very well mark the beginning of an era where proponents of so-called cyber warfare begin using military resources in attempts to regulate a data distribution protocol which has, thus far, been impossible to regulate.

At the minimum, it’s the start of a crackdown on 3D blueprints, which will undoubtedly become more common as technology advances.

Ryan Smith contributed to the article.

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

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.