Rip, Mix, (3D) Print

There's a very good chance that manufacturing is about to be hit by a wave of disruption - including illegal copying - similar to what hit the digital music business when Napster burst into mass consciousness.

Back in February, VentureBeat predicted that soon any 3D object in the world could be scanned, converted into an instruction file, and rendered on a 3D printer, "meaning that anyone will be able to own just about anything, almost for free."

The obstacles to this happening are largely the costs of the scanning and printing technologies, both of which are dropping like rocks. The rather unsubtly named "Buccaneer" from "Pirate3D, Inc" held a successful Kickstarter a couple months ago, raising USD 1.4 million from 3500 backers. Their stated goal is to produce a 3D printer that would retail for about 15% of Makerbot's current 2200 cost, putting it in much easier household reach.

The price of scanners is also dropping fast, as Quartz pointed out earlier this month. This one-two punch more or less makes it inevitable that if something can be scanned and printed it will be.

What we do about that is going to be anyone's guess. Congress can't even update laws to keep up with changing cellphone technology - there's no hope that the law will be able to keep up with a whole new emerging technology. That will almost certainly lead to a hodgepodge of judicial rulings and cases that drag on for years. Unfortunately, the people most likely to be hurt in the upheaval are not large entities that make physical objects in bulk - they'll lose a few sales but mostly won't care. The people who will be most hurt will be small manufacturers and artists - the people who depend on one-off sales and production of rare objects to make a living such as N-E-R-V-O-U-S whose ammonite "interphase earrings" are pictured above.

I don't have any good answers, but the sense that the little guy is going to get socked by this really rubs my "artists should get paid" sensibilities the wrong way.