The PC all over again?

Difference engine: Just as computers make it easy to copy music, 3D printers will soon allow easy copying of certain kinds of objects. Proponents of the technology should be prepared for toymakers and other manufacturers to fight back

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Readers' comments



Mr Escher would love to have a Printer printing printer printing printer printing printer printing printer printing printer printing printer printing printer printing printer printing printer, etc..


Why fight it? With the examples of printing press, photocopy and p2p standing there; people should digest already that they're only delaying the inevitable. Sorry about you losing your lunch but why try to force everyone into accepting your business model; instead of adapting and inventing a more up-to-date business model?

"Distruptive tech" is here to stay, dinasour way of doing things is not.

General Me

Rather than likening 3D printers to inkjet printers, you should compare them to CNC mills and the like - which essentially is what they are, except additive instead of subtractive in their action on the work product. Which is to say, they are not laser printers and they are slow as molasses or slower, and suited for special items in low quantities. Now, some folks have automated cement deposition for concrete construction, complete with rebar insertion, which is pretty much 3D printing on a larger scale, and that might help put to use some of the waste ash left over from making all that "clean electricity" people are clamboring for these days; but it's the ash problem driving the solution, not a market seeking methods for making complex stairways.

If I had a broken tail light on my 1949 Hudson, I might be pleased to use a 3D scanner on the thing and if I could find the right kind of red clear plastic for the 3D printer in my basement workshop, spend 4 hours printing a new one; but if it's for my 2003 Ford, I'd save money and time buying the replacement at a dealer.

I've got my 11 year old wrangling his Arduino into a hot melt 3D printer right now, just in case and so we won't end up homeless when the wave goes by - but until I can crank out those Hudson tail lights as fast as old fashioned machines can cut screws that sell for 8 cents each or ball bearings or anything else, and until those 3D printers can deposit something harder than cheese or plastic, it's a niche market and not worthy of the column inches you've given the topic over the past year. Sure, it's neato stuff, and there are uses for it, and it will evolve, and that's cool, too. Big deal - not so much this year or next, I think.

As to your concerns over property right infringements, you might take a page from another technology that began its cost effective and reliable emergence on the business scene back in the 1970's - copy machines such as those from companies like Xerox and Friden. These machines did indeed change the way information got stored and disseminated, and did and still do get used in ways that violate copyright law. 3D printers are a tiny splinter in the overall problem and growing industry of intellectual property management, and shouldn't be blown into something more important because they add material instead of subtract material.

I think you need to calm down and move on to things more likely to affect our world than 3D printing - like what to do with all that coal ash, or how to handle the growing problem of patent profiteers.


The whole issue of copyright and patenting needs a rethink. At the moment it is stifling competition and innovation and artificially inflating prices. It has nothing to do with a fair share for the artist/inventor etc and all about monopoly and lawyers.

I am now waiting for Apple to announce they have patented the cube so anything cube-shaped to come out of a 3D printer will be banned.

citizen of the world

One can imagine that this technology, as the list of "printable" materials increases, will be useful to manufacture small volume, custom components with essentially zero tooling costs. However, as the needed quantity increases, it is hard to imagine 3D printing keeping up with the throughput and unit-costs of traditional manufacturing methods, e.g., injection molding, cold forming, etc.. But if history teaches us any lessons, there will always a place for innovative new technology.


Useful products actually require many complex components,
Yes the idea of 3d printing sounds fantastic/star trekish, but in all practicality creating one object out of plastic isn't that useful and won't contribute to increasing productivity, though I do see a boom in creating Minecraft replicas and star wars action figure collections.

guest-ioieias in reply to HyunSmith

When first introduced to the internet, the wondrous ways in which information could digitally be shared amazed me. As teenagers, my friends and I would share MIDI files of music and thought it was the coolest thing ever. But to be honest, a technology that enables one to share and to listen to MIDI files in the 90s sounded useless for it was clearly of lower quality than the real thing. As it turned out, not much later one could download low-quality MP3s off Napster and today you can watch entire movies in high definition, streaming the content in real time.

It is true that the first generation consumer-grade printers will not be able to handle the variety of materials available to the built-for-purpose machines. It's not to say the whole thing is pointless. Even as I write this messages, working assault rifles designed by private citizens have been manufactured using this technology. A worrying development. I'm sure that a technology truely combining information technology with the concrete physical world will pose much more serious problems than illegal downloading.

HyunSmith in reply to guest-ioieias

You're comparing oranges to apples, you're thinking of a startrek replicator, when in fact 3d printers are just upgrades of creating molds casting out of sand.
The internet still works on the same fundamental technology or protocals as when it was first started. In constrast, current 3d printers only use one material. To get the useful type of startrekkish replication in 3d Printer that everyone wants they would have to be impossibly complex specialized to create a full product like a car or even washing machine. As you know cars and washingmachines have thousands if not close to hundred of thousands of parts made out of numerous different types of materials.


It is relatively easy to replicate the shape and appearance of a product. Replicating the mechanical and chemical properties of the materials is infinitely more difficult. This is why knock-offs, no matter how they are made, are often junk.

Even if the material is chemically identical it's thermal history can radically effect it's performance.


Innovation is mostly iterative in any case - small modifications and recombinations of components, etc.

- As modern CAD & simulation software advances, the costs of designing & developing new components, structures, forms and combinations becomes accessible to non-corporations (i.e. to hobbyists, scientists, mavericks and startup businesses)

- Several 3d fab labs in every town mean very low costs for prototyping and experimenting - for building assemblies and trying products in practice.

- the ability to simply send off the CAD & assembly files to a wind tunnel lab, destructive testing lab or to a group with some other test rig allows work to progress rapidly without long shipment delays or cost accrual.

All of that would suggest, to me, that we will see far faster progress in many areas, if we overlook copyright and patent infringements by groups using 3D printers. If we want to maximise welfare and technological progress, we should only require that businesses above a certain scale have to get licensing from patent & copyright holders.

If what you're business is doing is so simple that anyone with a 3D printer can do it at lower cost - and that's pretty much the entirety of your business revenue model - then you're obsolete and it's time to move onto another area of business.

Clearly, as a society, we need to get a tighter leash on our lawyers and courts - the point of copyright is supporting innovation & creative industries to the benefit of society, and that is the balance that must be struck (yeah - that means that some people bite the dust on both sides; key is to make the rules clear and stop this stuff from ending up in court/ paying rent to undead lawyers).


With current innovations in 3d printers and the production of cheap relatively easy to use 3d printers such as the Portabee and Printrbot, the expansion and adoption of such technology is inevitable and frankly very exciting to watch.
'Tinkerers' need to be wary of the political lobbying that will also accompany the rise of such technology.



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