I was browsing my RSS feed the other day and came across an ad for a home use 3D printer, one aimed at children. The company says while it remains a very close-in concept for now, it could be a shelf stocked product by next Christmas. This, of course, made me very excited for what I could begin making, and my head immediately went “I’d love to make one of the aliens from Toy Story!”
Almost immediately I realized that my thought wasn’t just a one-off, it was something that is universal, once of a whole new frontier of piracy. Let’s look back to say, 1998. I was a fairly net savvy kid, I had my own Geocities page, Angelfire site and mIRC platform on which I shared cool stuff with friends.
A friend of mine sends me a link to a site called Napster, a place to share digital music. My first thought was “wait, digital music!?” but a few clicks through WinAmp (the alternative to Windows Media Player at the time), I found myself converting my CDs to MP3s and sharing them with my friends. This was new, exciting and (unknown to a 15 year old) illegal. Shortly afterward I received a Rio MP3 player, and my addiction to the slow growing MP3 fad sprung up.
Now, there are entire sites with libraries of stolen content ripe for the download. In fact, people feel worse about lying to someone on the street about not having spare change than they do stealing music. It is almost a commodity good of the Internet.
So since I gave you a hefty detour down memory lane, let’s take what I just said and apply it to a 3D printer. When you have the capabilities to steal music, you do so, right? So what happens when you have blueprints to action figures, jewelry, watch faceplates, decorations and so on? With a 3D printer you now have the capabilities to mimic any of these. An entire new realm of digital piracy could appear, one that creates actual physical objects.
People have been bootlegging music, movies and video games for years; it was once a somewhat difficult process, but with software such as Alcohol 120% and Daemon Tools, it’s easy enough a tween can utilize it. “Do-it-yourselfers”(D.I.Y.’ers) that create prop and costume replicas are already using a 3D modeling program to build efficient plans for their projects. Give them an at home 3D printer and they’re set.
And from that point, it’s only a matter of time before a 3D scanner comes out. Just like digital piracy, all it’s going to take is one person to make the “seed”. Somebody buys a Star Wars® action figure and scans it into the system, then uploads it to a hub of 3D printing models. Repeat this for everything from Martha Stewart holiday decorations to model car kits.
I guess what I’m saying is that digital media is soon to not be the only thing in danger of being reproduced illegally. And if you’re in any doubt on the technology or capabilities, remember that Pixar is already doing this in house to build reference models of their 3D sculpts. The technology is here, the D.I.Y. community is more robust than ever and all it’s going to take is the right software and sharing platform when 3D printing becomes a home commodity.
And when it comes to this point, who’s to say what companies are going to do. The fate of their brand is in the hands of the same teenager buying the toy in the first place. And where they could take it in a few innocent clicks could change an industry forever.
