On Twitter, @magiclovehose asks:
Something for the “give me something to write about” list: the legal ramifications of copyright and 3D printers?
The thing about 3D printers is that they directly challenge one of the assumptions upon which copyright law is predicated.
See, right now, in most countries you can’t copyright the design of a utilitarian item. Say I am IKEA and I design a chair. That chair can’t be copyrighted: it’s utilitarian. The point of the chair is to make many more chairs just like it for common use: the idea of the chair is not copyrightable. (The building instructions, on the other hand, can be. Which is a minor reason IKEA does things the way that they do.) However. Say I am not IKEA, but instead I am a humble woodworker. And say I design a chair, but I design it as a work of art: the back of the chair is a gorgeous woodcarving of Jesus and Muhammad Ali fighting aliens. Now it’s not just a simple chair: it’s a personal expression. Therefore, it now attracts copyright.
That’s how the law works for chairs – and other utilitarian items – right now. If you mass-produce it, it’s not copyrightable; it’s utilitarian. (You may be able to patent it, of course, but that’s a different kettle of intellectual property-fish.) But when 3D printing enters the scene, that turns this entire legal scheme on its ear, because 3D printing will eventually render everything mass-producible. I carve my Jesus/Ali/Aliens chair, and then somebody else 3D scans it and suddenly you can torrent the .cad file to make my chair in a 3D printer from half a dozen places on the net.
So what happens at this point? Have I lost copyright in my chair because it’s been mass-produced and therefore my chair has become utilitarian and a piece of non-singular design? Or have the people downloading the file and reproducing my chair in iChair 2015 infringed my copyright in the chair? The answer at this point is “ask again later” because I sure as hell don’t know: thanks to technology we’re once again approaching a problem that copyright systems never anticipated coming. Will iChair’s additional features allowing the user to make sure that design features of customized chairs don’t keep the chair from being used for its traditional “sitting in it” purpose strengthen the utilitarian argument? What if iChair lets you design chairs from scratch and autocorrects you to make sure the chair is viable and won’t fall apart, which essentially means that with enough market penetration no original design will be non-duplicable even without people copying it? (This is the “sooner or later someone else will make a Jesus/Ali/Aliens chair” argument.) Does mass production therefore destroy whatever copyright exists in industrial design, or does it mean that legislatures and/or judiciaries will find new sources of copyright that do not as yet exist?
Like I said: I don’t know. But suspecting that the answer will benefit whoever stands to massively profit from the new industrial design landscape when 3D printing comes around will probably not be entirely inaccurate.
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3D printers are not a special new technology — you can do the same thing now, just in a different matter.
If I carve a sculpture, I have a copyright on the sculpture. It doesn’t matter if someone comes along later and casts a mold of my sculpture and then makes and distributes millions of copies. If I didn’t authorize them to do it, then they have violated my copyright.
Replace “casts a mold” with “scans into a computer” and I don’t see how the situation is difference, just the mechanism used.
http://www.cipo.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/cipointernet-internetopic.nsf/eng/wr02376.html
Take a look at that. Industrial Designs can be registered in Canada and are eligible for IP protection for 10 years.
The features that make it a chair can’t be protected, but all design features beyond its essential chairness can be protected IFF they are original and unique (and I’m guessing here – not derived from any functional requirement.) A better mousetrap is patentable. A better looking mousetrap is covered under Industrial Design rules.
A sculpture isn’t utilitarian. By definition, it does nothing other than sit there and be Art. That’s why it attracts copyright: it’s purely the expression of an idea. It doesn’t quite work the same way for something you can use.
Are you both Chrises the same Chris?
*some smiley or other*
There appears to be 3 different Chrises in here.
They’re Infinite Chrises!
Now we just need to redistribute the Chrises to get Chrises on infinite earths!
I don’t see how this is special to 3d printing, either. Maybe the way “utilitarian” is interpreted is different in Canada, but in the U.S. you can hold copyright in the facade of a building or the user interface of an accounting program. If the chair looks that way because it has to look that way to function, your only option is a patent. If it looks that way because you’ve ornamented functional elements to make it pretty, it’s a design patent. If it looks that way because you made a work of art that you can sit on, it can be copyrighted. If it has two black disks on top, it infringes on Disney’s trademark. Which protection is available is not a bright line, but I just don’t see how “now, it’s easier to infringe” materially changes any of them, especially considering that all the protections also protect against poor facsimiles.
Dibs on being the Chris of Earth-S. I wanna hang out with Talky Tawny.
…so…what’s the difference between a mass produced utilitarian chair & a mass produced utilitarian pamphlet…? (Other than one is easier to sit on)
I think that the principle (as I understand it from this post) behind defining a chair as utilitarian is that it’s generically useful to a wide variety of people. Whereas a chair that is artistically unique has some distinguishing feature which gives it value beyond ‘people can sit in it’.
Also, a utilitarian pamphlet openly pushes a specific ideology, whereas a utilitarian chair has none (beyond subtly and silently advocating for a chairocratic government).
I think I read a Cory Doctorow novel about this.
How is mass-producing a chair different from mass-producing a book? Aren’t there still just 100,000 copies of the same thing, meant for use by consumers (sitters and readers, respectively)?
Is it just because using a book (or a movie, or music) is different from using a chair? If it’s because it’s difficult to apply some objective measure of quality to those things, isn’t “comfort” somewhat subjective, as well? How different from reading a book is sitting in a chair, business-wise, as in consumption of a product?
It seems to be a sort of gray area ‘I know it when I see it’ situation where a judge would or similar impartial party would have to determine what is copywritable or not. An image etched into the chair would be pretty clear cut. However, something like as ornate ‘style’, maybe a snake scale pattern on the legs/arms/back, with pleather cushions … that would be hard to copywrite. If you have basically a sculpture/picture ‘attached’ to a chair, that would be a pretty easy copywrite. However, if the chair itself is the ‘art’, like it has some sort of weird spiderlike design of the arms, legs, back all intertwined, into an interesting design that is still a functional chair.
Of course, chairs are going to be replaced by Chlankets, which are a full body slanket with a small built in bean bag chair attached to the ass.
As indicated, there isn’t just copyright at work here – there are design laws, trademark laws, reverse engineering laws et al that will probably come into play.
That said, I can see a lot of the current pro-piracy arguments being used if 3D printers became common place, e.g. “It isn’t a lot sale because I never intended to buy it and you can stil sell your original in a shop – it isn’t like I’ve stolen it”.
The key difference between a chair and a book is that the function of the book is largely divorced from its creative content. Les Miserables works the same as Chilton’s works the same as a sketchbook. A chair doesn’t generally have that separate creative content; it is creative expression bundled up with function. The Aeron has a very distinctive look, but much of that distinctive look is a result of functional decisions rather than an attempt to communicate. When another chair looks like the Aeron, it’s often because it’s duplicating its functionality, not because it’s duplicating its creative expression.
The important question, is it a load bearing Jesus?
It is, but you can swap in a load-bearing Simon of Cyrene instead if you want.
suspecting that the answer will benefit whoever stands to massively profit from the new industrial design landscape when 3D printing comes around will probably not be entirely inaccurate.
That’s a best case scenario. Worst case is that whoever currently has the most cash gets to buy the laws that benefit them, even if it means strangling a huge potential market for a bunch of other people.
No movie studio could fund $200-million-dollar movies if the movie industry had successfully aborted the VCR / DVD market and left themselves with no income beyond ticket sales and TV broadcast rights.
If you can successfully copyright the instructions to make a chair, could you, for example, make your initial chair and then copyright the instruction set needed by the 3D printer to reproduce it?
@Sbloyd: Technically yes, but it’s the same as with fonts… you can copyright the representation (the font file), not the design. Someone could simply reverse engineer the curves (easy enough since it’s all math underneath), change the file format, and voila… a new free version of your chair is on Thingiverse.com.