*Yeah, I hear you. Look: if you want "policy engagement," you've got to actually engage with the situation on the ground, not just name-check 'em from a proper and decent political distance! You're not confronting the severe disjunction between your means and your ends! The open-source, have-at-it, viral design philosophy behind RepRaps is the polar opposite of your notion that some G-7 nation-state should seize that chance to prosper.
*The planet's 3dprint developers are not British patriots. Dyson didn't build all these 3dprinting gizmos. This paper is attempting to corral people who don't share the institutional interests of the authors. What's worse, the tone expressed there is rather threatening: the implied choice is to adapt British legality or else deserve the Napster treatment. What, without even phoning up Brussels first? By what right? Have you written a paper for the Pirate Party yet? The seething pirates in your Whitehall basement are never mentioned, but they are the guys who win the votes on these issues.
*So, this isn't your attempt to enlist "government" to make fabbing more ambitious; truth to tell, it's an attempt to prune the global potential of fabrication down to some specific areas where national bureaucrats can exploit them for national advantage. Okay, fine. That said, you can have at it! I don't mind (much). If the UK takes over the planet's 3dprint biz, and starts a shiny new British Industrial Revolution that 3dprints globe-spanning ships grander than Isambard Kingdom Brunel's "Great Eastern," I'd be thrilled to see that occurring. (Because I'd read all about it in Wired UK, of course.)
*In point of fact, I expect to see 3dprinters sold for peanuts in Chinese cornershops a lot sooner than British manufacturers can get properly wound up. Furthermore, if British fab designers were insanely great, then Apple would recruit them. But why be merely realistic here? To be great in scale and grand in ambition would indeed be great and grand. If you claim you can do all that, do it. I will cheer you every step of your way.
*Maybe Britain can lead the scattered, cat-herding, viral fab business to a new age of ambitious national grandeur. Just don't chase 'em into the Paraguayan Embassy – that's all I ask.
*No wait, before I click a button and post this: I'll go farther along on the limb. To stimulate some nativist British industrial development, in the approved contest-style, I will personally offer my own reward of fifty – (so what is that regional currency within Britain, oh yeah, "pounds") – I will personally give fifty LBS. to the first 100% British fabrication entrepreneur who can re-3Dprint this splendid golden Henry Maudslay Production Lathe. Henry Maudslay, that guy was British. He changed the world we live in today. Henry Maudslay didn't kid around; one of his disciples kicked Charles Babbage and his Difference Engine straight to the curb. This device in the following web link once led the planet by decades.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brucesterling/8047306017/
*Mind you, to win the prize, that lathe has to work, of course. That sublime machine tool must be full-size, industrial, functional, good to go, same as 200 years ago. An Industrial Revolution can't just be a learned paper about a potential industrial revolution. A genuine revolution has to function in the workshop, on the ground, among the populace, and not just score some points in Internet debate.
*It's not about the moment on the barricades. It's about living through what comes afterwards. Afterwards is coming fast. There's gonna be a whole lot of afterwards.
"Bruce Sterling should be more ambitious about the potential of 3D printing"
Posted By Spencer Thompson
23 October 2012
"Bruce Sterling, Science Fiction author and technology commentator, posted a very interesting response to our 3D printing research on his Wired.com blog last week. It’s fair to say he doesn’t agree with many of our recommendations – in fact, he basically rejects the idea that there is any need for any government policy on 3D printing. Whilst a lot of what he says is useful, we think he has misunderstood the vital and pressing need for policy engagement with this innovative new technology.
"The main group currently engaged with low-cost 3D printing technology are hobbyist ‘makers’ and open source enthusiasts. Sterling sees 3D printing as their semi-exclusive domain. He regards our recommendations, around promoting investment and innovation in 3D printing services by business, as something of a challenge to the collaborative and open ethos of the current 3D printing scene.
"It is true that this group have done an enormous amount to popularise the technology. They have developed low-cost home use 3D printers, set up online platforms for the sharing of designs and made waves with hobbyist trade fares and media exposure. But the crucial point is that 3D printing is moving towards the mainstream, and when it does this group of innovators will face considerable challenges to their activity, from other businesses as well as from policymakers. It is not going to be feasible to keep commercial interest out of 3D printing in the medium-term. What we would like to see is an inclusive policy debate, one that includes the current crop of exciting 3D printing innovators, to look critically at the policy barriers to greater adoption and application of their technology.
"We only need to think about the last decade’s copyright wars to see how a lack of policy debate can be detrimental to new technology. Around the turn of the millennium, file-sharing was starting to take off, with great innovation to develop new digital services. Unfortunately, a lot of this activity was either illegal or of ambiguous legality. The reactions of vocal groups of incumbent rights-holders from the worlds of music, film and television led to knee-jerk policy responses in many countries, fully throwing the baby out with the bath water. It took until last year for the UK government to publish the Hargreaves Review (that Bruce Sterling admits he hasn’t read),
http://www.ipo.gov.uk/ipreview.htm
"which acknowledges that we live in a new digital age and that laws around copyright need to be modernised to reflect this. Whilst this is welcome, we may have missed out on a good deal of innovation and new ways of distributing copyrighted work because of policy myopia in the early days of file-sharing.
"What we are saying in our report is that government should get in on the ground floor with 3D printing, talking to all the relevant communities of interest; lead users and the open source community, small start-ups experimenting with 3D printing services, and existing manufacturers with an interest in 3D printing. Failure to do this may result in 3D printing being choked off just as it becomes a potential mass-market. Just imagine the response of ill-informed politicians suddenly confronted by the prospect of 3D printing. Worried about the 3D printing of guns? Ban 3D printers. Concerned that patents may be infringed? Tie 3D printing businesses in prohibitively expensive legal knots around licensing. It is only with an early and far-sighted consideration of these issues, that we might be able to prevent the ad-hoc policy making and costly legal battles that characterised copyright law for a decade.
"We shouldn’t underestimate the power of engagement in fostering solutions to problems facing different industries. The Automotive Council, set up by the last Labour government and strongly backed by the current coalition, has achieved cross-party approval and support from unions and businesses for a similar kind of collaborative policy-making. Why not apply those lessons to a brand new and exciting technology as well?
"One of the best suggestions in the Hargreaves report was for a digital copyright exchange. This is an online marketplace where those providing innovative services based on copyrighted works, like Youtube, Spotify, Grooveshark or countless others, can quickly and cheaply license works, ensuring they are within the law and satisfying rights-holders. We argue that a similar approach could be applied to the 3D printing of objects, balancing the need for ease of access to rights on the one hand, and incentives for design and r&d investment on the other.
"Where banks of open source designs for 3D products, such as Thingiverse.com, have been developed, we may need a new set of open rights. In the last decade open licensing for copyrighted works including software, music and books has flourished. Whilst these rights can be applied to the design documents for 3D printed objects, the use of a 3D scanner can be used to make a new design document, potentially getting around open licenses. It is likely the ingenuity of the open source community will come up with an effective solution in the near future, but policy should seek to engage with the needs and substantial benefits of open source for 3D printing.
"Bruce Sterling is right to be worried about government interfering with the great innovation and experimentation currently happening around 3D printing. But the truth is, it is likely government is going to get involved at some point anyway. It would be infinitely better if they did so in a considered, enlightened and prescient manner, rather than when 3D printing starts to cause real disruption to manufacturing."
