Brian,

I’m not sure this is the clearest way to think about things.

At a fundamental level, almost everything is copyable already. You can produce a chocolate bar that tastes identical to a Cadbury’s special. You can create a sculpture of identical cut to Rodin’s.

The 3D photocopiers of today are large, sophisticated factories. Take your shirt to a Chinese factory and tell them you want 5,000 copies. You’ll get them.

Now, is this any different to a 3D photocopier? Not really. After all, this device you propose would need raw materials, would it not? So basically, the 3d photocopier would be a highly efficient and automated mini-factory. But a factory, requiring inputs, nonetheless.

So if your 3D photocopier is a factory, the debate hasn’t really progressed much.

After all, in the current world you can ‘clone’ a CD, or a DVD, given the right factory and the right raw materials. The technical ability exists.

The legal ability is the other side of the coin. Should you be /allowed/ to clone said products?

This legal question on intellectual property wouldn’t change before or after the invention of a 3D copier. Consider:

1) [Today] You can create an exact copy of a CD, including packaging, in Pakistan, where pirate factories are very highly developed. Yet you do not have the intellectual property rights to do this.

2) [Tomorrow] You can use your 3D photocopier to clone great works of art, but you do not have the intellectual property rights to do so.

In fact, this situation has been around since the 2D photocopier:

3) [Yesterday] You can photocopy the Atkins diet pamphlets to clone them. You do not have the IP rights to do so.

So a 3D copier (or super-factory) would change nothing on IP.

Would the 3D copier change anything about scarcity? Perhaps. It would make IP more valuable an asset… until somebody came along and abolished IP. Then? Scarcity would only apply to the raw materials of creation, the land to put your photocopier on and the power to run the photocopier…

Ross

Thanks for all that.

My reason for talking about a 3D printer is that what has made the existing IP problems of big companies so very, very arkward has not been the mere fact of copyability, but the extreme ease and cheepness with which so many, many people can now do it.  You can set your lawyers on a big factory.  It is much harder to arrest an entire generation of teenagers, and even if you could do this, where would it get you, from the business point of view?

And that isn’t even to mention the straight copying of CDs.

In a way, all this cheap copying is already “abolishing IP”.

I still buy my music by buying new and second-hand CDs.  Primitive I know, but there you go, I like them, and I like the exercise involved in buying them, what with me doing my actual work at home.

But part of why I persist with CDs is that they are now being radically yanked down in price, presumably partly by internet availability of exact copies or sufficiently entertaining substitutes to suffice, and by CD copying.

I strolled round Virgin Piccadilly’s classical CD department the other day, and the pretence that a “full price” CD, of a nearly new recording, will actually cost you the full price has been, at any rate there, all but abandoned.

Later last week I browsed through some box sets of old pop music, by people like Cow Cow Davenport (I just love that name), costing £1 per CD.  I remember when blank CDs cost that much.

This didn’t happen when CDs first became copyable in big factories.  It happened, surely, because CDs can now be copied in my kitchen, and music downloaded to my kitchen via the internet.

Plus: how many books have you actually ever photocopied?  Right through?  Your otherwise obtainable working wage has to be very low for that to be worth your time, unless the book is otherwise unavailable to you.  To say nothing of the godawful inconvenience, compared to a book, of a photocopy of a book.

The relevance of all this to the legal side of things is that property rights which simply cannot be enforced without ruinously expensive state action are, I think, a real problem, in principle as well as just “in practice”.

Bollocks.  I just wrote a CNE IP posting, for nothing!