No to Copyright on 3D Printer Files

The prevailing opinion is that 3D printing, by merging the tangible with the digital, changes our way of interacting with the material world. Rather than buying a commodity conceived by others and manufactured in a sufficiently low-wage country, people from opposite sides of the globe will be able to collaborate on the design of a customized product, and then print it home (in the sense of making it in three dimensions) at a limited cost.

Just as personal computers enabled everybody to become creators of content, 3D printers will enable everybody to become creators of things. Just as the advent of the digital age led to the "copyright wars", pitting authors and copyright owners against users who have been inclined to facilitate the unauthorized digital reproduction and circulation of protected content, the fear is that 3D printing will allow the copying of objects and parts protected by intellectual property law. Just as the invention of the mp3 format determined the manufacturing of the first mp3 player and the creation of new business models for the online distribution of music, there is no reason to believe that firms won't exploit the new market possibilities offered by 3D printing.

However, the early response has been to focus on the threat of piracy, rather that looking at the possibilities for growth. Faced with Pirate Bay's prophecy: "You will download your sneakers within 20 years", current incumbents are trying to protect themselves from this new industrial revolution, since they control intellectual property rights on manufactured goods that 3D printers will make reproducible by everybody at decidedly lower costs.

In order to avoid repeating the errors of the recent past, we must understand a priori whether 3D printing is a copyright violation. If it is true that a physical object can exist as a file in the .stl format to be decoded by a 3D printer, this does not mean that the digital version of any object is protected by copyright, just because it's digital. It is necessary for the physical object to be protected by droit d'auteur to be able to make the case that its unauthorized reproduction (the .stl file) is a copyright violation. Conversely, if we put copyright on all the virtual representations of objects (i.e. all .stl files) – also on those that reproduced objects not covered by copyright – this would translate into a very high and unwarranted level of control on the distribution and manufacturing of objects by those who make them.

This does not exclude the case of the physical object that is patented, and whose reproduction via a 3D printer can violate existing patent law. However, that is no longer a copyright issue concerning the digital file, but an issue of patents covering physical goods.