More Than 3Dimensions

WrenchOwnership is the subject of “On the Media’s” recent broadcast from WNYC, and the show’s producers talked to a variety of voices about the ever-shifting tensions between intellectual property rights and disruptive technologies.  One segment featured a conversation with Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics, and the theme was a familiar one — the inevitable disruption of manufacturing by 3D printing technology coupled with a preemptive criticism of federal regulation that would seek to mitigate said disruption as a protectionist move among traditional manufacturers.  Before this technology is anywhere near wide distribution, its proponents are already anticipating the kind of legal constraints that might naturally ensue, and they’re getting their message out early — namely that 3D printing is the next revolution in a DIY, permission-free lifestyle, and it will be great for all of us if lawmakers don’t mess it up.  But to what extent is this conversation purely academic?  In fact, host Bob Garfield’s example of printing a wrench is itself and indication as to why 3D printing may not be quite so universally disruptive, or at least not in the way many proponents assume.

Start with the premise that I bet I’m not the only one who has gone through at least a dozen or so ink jet printers in my life so far, and we all know why.  Because the printers are made to retail pretty cheaply in order to lock us into buying toner cartridges that are still quite expensive.  Over twenty years of desktop printing, and the price of a black toner cartridge is still $30 to $40 at Staples.

So now, it’s the future, and I have my 3D printer, which had to retail for maybe $500 or less in order to achieve market penetration; and I’m ready to print myself a new crescent wrench, something that has already been done by various printer advocates and entrepreneurs.  If black toner is $30, how much will it cost for, I don’t know, 30oz of whatever MagicGoo has been invented to enable printing a wrench that has enough structural integrity to truly fulfill its purpose (i.e. not break)? It’s going to have to be really cheap and really good (two things that often don’t coincide) in order to compete with the steel-alloy, nickel-plated Craftsman I can buy for about $30 and comes with a lifetime guarantee.  And of course my 3D printer better be a lot more reliable than my 2D printers have been because I’m sure many of us have lost whole days fighting with these delicate, cantankerous beasts, which is right around the time we give up and buy a new one.  Meanwhile, I’ve got bolts on the kids’ swing set that remain unbolted because my printer jammed half-way through making my stupid wrench, and my wife is telling me I’m an idiot for not going to the hardware store two hours ago. So, a lot more than downloading software and owning a printer has to align for this entire prospect to be superior to the current wrench acquisition paradigm that is neither cumbersome nor cost-prohibitive.  And that’s just a wrench.

Take something a little more complicated but still low-tech like a brake caliper, which has several components and retails for my car for about $60. In its present form, the caliper (like so many products) represents mining, petroleum production, rubber harvesting, commodities markets, international trade, shipping (which is protected by the US Navy), machining, assembly,  testing, and regulatory safety standards. And still, the part is only twenty dollars more than a black toner cartridge. But as this is a moving part complete with spring, I can’t just build it as one piece out of nothing but MagicGoo. Hence, are we envisioning a future in which individual consumers have affordable access to raw materials like copper, metal alloys, rubber, etc. all in some form that can be extruded through the 3D printer?  If so, that’s a pretty massive shift in the global supply chain; but even if the day comes when I can precision-print each component, I still have to assemble the caliper by hand (presumably with tools I’ve also printed), which brings us to another matter. . . . Guess what none of us has anymore — auto insurance.  Car parts are just one example of products that come with a liability chain, and I’m betting there isn’t going to be an underwriter willing to insure drivers who make and assemble their own parts.  By contrast the calipers on all our cars have a supply chain that can be traced, which provides a) relative assurance in reliability; b) absolves us consumers of personal liability; and c) provides insight into systemic problems when something does fail.

Just glancing across my rather cluttered desk at the moment, I recognize products that contain gold, silver, copper, silicone, steel, aluminum, rubber, and cotton, all assembled in very specific combinations either by hand or by robot.  In fact, the complexity of systems that put these things at my fingertips belies their affordability. Hence, my immediate instinct is that many of these preemptive policy statements by 3D printing champions make for very interesting conversation and TED Talks, but still belong in the realm of the academic.  A holistic contemplation of 3D printer disruption, taking into account what a pain in the ass common ink printers have been so far, shows it will take a lot more than building an object that looks like a product for the thing to actually be that product.

Technologists and inventors are supposed to dream big; it’s part of their job description. And the prospect of 3D printing to produce new products or new methods of certain types of production in the arts, in food, even potentially in housing, are very intriguing, but to proclaim imminent disruption across the entire manufacturing sector seems a tad premature. And the policy messages start to sound a little like people arguing for revised traffic laws in anticipation of that day we all have jet packs. All that said, I’d be very eager to use a 3D printer to print out new 2D printers and especially those damnable toner cartridges.

Privacy Concerns?

Just a quick post this morning regarding this story in yesterday’s New York Times about Google’s admission to violations of privacy as a component of its Street View project.  For those who haven’t followed this story, the crux of it is that while Google’s vehicles have been combing the streets, mapping the world through pictures (something that is admittedly very useful), they’ve kinda been collecting personal data from household computers with open wi-fi connections. I suggest reading the article for deeper insight.

As I have argued many times, and shall continue to argue, there’s nothing wrong with questioning the federal government’s ability or willingness to spy on us in cyberspace; but there’s a lot wrong with over-dramatizing this fear while turning a blind eye to both the capacity and the motive for a company like Google to point its virtual proboscis where we may not want it.  Moreover, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which I criticize with some frequency, is perceived as a privacy advocate in the digital age but remains rather silent on the matter of Google’s invasions of privacy in contrast to the amount of “ink” it devotes to drones and other forms of government surveillance.

I leave it to you to decide which worries you more:  a government with a limited budget, a defined scope for surveillance, and a mess of competing oversight processes; or a private corporation whose entire business model is based on amassing every bit of data it can gather.

Choice Words & The Right to Choose

Photo by David Crockett
Photo by David Crockett

Announcement of the Copyright Alert System just over a week ago brought some new readers to this blog, and among these was one who was offended by this post, which is coincidentally the most-read to date.  My use of the word slavery in context to BitTorrent sites exploiting labor inspired the reader to call me a racist. You can decide for yourself whether the accusation is fair, but the subsequent exchange of comments did leave me thinking about the word slave, which made me think of Prince, who performed in 1993 on Late Show with David Letterman with that very word inscribed on his face. [Date and show name corrected from original post thanks to comment from a regular reader.]

Prince is an unqualified musical genius, and in the tradition of geniuses, he has been as provocative in managing his career as he is with the production of music itself.  It occurs to me, though, that this particular artist also unwittingly personifies so many of the emotional and functional complexities in the business of making and selling music in the digital age.

Presently, the 1984 hit song “Let’s Go Crazy” is at the heart of an ongoing case, Lenz v UMG, brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2010. The case involves a DMCA takedown of a home video from YouTube depicting a baby dancing in a kitchen while Prince’s song plays on the radio in the background.  The short story is that the video was taken down in error and then restored, which is pretty much how DMCA is meant to work, but of course the video and Mrs. Lenz’s temporary inconvenience aren’t really the point. See Terry Hart’s analysis from August of 2010.

Interestingly, the CAS bump in readership here also brought a new reader/commenter with whom I had discussion about the altruism (or not) of organizations like EFF; and Lenz makes a pretty good example of what looks to me like a group of lawyers making much ado about nothing while hiding a rather large axe to grind.  The general public gets the easily digestible image “Prince sues mother and baby,” even though the suit was brought by Lenz and the EFF.  But the aura of Prince provides good cover for the real motive in this case, which is that the EFF is seeking a ruling that UMG willfully issued takedowns to non-infringing material (because honest mistakes are not grounds for a suit) in order to establish a precedent that would place a higher burden on creators seeking to protect their works online.  Writes attorney Luke Platzer in this guest post at Copyright Alliance:

“…the expansion of the 512(f) standard to challenge the reliability of copyright owners’ takedown processes — thereby forcing copyright owners to use more precise, but potentially much slower processes — appears to have been at least in part EFF’s goal in bringing the Lenz case.”

If you read the recent article in the Wall Street Journal about NBCUniversal’s counter-piracy efforts which can hardly keep up with its notice and takedown process, you might understand why many independent content owners have given up hope of protecting their work online; but by bringing the case in Lenz, the EFF would like to make that process even harder. In fact, cases like this aren’t about the work, they aren’t about the artist, they aren’t about free speech, and they aren’t even about fair use.  They’re about ivory-tower academics making a career out of fighting a problem that doesn’t exist. To paraphrase Hart, DMCA was 12 years old when the case began, and this relatively benign and temporary video takedown was the best example they had to reflect a supposedly comprehensive threat to free speech and democracy.  In fact, the recent misuse of DMCA by NASCAR to remove footage of a crash from YouTube makes a much better example than Lenz, but  Lenz  is already underway.  Still, the fact that Prince is the face of this story is somewhat paradoxical, although not necessarily incongruous, if we understand the mind of the artist.

Where this stuff gets a little complicated for the casual observer is that Prince is in fact an ardent — some might even say obsessive — protector of his rights on the Internet. He has gone to great length and expense to control where and how his work is used but has never, to my knowledge, filed suit against an individual user or fan for infringement. For anyone who thinks copyright is just about money, consider the likelihood, that it costs Prince more to pursue these actions than it is probably worth on the balance sheet. So why does he do it?  I don’t know the man, but I’m going to guess that it’s the same passion that drove him to the performance he gave in 1993 on Letterman.  It is one of the few live TV acts I’ll never forget because it was so strange — this virtuoso guitarist playing as though wrapped in a straight jacket, and scrawled on the side of his face in what looked like black marker, letters organized vaguely into a guitar shape akin to the glyph that would become his temporary moniker, the word — SLAVE.

I do find it fascinating that the same musician who has been unfairly tarred in the Lenz case is the one who can reasonably be described as our generation’s poster child of the artist bucking against his corporate “gatekeepers,” for those who would use that term. In fact, Prince’s frustration with Warner Music back then had nothing to do with money per se, but with the label’s reluctance to release his new album Gold over concerns of “saturating the market.”  Restraining an artist is a difficult thing, and I can only imagine doing so with Prince would be like trying to lasso a stallion with a length of yarn.  Yet even in the years subsequent to these events, even with all the resources at his disposal, Prince has not thoroughly embraced the so-called “permissionless culture” promoted by legal scholars, who perhaps don’t actually understand artists.  Some will assume the motive here is greed, although I would argue that this assumption is likely a misunderstanding of Prince in particular and many artists in general.  What those who don’t create art fail to grasp is that controlling distribution is often a component of the work itself.  This is why an artist as passionate, as obsessive, as prolific, and as influential as Prince will naturally rebel against both a Warner Music holding him back and a Google exploiting his work. And, yes, either form of restraint on his choices can make the artist feel like a slave.