No.

Tied into our current 3D printing boom is a second, equally interesting one: an explosion of accessible 3D scanners.  As you may be able to guess from the name, 3D scanners can take physical objects and turn them into digital files.  Once you have digitized an object you can modify it, share it over the internet, and/or print it out with a 3D printer.

Like 3D printers, 3D scanners are not new technology.  Companies have been making expensive, high quality scanners for years.  These scanners could be used to quickly create digital replicas of things like buildings, entire neighborhoods, or even fossilized whale bones that are accurate down to the centimeter (or millimeter).  But, also like 3D printers, recent years have started to see low cost, pretty-good scanners enter the market.

There huge variety in these scanners.  Microsoft’s Kinect has been hacked and turned into a 3D scanner.  123D Catch from Autodesk can turn a series of regular, 2D photographs into a 3D model.   Makerbot has released their own 3D scanner (well, sort of their second 3D scanner), and Kickstarter is chock-a-block full of handheld 3D scanners, desktop 3D scanners, and dongles that turn your phone or tablet into a 3D scanner.  Back in 2011 we even did a podcast interview with the inventor of Trimensional, an iPhone app that used light from the iPhone’s own screen to create a 3D model.

All of which is to say that pretty soon anyone who wants access to a reasonably high quality 3D scanner will have one. In fact, anyone with a smart phone in their pocket will have one whether they want it or not.

A Crisitunity?

Most people will see this as an exciting opportunity.  Imagine if on your next vacation, instead of just taking a picture of yourself next to the Elgin Marbles you scan them so you can print them out at home.  Or going to a botanical garden, scanning a bouquet worth of flowers, and mixing them into a 3D printed statue for your sweetheart.  Being able to capture the world in 3D will present us all with incredible opportunities.

Of course, some people will see this new technology as a crisis.  They will worry that being able to copy objects means being able to copy objects without permission.  And that could mean infringing on copyright (of course in many cases the objects being copied will not actually be protected by copyright, but let’s set that aside right over here for now).  They will conclude that this type of technology is just too dangerous to be freely available, and insist on some combination of digital and legal restrictions that make it much less useful and much easier to control.

A Dumb Response

This type of response is, in a word, dumb.  Yes, it is true that 3D scanners can copy physical objects.  And it is true that some of those physical objects will be protected by copyright (or patent).  And, furthermore, it is true that some of those protected objects will be copied without permission, therefore infringing on their respective copyrights and patents.

But that alone is not enough to build a case to restrict them.  After all, you can say pretty much the same thing about digital 2D cameras.  Digital cameras make copies of all sorts of copyright-protected things every day.  Many of those copies are made without permission.  And, at least on some level, that is a problem.

But no one would suggest that the correct response to that problem is to build limitations into digital cameras.  Or hold digital camera manufacturers responsible for copyright infringement.  There is no reason to treat 3D scanners any differently.

So enjoy those 3D scanners.  Use them responsibly.  Or at least as responsibly as you use your 2D camera.  And if someone starts freaking out about how 3D scanners will somehow mean the end of intellectual property as we know it, tell them to take a deep breath.  Sit them down.  Scan their face.  Turn it into a 3D printed mug and fill that mug with whatever liquid you think will best help them to relax.

The White House and Congress are trying to restrict use of public domain photos and videos. 

Expanding on The Switch’s 5 things that  neither side of the broadband debate wants to admit.

Last week I had the opportunity to participate in the Open Hardware Summit, an event that is always a highlight of my conference year.  Now in its fourth year, the summit is a chance for the robust community that has grown up around open source hardware to come together, discuss what has been happening, and show off great advances.

By any measure, the open source hardware community is thriving.  Each year the summit gets bigger, the projects and products get more ambitious, and the barrier to entry is lowered.  But this year it did feel like the community was reaching an inflection point.  The world of open source hardware is expanding beyond its original borders, and that presents its own set of challenges and opportunities.  While I raised some of these during the panel that wrapped up the summit, I wanted to expand upon a few of them a bit more.

The State of Licensing and the Law

I touched on this in a blog post last year, and it was the topic of my presentation this year, but my discussions with people at the summit made me think about this further.  While open source hardware looks to open source software for inspiration and guidance, from a legal standpoint it must strike out on its own. Fundamentally this is because, in contrast to software, most hardware is not protected by any type of intellectual property.  

This can lead to a tension.  There are people who are interested in creating “sticky” licenses for open source hardware – licenses that would force people who build upon open source hardware to be open as well.  Unfortunately, without an intellectual property hook, those licenses simply are not enforceable.  

The way to resolve this tension is not to find a novel way to protect hardware with existing intellectual property law, or to create a new type of intellectual property law that is easier to apply to hardware.  For every person who used this right to share designs, there would no doubt be 100 or 1,000 who would use it to reduce sharing.

Instead, it is to find alternatives.  Clear, non-legal descriptions of expectations may not be legally binding, but they will make it easy for good actors to play by the rules.  Legal enforceability is nice, but it is not the only way forward.  There can be a lot of power in publicly calling someone out for violating the rules. 

Letting New People In and Allowing Existing People to Evolve

You cannot effectively enforce the rules until those rules are clear to everyone.  There have been important attempts to help codify what it means to be open source hardware.  Phillip Torrone has written the {unspoken} rules of open source hardware, a strong effort to document some of the informal understandings that have grown up over time.  The open source hardware definitionand best practices, hosted and developed by the fantastic Open Source Hardware Association, are also a huge step forward.  We need more of this.

But to many people, the heart of open source hardware can still feel like a set of gut instincts, community expectations, and hidden rules that are all too easy to run afoul of.  If you are not someone who has already spent a good amount of time in the community, sometimes it can feel like there are unwritten rules just waiting to be inadvertently broken.

For those already deep into the open source hardware community, this may not feel like a problem.  But for a community interested in expanding and evolving, it could be.  

Here is one, but certainly not the only one, way that the lack of clarity can play out.  Over the course of the summit I spoke with a number of people who work for large companies.  These individuals (and presumably their companies) were excited, or at least intrigued, by open source hardware.  I had no reason to believe that their desire to help their companies go open source was not totally sincere.  

But, for all their enthusiasm and interest, they were a bit concerned.  They understood that the open source hardware community is a passionate one, and that they would only get one chance to make a first impression.  But they were not totally sure how to make sure that first impression was a good one.  As a result, the fear of crossing a hidden line may keep them out of open source hardware entirely.

Depending on your perspective, this is either a good thing or a bad thing.  There are plenty of people who don’t really care if large companies engage with open source hardware.  And that is a totally reasonable position to have.  But for people who are at least intrigued by the idea of having large companies embrace open source hardware, this feels like a missed opportunity.  Giving newcomers – even corporate newcomers – greater certainty that the rules are clear will help expand the open source hardware world.

Moving Forward

The bad news is that neither of these challenges can be solved by an arduino robot or flashing LEDs.  They are the kind of unglamorous infrastructure and community building work that feel a bit like documentation – always behind something else on the todo list.  

Furthermore, there is nothing that says that anyone has to do any of it.  The world doesn’t end if the open source hardware community does not figure out an alternative licensing solution.  Similarly, nothing explodes if the only way to really “do” open source hardware is to hang around in the community for a while first.  

Nonetheless, I think not working harder on those things would be a shame.  But I could be wrong.  And I’m happy to be wrong.  My real hope is that if neither of these things happen it is because there was some sort of conscious decision not to let them happen.  While I think it would be a missed opportunity not to do them, the real missed opportunity would be to not do them without even realizing it.

According to Verizon, the FCC’s Open Internet Rules are the only thing preventing ISPs from becoming gatekeepers for the internet. For background on yesterday’s hearing, start here, for a summary of the arguments go here, and for a timeline of net neutrality, click here.