Today the Register of Copyrights and the Librarian of Congress announced the 1201 exemptions.  You may remember that the 1201 review is the triannual process whereorganizations, communities, and individuals request permission to circumvent Digital Rights Management (DRM) technologies that prevent them from doing otherwise perfectly legal things.  This time around, Public Knowledge requested an exemption that would allow people to rip DVDs they already own in order to transfer the movie to a device that cannot play DVDs (like a tablet).

That request was rejected.  Furthermore, the Register and the Librarian explained that they were unconvinced that space shifting was fair use at all.  That has huge implications well beyond people who want to watch the movies they own on DVD on their iPad.

“Space Shifting” is what you do any time to take a file and move it from one medium to another.  The best known example of this is probably ripping CDs to move the songs on to digital music devices like iPods.  If you think it is ridiculous that such activity is illegal, you are right.  

And the RIAA and the MPAA agree with you.  In 2005, their lawyer (now the Solicitor General of the United States) assured the Supreme Court that “The record companies, my clients, have said, for some time now, and it’s been on their Website for some time now, that it’s perfectly lawful to take a CD that you’ve purchased, upload it onto your computer, put it onto your iPod.“

Movie executives agree as well.  Mitch Singer, the Chief Technology Officer of Sony Pictures Entertainment explained to author Robert Levine that the idea for the movie industry’s UltraViolet program evolved out of Singer’s own frustration with transferring movies between PCs in his home.

So do members of Congress.  Earlier this year, Representative Darrell Issa did a IAmA on Reddit.  Rep. Issa told Redditors that it was already perfectly legal to make personal copies of DVDs for their own use.

If all of this, combined with the fact that all major media management software comes with space shifting technology built into it out of the box, is not enough for the Register of Copyrights and the Librarian of Congress, then it is time to for Congress to step up.  

Public Knowledge has already proposed a bill, hosted on the Internet Blueprint,that would incorporate noncommercial personal uses into the definition of fair use.  Congress needs to pass the bill in order to make clear that the millions of Americans who have copied songs they own onto their iPods and movies they own onto their laptops and tablets are not copyright infringers.

Recently, Antonio Regalado at Technology Review identified a patent on Digital Rights Management (DRM) for 3D printing.  The patent, granted to Nathan Myhrvold’s companyIntellectual Ventures (IV), initiated a wave of discussion about DRM and 3D printing.  While this is a discussion that is worth having, the existence of the patent it not particularly relevant to it.

DRM is a generic term for a suite of technologies that, in theory, allow people to control how others use digital information.  DRM is usually applied to things protected by copyright (like movies on DVD) in the hopes of preventing unauthorized copying.

DRM is problematic for many reasons, but two are particularly relevant to this discussion.  First, almost by definition, DRM cripples the functionality of devices or programs, making themdefective by design.  As applied to 3D printing, DRM could transform a general purpose tool capable of making anything into a specialized tool that can only be used to create a handful of pre-approved items.  Such a transition at this point could cripple the growth of consumer 3D printing.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, DRM does not work.  The highest profile uses of DRM have been attempts to restrict unauthorized copying of works like music and movies (while the music industry has largely moved away from DRM, the movie industry clings firmly to it).  Despite being protected by increasingly sophisticated types of DRM, unauthorized copies of just about any movie released on DVD or Blu-Ray can easily be found online.  Since only one person needs to be smart enough to crack a given DRM in order for everyone to be able to circumvent it, DRM inevitably fails.

Unfortunately, that does not mean that DRM does not have an impact.  Although DRM does not prevent bad actors from making unauthorized copies of works, it does prevent good actors who wish to comply with the rules from making legitimate uses of them.  In this way, DRM imposes costs on consumers without granting any legitimate benefit to rightsholders.

Enter IV’s patent.  The patent appears to be quite broad, and to cover many of the ways that DRM might be implemented on 3D printers.  Does it change anything?

Probably not.  When confronted with a digital disruptive technology, many people reflexively turn to DRM in an attempt to control the disruption.  IV’s patent is not the first time someone has thought about this, and it will not be the last.

Also, the patent does not appear to represent an actual functioning DRM mechanism.  This probably should not come as a surprise.  Intellectual Ventures is widely known as a “non-practicing entity” by some and as a patent troll by others.  Their general strategy is to stake out an area and charge people to license their patents, not to actually develop technology to implement.

Furthermore, and this is important, having a patent does not allow you to force people to use the technology that you have patented.  Since the patent does not represent a way to implement 3D printed DRM, its existence does not really move 3D printing closer to a DRM world.

Finally, in some ways this patent could actually slow the adoption of DRM in the 3D printing community.  Assuming the broad patent survived a challenge in court (a big if), most people dreaming of imposing DRM on 3D printing would be forced to pay Myhrvold and Intellectual Ventures a licensing fee.  That increases the rightholder cost of using DRM, which is a good thing.

The emergence of this patent has helped raise awareness of the possibility of using DRM in connection with 3D printing.  However, that awareness raising may ultimately prove to be its most relevant impact on 3D printing’s development.

Having made it into the New York Times, it looks like it is time to talk about 3D printing and firearms.  The tl;dr version of this post is: this is an interesting development that is not really new but does provide a useful framework to start thinking about the larger policy issues around 3D printers.

Last month I attended the third Open Hardware Summit in New York City.  With the growth of the community and the emergence of products that target people beyond core open source hardware enthusiasts, there was a great deal of discussion about what it really means to be open source hardware and also how to be both open source and competitive in the hardware world.  This post expands upon something that I only had time to briefly touch upon during my presentation.

This post originally appeared in TechCrunch