Chapter 7

Understanding 3D Printing’s Effect on Traditional Lines of Business

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding changes to production

Handling challenges to intellectual property laws

Using expired designs

Being ethical

As I discuss in Chapter 1, the transformative potential of additive manufacturing is so great that we are already in the middle of a third Industrial Revolution (See Industry 4.0), one in which local production is displacing less flexible and resource-intensive traditional manufacturing processes. This chapter discusses the potential disruptions resulting from this ongoing evolution and its likely impact on not only traditional manufacturing, but also personal individualized manufacturing.

Transforming Production

In addition to using sustainable alternative materials such as polylactic acid (PLA) instead of traditional petrochemical-based materials, additive manufacturing could bring back home manufacturing tasks currently outsourced to locations that offer lower-cost mass production. Such a shift, in turn, may affect the industries involved in the transportation and storage of mass product quantities and reduce the environmental impact of cargo transportation. Manufacturing in less industrialized settings may also result in less environmental impact and lessen the need for regulation.

Many strategies for recycling become possible where a part is generated on the fly, used, and then recycled instead of just discarded. 3D printing may one day allow manufacturers to transform everything from solid objects and construction materials into new appliances or buildings without any waste.

The fundamental technologies behind additive manufacturing may also transform the materials (and quantities thereof) used in the production of goods, which could affect industries that currently supply parts to existing production lines. As manufacturers become more capable of low-impact (green) production of lighter weight structural frameworks (with complex interior designs like a bird’s wing bones instead of a solid mass of steel or aluminum, for example), major changes in the production process may be triggered along the following lines:

• Reduced quantity of material needed for the same result
• Improved potential for reuse of recycled source materials
• Stronger, lighter products created closer to their markets

The resulting energy savings would be passed along to industries that currently consume fuel and energy in the traditional manufacture of goods. One result would be an environmentally friendly effect on second-order consumption in terms of a reduction in input resource requirements due to the changes made possible by — rather than as a direct result of — using 3D-printed products.

Displacing the production line

The potential presented in additive manufacturing as it matures suggests a fundamental transformation in the production of material goods. Supporters like to discuss the possibilities of ad hoc personalized manufacturing at the consumer level, whereas critics argue about the damage any transition from traditional mass-manufacturing, storage, and distribution would make on existing economies.

These concerns are the same that buggy-whip makers and farriers had when machines replaced horse-drawn carts, when hand-spinners were replaced by automated thread makers, when coopers faced the rapid production capacity of injection-molded barrels, and when automated looms transformed textile production capabilities. All these examples occurred during transformational stages in the first and second Industrial Revolutions.

With the potential already developing to print everything from engine parts to whole houses by moving production directly to the consumers’ sites, many cargo container ships will be put out of business if the 3D Industrial Revolution reaches a fraction of the promise of its potential.

3D printing, crowdfunding, robotics, ad hoc media content, and a host of other technologies — taken together — will not only alter the course of production but fundamentally shatter traditional manufacturing practices and related industries such as advertising and marketing.

In engineering settings, the success of additive manufacturing has been thoroughly proven. Consider the reconstruction of the Saturn V’s colossal rocket motors by NASA scientists. This technology was designed to provide heavy-lift capability for the Orion system that will replace the retired space shuttle for manned exploration of the moon and Mars. 3D printing is preparing the vehicles that will carry future astronauts. 3D printing will provide them with the tools and possibly even the food they’ll need during their journeys.

In medicine, 3D printing may soon provide replacement parts for human bodies. The military is also finding many uses for 3D-printed-in-the-field rapid prototypes.

Abbreviating the manufacturing chain

Traditional manufacturing involves a sequence of events that take place in scattered locations. Manufacturing a cellphone’s lithium battery, for example, involves these steps:

1. Collect basic resources such as iron and lithium.
2. Transport the materials to locations where materials for individual components, such as steel and intercalated lithium compound, can be refined.
3. Transport the refined materials to sites for processing and finishing into subassemblies such as batteries.
4. Transport the subassemblies to locations that assemble the finished product.
5. Transport the finished product for consumer packaging.
6. Transport the packaged product to customers.

Thus, when you shop for the newest cellphone at a store near your home, you’re at the far end of a long chain of events. The manufacturing cycle looks different for an equivalent product of additive manufacturing:

1. Collect basic resources.
2. Create needed materials from collected resources.
3. Transport materials to a fabrication site in each town or region.
4. Have individual customers select product options before manufacturing.
5. Use data files that define the product design to fabricate a specific model of the final product that includes the chosen options.

In addition, recycling earlier products as feed stock for the production of complex, multimaterial designs would reduce costs to consumers and encourage the recovery of materials that would otherwise end up in ever-expanding landfills.

Providing local fabrication

Some goods, such as coat hooks and children’s party favors, can already be produced easily on a consumer-grade 3D printer. A search of Etsy or almost any other online shop providing products for common hobbies and pastimes shows many other products that can be made at home today, including miniature figures, drones and model aircraft, board games, plastic eyeglasses, jewelry boxes, and cellphone cases. Also, making these items at home means you can customize them.

UPS deliveries, Amazon, and other online marketplaces are researching how items can be fabricated locally and delivered to consumers via drones without traditional manufacturing and distribution chains. Soon, mobile fabrication centers may travel ahead of events such as concerts to prepare personalized items for sale or traveling in the wake of storms to provide items that are useful in recovery.

Researchers are exploring ways to use natural materials to fabricate protective structures for just such a need. Markus Kayser at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology built his original Solar Sinter to use the abundant sunlight and natural sand available in Egypt to fashion durable items and prototype structures. NASA and the ESA (European Space Agency) are exploring automated systems that will build shelters on the moon. Those same technologies can be applied on Earth with equal ease because the models cost almost nothing to duplicate from one computer to the next.

Eliminating traditional release cycles

Globally, the transition between seasons imposes a cycle of goods suitable for warm and cool weather. Similarly, massive corporate marketing efforts update durable goods for the next cycle’s models to attract consumers and ensure continued sales to sustain manufacturing growth. Some cycles provide actual improvements and innovations; others make purely cosmetic changes. As cycles of change are repeated, repair parts become scarce, and costs to service the original design rise. Automobiles have exhibited this trend over many years. Components for a vintage collectable such as a World War II–era Willys Jeep, for example, are increasingly unavailable except from specialty providers that charge high prices in keeping with item scarcity.

Handling Challenges to Intellectual Property Laws

The United States, the European Union, and other members of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) provide legal protections under patents for both utility (functionality) and design (ornamental design of a functional item). During the term of a patent, owners can prevent the unlicensed use of their registered intellectual property (IP) designs in products for sale, and licensees must pay a licensing fee.

Threatening IP protections

Design patents provide protection against the duplication of a particular object’s physical form but are intended to encourage competition through the development of derivative designs that can be patented by their creators. The grant of a patent requires that the work be original and nonobvious.

Physical designs such as the alien cube from the movie Super 8 and nonfunctional movie props (such as the Oscillation Overthruster prop from the movie Buckaroo Banzai, which was later used in several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation) may be protected under copyright, which protects nonfunctional designs from being copied for sale. The difficulty for IP owners is that designs can be copied from photographs, which can be taken from a distance without the owner being aware of the duplication.

This situation presents a challenge for manufacturers. The body design for a new car, for example, could be captured by a photographer, transmitted to a fabrication facility, and made available as a 3D-printed overlay for last year’s model before the new version is in the manufacturer’s showrooms for sale.

Because additive manufacturing allows people to copy or create new items similar to patented designs, existing patent laws will need to be updated. Until the laws change, however, the technology will continue to cause trouble.

The plastic tank model shown in Figure 7-1, for example, is Thomas Valenty’s design for a model used in playing the Warhammer board game, created by Games Workshop. This model isn’t a direct copy but has a similar look and feel. Valenty’s posting of his model online resulted in a challenge by Games Workshop, which claimed that the 3D design violated its IP rights. That is, if someone downloaded Valenty’s design, they wouldn’t need to buy the official object from Games Workshop. The Thingiverse repository received a takedown notice on the basis of protections under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which is better known for suits against illegal sharing of music and video files. This notice was intended to prohibit people from downloading a copy of the design that could be used to create an object for personal use.

FIGURE 7-1: A 3D-printed copy of Thomas Valenty’s tank model for Warhammer.

Assigning legal liability

At this writing, people can make items for their own use without having to retain a lawyer and pay for a full search of all IP registrations to identify potential conflicts. This is true of patented designs. You can write your own operating system, which can look like a commercial design, as long as you don’t distribute it to others. You can duplicate the trademarked shape of protected soda bottles for personal use at home. Now that a person without significant design skills can create a replacement part for an older car that may be protected intellectual property, there’s potential IP trouble. The legal system is trying to come to terms with how to protect designers’ right to make a profit from their designs and people’s right to make their personal items without an impossible level of cost and legal review.

If a component or other product fails to function properly, often, the result is recalls and replacements in the world of traditional manufacturing. Consumers who create copies of such items may unwittingly take on liability for any damage or harm resulting from the use of that component or product. If you use a 3D-printed vacuum cleaner produced at a local fabrication site of the sort that UPS envisions (refer to “Providing local fabrication” earlier in this chapter), and the handle fails and causes injury, where does the legal liability lie? Is the defect the original designer’s fault? Is it the fault of the manufacturer or individual, which may have used different materials? Is it the fault of the owner who paid for the replacement part, who may not even have known that the part wasn’t an official factory-manufactured replacement? Traditional insurance and legal rules that determine liability need to be updated in the years ahead to reflect 3D-printing innovations.

Leveraging Expired Patents

Patents protect designs, but what happens when they run out? Items that age out of the system are no longer protected by IP restrictions. Any object older than the term of patent — or released from patent due to discovery of earlier art or failure to pay the applicable fees — can be produced by any manufacturer for sale. Many expired designs are being converted to be 3D model files that can be downloaded from Thingiverse or ordered from the storefront at Shapeways (www.shapeways.com).

Currently, the U.S. Patent Office has illustrated diagrams of more than 8 million patents granted since the Patent Act of 1790 allowed citizens to apply for a patent. The vast majority of these patents have expired and are available for reproduction. If the current laws are retained, nothing will stop entrepreneurs from bringing back many collectibles and offering 3D-printed reproductions for sale. If the files that define 3D models of designs become protected under copyright law instead of patent law, however, use of these designs could be delayed for centuries. Copyright protection lasts until 70 years after the author’s death; advanced geriatric care and new medical procedures could extend human life well past the century mark before the 70-year countdown even begins.

Rare items are rare only because they’re no longer being manufactured. Obviously, collectors of rare items depend on their investments to be protected and want to prohibit unlicensed manufacture. A 1971 factory-original Plymouth Hemi Barracuda, for example, was recently offered for sale for $2 million USD. If a 3D-printed ’71 Barracuda became available, collectors would surely try to print one. Owners of the few remaining original cars, however, would feel that their investments were threatened.

Working around patents

Additive manufacturing is still in its infancy, and many of the designs for rapid fabricators are still under patent protection. The expiration of patents on two early modeling techniques — stereo lithography (SLA) and fused filament fabrication (FFF) — opened the way for the development of the many open-source RepRap variations, as well as the new boutique production of home printers like the Form 1. Critical key technology patents covering laser-sintered granular-bond fabrication expired in 2014. These expiring patents create potential for many new commercial and hobbyist systems. Eventually, this situation will not only bring down the cost of creating 3D-printed objects from metal and other materials but will also offer new opportunities for creating and commoditizing such objects.

Not all IP controls have been holding back the floodgates, however; some patent protections encourage development in 3D printing. When 3D Systems held all production rights for stereolithographic fabrication, another company sought alternative ways to use photopolymerization without relying on a liquid pool for fabrication of the developing object. Objet (now combined with Stratasys) developed the photopolymer PolyJet technology from inkjet printing methods, allowing the application of thin films of liquid plastic that could be rapidly hardened by ultraviolet light.

This photopolymer process is much easier to manage without the large vats of liquid plastic needed for SLA fabrication, but each technique provides its own advantages. Some of the largest and most precise 3D printers use variations on stereolithographic and multiphoton lithographic fabrication. (For more on that topic, see Chapter 2.)

The process is similar to the way 2D printers mix colored inks to create full-color photo reproductions. As a result, Objet’s printers can create objects whose physical properties vary from one point to another — even throughout the object itself! — to allow flexibility in one area, a higher frictional surface in another, or variations in transparency and color for aesthetic or functional purposes.

Without the barrier created by 3D Systems’s control of the original SLA patents, the PolyJet alternative might not have become available. As the earliest additive manufacturing technologies come out of patent control and new technologies are developed, opportunities will emerge for the transformation of manufacturing and the production of new products.

Protecting intellectual property rights

New technologies create a threat to the intellectual property of established companies. As long as self-built 3D printers are available, however, mandatory digital rights management (DRM) controls are likely to remain absent in home-production systems. Commercial vendors may be forced to comply with some type of DRM solution, with complex algorithms scanning each model to see whether it violates someone else’s intellectual property or includes items restricted from fabrication.

It will be necessary to develop a database of all protected IP designs and then create a search engine that can be linked to a 3D printer’s software to approve or deny the fabrication of a particular design. Aside from potential attacks on such a service from people who support open-source design, not much will prevent an operator from bypassing a designer’s controls on the type of materials that can be used, replacing (say) an aluminum powder cartridge with a gold powder cartridge, regardless of whether the designer ever intended a solid gold version of the object.

Imposing Ethical Controls

Some objects are protected from duplication by virtue of their use, such as firearms and high-security keys for locks. New systems promise to inhibit the creation of 3D-printable firearms by identifying characteristic components, which could run into problems when they block the fabrication of any tube that is 9mm, 10mm, or any other diameter matching firearm ammunition. Just as with DRM, as long as self-created 3D printers are available, any software controls can be bypassed to allow the fabrication of protected designs.

Figure 7-2 shows the Liberator, the first 3D-printed functional firearm. (Note that we modified the firearm from its original design files in various ways to render it inoperative.) These weapons present difficulties for law enforcement because, although the designs are intended to comply with current U.S. laws for legal firearms, they could be modified to be undetectable by current security scanners.

FIGURE 7-2: The 3D-printed Liberator firearm, modified to be nonfunctioning.

It’s equally possible to fabricate (scan and 3D-print) controlled designs such as high-security keys for handcuffs and other secure locks. Because these functional keys are made of plastic, they could be carried through metal detectors by criminals. Students at MIT recently created 3D-printable models of the controlled key blanks used by Schlage’s Primus high-security locks. The uncut key blanks normally can’t be acquired by civilians. Researchers have been able to duplicate keys from photographs captured from up to 200 feet away, needing only the blanks to create fully functional keys capable of bypassing traditional physical security controls in government, medical, and detention facilities.

As 3D-printable drugs, body tissues, and organs become available, ethical control of this new form of manufacturing will be difficult. Where we once were concerned with athletes doping their blood, we may someday have to find ways to identify custom body modifications that allow all manner of extreme physical feats.

Software alone will not provide a technical solution to control the ethical or unethical uses of products that were once simply impossible but which are now becoming more than possible. Medical researchers may present more than just 3D-printed tissues for reconstructive surgery and medical treatments in a few decades. Legal controls such as patents are already facing challenges when applied to biological organisms; digitally fabricated viruses and other materials are entirely possible and will present a spectrum of difficulties in their application, liability, and legal controls.