The creation of harm is really the only place to draw the line. In child porn the harm happens at each step, creation, dissemination, and arguably inspiration. Design blueprints don’t have the same properties. I have clear guides to the creation of a huge number of incredibly dangerous and illegal items all over my house. Those guides are not only legal, some of the are produced and disseminated by the government. Chemistry textbooks will teach you to make all kinds of fun drugs and bombs. Old army field manuals will walk you through a large number of ways to kill a human being.
That being said the argument around gun designs isn’t new and we have a societal history of how to deal with it. Plans for zip guns are on Wikipedia if you know where to read and some of those designs are faster cheaper and more reusable than any of the 3d printed designs we are looking at. Education, social taboos, and penalties for actual manufacture work pretty well.
^^Yes, clearly. While “regular” porn is fine. Child porn REQUIRES its subject to be the victim of abuse in nearly all cases. (I suppose the actual taking pics of nude children may not be abusive, (I think all of us have a “bath tub” pic in their moms photo album somewhere) but anything beyond that clearly is.)
Now, you might get some “grey” area where you have under aged people engaged in porn (i.e. Traci Lords). One could argue she was a willing participant, but she was underage and we need to have a legal limit for this sort of thing.
The way more common, exploding issue, is under 18 young adults sending nudes and recording their sexual exploits. Again not abuse usually, and while not legal, I think it should be largely decriminalized - at least among the people making it. Some one who swapped nudes at 16 or 17 with another 16 or 17 year old I don’t think is doing anything wrong. Perhaps spreading it to third parties should remain a crime.
But a more accurate comparison is a “how to” guide to making porn or taking nudes shouldn’t be illegal.
But anyway, I am digressing so I hope that is an enough of an illustration.
I think you need to check yourself. Making it illegal to own a 3d printer because it is capable of creating something you personally don’t like is well below the bar for serious consideration.
Ah, a fundamentalist? I’m sorry. I’ll just back away from the cray cray.
“Throughout this paper, we will call the shared items (e.g. software programs, songs, movies, books, etc.) objects. The persons who copy objects will be called users of the darknet, and the computers used to share objects will be called hosts.
The idea of the darknet is based upon three assumptions:
Any widely distributed object will be available to a fraction of users in a form that permits copying.
Users will copy objects if it is possible and interesting to do so.
Users are connected by high-bandwidth channels.
The darknet is the distribution network that emerges from the injection of objects according to assumption 1 and the distribution of those objects according to assumptions 2 and 3.”
Probably. But there are already some 2D analogs to the 3D printing issue, such as the filters in Photoshop, photocopy machines, scanners and printers that automatically block the scanning, editing or printing of currency. And then there are the yellow ink dot codes that many printers use to print device serial numbers in hard to visually detect small yellow dots on printed images, making it easier for law enforcement to track various printed documents. Such controls are imperfect and seem to be implemented “voluntarily”, but I’d think they could be implemented by statute and possibly survive constitutional muster.
It would be harder to to control the printing of gun parts - and impossible to do perfectly - but just as some drones have built in GPS no fly zones so do could 3D printers be required to prohibit printing certain known files, and to update their list of prohibited files just as the drones update their list of no fly zones and altitude limits. Not perfect. Possible to circumvent. But possible to implement.
(I don’t think it would be easy, though, to create a “don’t print gun-like components” algorithm any more than one can make a perfect algorithmic porn filter - there would be lots of false positives and false negatives.)
If you are going to make it illegal to possess any machine which can be used to make a gun, then, welcome to the thirteenth century. Before too long we’ll be reliving it.
You keep waving that word around. I don’t think it means what you think it means.
It’s not really a “SCIENCE PAPER”. It’s more of an overview of technology with added speculation. The updated abstract explicitly says “This edit is not scientific.” And the paper goes on to say “we speculate”.
If the argument is that possessing or distributing this information harms no one, it is specious. We know what the intent is.
You also cannot both support this and then have a point of view that there should be any form of registration/regulation for firearms, since this makes that point moot. If you want sensible gun laws or regulation, you cannot also have a view that the pursuit of this technology should be free of said regulation because it is on the slippery slope of the first amendment.
The author of this piece has pointed out in the past that, hey…it’s a shitty plastic gun. But the technology will get better, the materials will get better…we know this to be a fact.
But the other issue here is that once again America’s general behavior and arrogance is that this is an issue for America to decide, forgetting that other nations in the world already decided through their own legislative process, guns are not legal or allowed, but once again here we have the technology to make that point moot as well.
After all the reactionary garbage we had to go through after 9/11 and the shoe bomber, this is going to create a whole new level of fear and inconvenience. And it will only take one instance of one of these getting onto a plane which will either have a horrific outcome or simply spark an international outrage. I’ve accidentally passed through security with two full bottles of water before…getting a plastic gun through security will happen (if it hasn’t already).
We can simply equate this discussion to “it’s just data/information” and talk about how if we keep this from being readily available it will find its way to the dark web…but that doesn’t mean just because that might happen, we have no responsibility here.
I don’t have an answer for this…but I think taking the stance of freedom of speech over the safety of our societies, is a cop out. We have to do better and think very hard about where this leads and how it might affect those we love down the road.
“If you want to freak out about things that still haven’t quite happened yet imagine the future of CRISPR and drug recombination, which is also just digital information …”
Raijaniemi’s “Quatum Thief” paints an awful picture of that scenario. At least current malware can’t corrupt your DNA.
Do we? Does everyone who owns the Anarchist Cookbook or one of the various other fringe books telling people how to do shady shit actually use said information? Does everyone who learns something like internet security go on to be black hat hackers?
There are specific laws concerning the reproduction of currency also called forgery. Those sorts of controls are not analogous to the issue of posting plans to print a gun and the issue being discussed is not the printers but the information you would need to supply the printer in order to create something. That’s what’s in question today.
I think the argument is actually that we have laws protecting speech and the courts have long held that information in print (digital or otherwise) is speech and therefore cannot be abridged. The potential “harm” as a result of this speech is the creation of an item also protected by our most fundamental laws, namely a gun. The creation and possession of a gun is protected by our laws. Therefore, it is reasonable to conclude that the plans, the intent, and the product are perfectly legal and the government is prohibited by our foundational documents from creating any laws concerning the distribution of 3d gun plans or the resulting product of those plans…
Sorry, but that’s is not at all an issue at play here. This concerns the disposition of such information in the United States. We have no control or jurisdiction over sovereign nations. They are not only free to but indeed obligated to address this issue as best fits their situation.
The intent of this file existing is to print a gun. It exists for no other reason. No one can state that everyone who would download this file would in fact print a gun, but the file itself has a very specific use.
The purpose of a gun is to be shot. The purpose of a file that prints a gun is to print a gun…to be shot.
This is one of those situations where first amendment supporters who are opposed to the second amendment, or at least want sensible regulation, find themselves dealing with some very heavy cognitive dissonance.
