Gotta a 3d Printer? Make pew pew pew

[pauldun170]

3D printing gunmaker forms company to flout copyright law, Ã* la the Pirate Bay
CEO: "I'm willing to crawl into [any] corner of the Earth to keep this going."
Less than two weeks ago, Texan gunsmith and law student Cody Wilson made headlines (Ars included) when he demonstrated a new 3D-printed lower receiver for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that can fire more than 600 rounds. At that time, the United States Department of Justice told Ars that Wilson's initiative was completely legal.

On Monday afternoon at 5pm CT, Wilson is scheduled to give a talk at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, where he plans on announcing the next phase of his existing nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed. He's already released a promo video in advance of the talk.

Wilson's new company is called DefCAD, and public records show it was registered as a Delaware corporation on March 4, 2013. Wilson told Ars that this new company will expand the work DefCAD.org has been doing so far. The company is looking to raise $500,000 in the next 30 days, after which it will formally open for business.

Wilson said DefCAD will become a for-profit corporation that will act as a one-stop search engine for “3D printable models� of just about anything. In other words, DefCAD hopes to be an expanded version of the physibles section on the Pirate Bay.

“It maintains all the present features but we step it up a notch,� Wilson told Ars. “The Pirate Bay has the right idea with physibles, but increasingly the fight is going to be about physical copyright—we want to build one of the tools early.�

And like the Pirate Bay, which has thumbed its nose at corporations, copyright, and the legal system for digital goods, Wilson suggests DefCAD would do the same for physical objects as much as possible.
Law & Disorder / Civilization & Discontents
3D printing gunmaker forms company to flout copyright law, Ã* la the Pirate Bay
CEO: "I'm willing to crawl into [any] corner of the Earth to keep this going."

by Cyrus Farivar - Mar 11 2013, 3:30pm EDT

Media Innovation

122
A still from Cody Wilson's latest video shows this example of 3D-printed handguns (these are mock-ups pictured, not actual handguns).
Defense Distributed

Less than two weeks ago, Texan gunsmith and law student Cody Wilson made headlines (Ars included) when he demonstrated a new 3D-printed lower receiver for an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle that can fire more than 600 rounds. At that time, the United States Department of Justice told Ars that Wilson's initiative was completely legal.

On Monday afternoon at 5pm CT, Wilson is scheduled to give a talk at the South by Southwest (SXSW) conference in Austin, where he plans on announcing the next phase of his existing nonprofit organization, Defense Distributed. He's already released a promo video in advance of the talk.

Wilson's new company is called DefCAD, and public records show it was registered as a Delaware corporation on March 4, 2013. Wilson told Ars that this new company will expand the work DefCAD.org has been doing so far. The company is looking to raise $500,000 in the next 30 days, after which it will formally open for business.

Wilson said DefCAD will become a for-profit corporation that will act as a one-stop search engine for “3D printable models� of just about anything. In other words, DefCAD hopes to be an expanded version of the physibles section on the Pirate Bay.

“It maintains all the present features but we step it up a notch,� Wilson told Ars. “The Pirate Bay has the right idea with physibles, but increasingly the fight is going to be about physical copyright—we want to build one of the tools early.�

And like the Pirate Bay, which has thumbed its nose at corporations, copyright, and the legal system for digital goods, Wilson suggests DefCAD would do the same for physical objects as much as possible.

DefCAD's new video specifically addresses Bre Pettis, who has become something of a public face for the 3D printing community. (Pettis announced a 3D scanner at SXSW on Friday.) “When [Pettis] decided that 'radically open' meant not so radical and not so open, DefCAD was born,� Wilson intones in the video.

Pettis’s company, Thingiverse, famously cracked down on gun parts, removing Defense Distributed’s designs from the site in December 2012. Pettis’ spokesperson did not comment on Wilson’s new video when Ars asked. Previously, in an October 2011 blog post, Pettis acknowledged: “One thing that’s for sure, the cat is out of the bag and that cat can be armed with guns made with printed parts.�
“There will be no takedowns. Ever.�

“Help us turn DefCAD into the world’s first unblockable, open-source search engine for 3D printable parts,� Wilson narrates in the video. “There will be no takedowns. Ever.�

Would that mean ignoring takedown requests under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA)? In the words of Omar Little: “Oh, indeed.�

“We would try to defeat DMCA,� Wilson told Ars. “We would fight to the fullest extent of the law. We could iterate [any product] over and over again and lose the one with the claim on it but [eventually] have three different variants.�

Wilson acknowledged that like the Pirate Bay, there are “contingency plans� to incorporate or move his operations to other countries not as affected by the DMCA. He specifically mentioned Slovakia, Russia and Singapore as “places we could go.�

“If that's what it takes, then that's what it takes,� Wilson said.
No Google guns

For now, Wilson said he is DefCAD’s CEO and holds “all the voting shares, and most of the others.� But he added that “ownership will be shaken out over the next few months.�

So how would Wilson make money from the new site? Beyond ad revenue, the young law student imagines a way to make money off link referrals. For example, in the video, a mockup of DefCAD’s page for the AR-15 shows a button for a Magnet file download, a “develop� button to create a forked iteration of the gun’s design, a “3D print� button where a local shop with a printer could actually print a gun, and a button to directly buy a more traditional gun from a retailer like LaRue or Walmart.

“We just saw an opportunity and went for it,� Wilson said. “We can direct traffic to actual local printers. What we think is interesting is that you see a file but here's a manufacturer that makes it. We think there are so many avenues. It just seems intuitive. It seems to me that it just doesn't have to be serving ads on people. I think we can do really intelligent searching. If it was useful, Google would already be doing it. There's never going to be a Google guns and that's the example going forward.�

The DefCAD site reveals that the company will also act as a vehicle for fundraising by kicking in a little cash to organizations that it supports.

“Hackers are persecuted by federal prosecutors while the basic needs of veterans go unmet,� the site states. “All purchases mediated by the defcad.com search engine will be rounded up to the nearest dollar; 50 percent of the proceeds will be donated to the VFW and 50 percent will be donated to 4chan to support free speech on the Internet.�
Revolution vs. revolution

So what’s Wilson’s endgame? He describes himself as a “crypto-anarchist� who follows the teachings of 19th-century French anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.

“I believe in revolution—not the capital-R ‘Revolution,’ but I’m all for the next thing,� Wilson said. “No one can imagine the end of neo-liberal democracy. I don’t believe in socialism from above, but socialism from below. It doesn't matter what it is, the point is that it's not imposed. It will be what it needs to look like. [Society will be] based not on coercion but cooperation—I'm a desperate romantic. If any of these things are possible, I don't want to believe in anything else. I want to see if these are real and can work.�

Wilson understands that his revolution—however he imagines it—may not be shepherded into existence even if everyone in the world has a cheap 3D printer on his or her desk. Nevertheless, he wants to push as hard as he can to find out.

“The thing I think we've got here is that I'm willing to crawl into whatever corner of the Earth to keep this going,� he said. “One of the big things is I’m not convinced that it is important. If you knew today you could print out a gun, I'm not sure social relationships would change.�

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2...he-pirate-bay/