Abstract
Additive manufacturing has spread widely over the past decade, especially with the availability of home 3D printers. In the future, many items may be manufactured at home, which raises two ethical issues. First, there are questions of safety. Our current safety regulations depend on centralized manufacturing assumptions; they will be difficult to enforce on this new model of manufacturing. Using current US law as an example, I argue that consumers are not capable of fully assessing all relevant risks and thus continue to require protection; any regulation will likely apply to plans, however, not physical objects. Second, there are intellectual property issues. In combination with a 3D scanner, it is now possible to scan items and print copies; many items are not protected from this by current intellectual property laws. I argue that these laws are ethically sufficient. Patent exists to protect what is innovative; the rest is properly not protected. Intellectual property rests on the notion of creativity, but what counts as creative changes with the rise of new technologies.
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Notes
To be fair, there are a number of limitations on our current ability to do this—some objects are simply too large and/or expensive to manufacture at home, some materials cannot currently be used in additive manufacturing, and so forth. I discuss further limitations toward the end of this paper, but my point holds for an ever growing number of objects that a person could desire; it does not seem absurd to think that this will be possible for at least a great many objects in the future.
Note that one can also consider safety questions that relate to a product and its use; those sorts of issues are less likely to be affected by changes in manufacturing process, however, and thus will not be considered here.
Indeed, this is one of the current problems facing 3D printers; while there is great potential to use them to create spare parts, for instance, those parts must conform to relevant safety standards. (Petrick and Simpson 2013) Just as we cannot regulate the safety of “do-it-yourself” activities that people undertake at home—and thus there is always the risk that an overly ambitious person might injure him or herself with a circular saw—so too we will have difficulty regulating 3D printed objects produced by home users.
In our normal manufacturing processes today, this is what leads to product recalls.
This is not entirely true if, for instance, one is designing a bridge—in such a case the plan is going to be thoroughly reviewed. However, most products manufactured for home use require the inspection of finished products, not designs.
See, for instance, the controversy over ratings on Amazon.com.
Or perhaps there could be some neutral body like Consumer Reports or Underwriters Laboratories who did standards tests for plans.
Assuming it were possible to enforce such a rule, that is—my suspicion is that uncertified plans would still be shared, just less openly.
Note that there will still be some safety issues due to the fact that different machines produce slightly different objects using the same plans, since some of them manufacture to higher standards. This, too, would need to be addressed eventually, perhaps by certifying particular combinations of plans and printers: we could say that if you print plan X on printer Y then it meets the necessary standards.
There may be other exceptions to patent protection under UK and European law, such as reproduction for educational use. However, a full treatment of the laws in other countries is beyond the scope of this paper.
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Acknowledgments
A version of this paper was presented at the CEPE/ETHICOMP 2014 meeting in Paris, France. I am grateful for the helpful comments received by people present at that presentation, as well as the peer reviewers and editor of this journal. My thanks also to Clif Flynt, Rebecca Newman, and Bill Roper for answering certain questions on engineering practice.
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Neely, E.L. The Risks of Revolution: Ethical Dilemmas in 3D Printing from a US Perspective. Sci Eng Ethics 22, 1285–1297 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9707-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-015-9707-4