3D Printing Piracy

Well this week has been kind of interesting.  On Tuesday, The Pirate Bay announced a new section on their site called Physibles.  Physibles is the term they decided to use to call their 3d printing/digital things file section.  The site mirrors the function of Makerbot's Thingiverse and Google's 3d Warehouse by allowing people to download cad data for their 3d printers.  The difference is that The Pirate Bay does not host the files themselves, like Thingiverse does.  The way that The Pirate Bay works is by providing links to a file that tells you who else has the file, similar to how Google search doesn't host files, but tells you where on the internet files and websites and things are located.  This decentralization allows for information to be spread even if one site is shut down, because the files are hosted in dozens and often even thousands of places around the world.  Torrents don't mean illegal file sharing, though many people often think they are the same thing.

Anyway, as soon as I found out about the physibles section, and read the blog post which mentioned that they were going to rename the site The Product Bay temporarily but didn't have a graphic artist on hand, I got the idea to 3d model the pirate ship seen in their logo.  After about 3 hours of modeling, and 30 minutes of figuring out how to share my own torrent and list it on their site, my model was being shared around the world.  I modeled the ship, three masts, ropes, cannons, stairs, a sliding board, railings, barrels and and even the casette tape and crossbones logo for the center sail.  I designed the ship using the design constraints of the White strong and Flexible material from an EOS printer, and listed it for sale in my Shapeways shop.  You can buy a 3d print of it for $99, and hang on to a pretty cool physical print of history in the making.  It's also listed on Thingiverse here: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:16419

The coolest thing was that yesterday when all of the news sites started reporting on the new section, they grabbed the screenshot of my 3d model that was now being shared among hundreds of people, and used that photo in their articles.  It was the main image on dozens of articles, including Wired and Popular Science.  I even got interviewed yesterday by a tech reporter from the New Scientist magazine.

Of course after already receiving the cease and desist letter from Paramount last summer, I'm not going to share my 3d model of the Super 8 cube, but someone else has uploaded a 3d fractal cube to Thingiverse.  I wonder how things will be different for others in the future now that there is a section for these types of files on TPB.

Interesting times.