In the papers again!

[major_clanger]

Metro: Will 3D printing revolutionise the way we eat?

Others see trouble ahead. With the notorious Pirate Bay file sharing website hosting 3D printer designs, legal battles lie in wait. Lawyer Simon Bradshaw said: ‘I think we are going to have a very big court case in the next couple of years because someone is going to say “I have rights and I want to enforce them”. ‘I would not be surprised if there was pressure to change the law. When we get to the stage when you can print a Louis Vuitton handbag big brands are going to start jumping up and down.’

Comments

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

You are famous! Will you still speak to us normal mortals?

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

Of course I will! The question is, am I famous enough that Mooncat will deign to acknowledge me?

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Oh, that I can't tell you. She is inscrutable.

[mr-tom.livejournal.com]

At least they could have used the full quotation.

"When we get to the stage when you can print a Louis Vuitton handbag big brands are going to start jumping up and down. Which will be hilarious and awesome."

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I was actually hoping for "...and then flinging huge wads of cash at me to advise them."

One can dream...

[daveon.livejournal.com]

While I agree the big brands will jump up and down, I'm not sure that, in real terms, it will make much of a difference to their sales.

While a printer made Louis Vuitton might be better than the knock off you get down the market, the people who can afford to buy the real thing are, generally, going to buy the real thing because it's the real thing.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

I agree that the people who can afford to buy the real thing are not generally going to start buying the knockoffs if there are knockoffs. The question for LV is, will the people who can afford to buy the real thing keep buying the real thing if there are knockoffs? Nobody now says "Burberry, ooh, there's an iconic luxury brand." Admittedly, Burberry did that to themselves.

I think it's okay for civilization to change: it's changed before, and TEOCAWKI turned out not to be the actual end of civilization. But I don't expect the owners of title to lucrative "IP" to go quietly.

[daveon.livejournal.com]

Well, even absent 3D Printers, sweat shops in China and Indonesia do a fairly good job getting knock-offs out into the market pretty cheaply and quickly.

Frankly, I'd actually think, they probably have a lot more to lose than the actual brands. There's not going to be much work for your Sweat Shop if Joe Public can do it themselves or Derek Trotter can knock out his LVs and Burberrys in the back of the Reliant?

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

I am always a little disappointed that the sweat-shops are making fake Louis Vuitton handbags rather than spending the materials on making authentic Bangkok Backstreet handbags: would work just as well as a handbag, have a better anecdote attached, and not get confiscated at customs

[quercus.livejournal.com]

There's no market for Bangkok Backstreet handbags though.

If you want a handbag, go to a leatherworker in the UK and ask for one. Much leatherworking is quite easy to take up-market, you simply specify better grade materials. It's easy (although somewhat spendy) to make a bag that's every bit as good as a Louis Vuitton.

Then you sit there trying to sell it. With no result. Simply because the market for bags is nothing at all to do with their actual quality, it's about the perception of their desirability. Which in the current TOWIE-watching superficiality, means having the right logo on it and no more.

If you are already making Bangkok Backstreet and you want to sell them, then you need to have 'Sleb du Jour seen carrying one. Then they'll sell. After which your account will point out that you need to spend more on marketing via la 'Sleb and shouldn't waste money on quality materials that no-one cares about. Indeed you may have a duty to your shareholders to do just that.

For as long as sales are driven by 'slebs not stitches, there is no mainstream demand for the quality product.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

If you want to sell me a Bangkok Backstreet handbag, you put a cute little leather cut-out elephant on the zip handle, stick it somewhere among the obvious rip-off handbags in your rip-off handbag stall set up somewhere off Thanon Sukhumvit between the massage parlour and the mango waffle stand, and I think that a handbag would be useful and that I don't want a transparently fake one.

But maybe there is only one of me and eighteen million people whose major desire from a handbag is that it have a misspelled LV logo on it.

I got accosted by a tailor on my first day in Bangkok and ended up with three waistcoats, a (very hot) long-sleeved shirt made of blue silk brocade with gold sigils, and a nicely-fitting suit; none of it has a logo, but it all has an anecdote, and the blue silk brocade stands out in all circumstances.

[del-c.livejournal.com]

That's true in the same sense that Prohibition was a gift to the mob, and the war on drugs a gift to drug dealers. But it's not like they can cry to anyone about it, or claim an exclusive right to disregard the exclusive right of the rights-holders.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

This is what happens when you spend too much time around David Allen Green, isn't it?

Congratulations. :)

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

I'd actually never met DAG when I did the work that led to this; I wrote my dissertation back in 2008 (me with a RepRap!) but didn't get to know DAG until the following year when I offered to help with the Simon Singh libel case.

[sesquipedality.livejournal.com]

I've always wanted one of those, and markbanang occasionally threatens to build one.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

So this chocolate printer - how the hell do they do the fillings? Does it have several nozzles with different ingredients. What about walnuts and almonds? Or liqueurs?

Re designer knock-offs, I think it's going to have to be a hell of a lot cheaper first. Right now the plastic feedstock to make something like that would probably cost more than a cheap knock-off, if I've checked the prices properly.

[major-clanger.livejournal.com]

A point I made in the interview behind that article (98% of which of course never got into it) was that 3D printers now are about where computer printers were in the early 1980s; good ones are not cheap, and cheap ones are not good. What we are waiting for is the 3D counterpart of, say, the Epson FX-80 or, the early HP colour Deskjets.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Chocolate printing is about shaping the shells. There's no benefit to shaping a soft filling. So empty shells are printed, then they're filled by hand and another half-shell placed on top.

Chocolate making is either cheap (i.e. fast) or expensive and can thus afford the time to hand-work a filling. 3D printing is never going to be as quick as moulding with a pre-made mould, but it doesn't seem to offer much for high-end either. It's hard on the chocolate, so they don't taste great either. You can make custom cartoon figures and robots that have some price premium, but if you just want hollow boxes and balls to hold fillings, a mould works fine already.

I know one local chocolate maker who has already rejected 3D printing, because of its effect on the taste of the chocolate. OTOH, delta robots are pretty common in mid-range chocolate making, for packaging.

[watervole.livejournal.com]

I think they'll shift to using fabrics that don't print well - woven stuff and leather, etc.

Fashion is all about having what other people can't afford, so anything that can be printed will cease to be fashionable.

[quercus.livejournal.com]

Robot leatherworking is already huge. You can laser engrave it, machine it with a router cutter, or hot press it. Colour printed leather, with laser engraving used to delineate the blocks of colour, is already a big seller for medieval re-enactment. Looks like hand-work, but it's cheap and quick.