“If RepRap is succesfull a number of changes may well happen in society. The principal one of them will be that we have the distribution of the
manufacture of goods. At the moment economics scale it means that it is sensible for goods to be manufactured in factories and then to be shipped to the individual people who wish to have these goods using a complicated transport system. If RepRap takes off and increases its abilities by evolution to manufacture more and more products, then people having these machines in their homes will be no longer a need, or no longer such a big need for factories to make the goods they want. When they want something it will simply be a question of downloading it from the web, in the way they currently do with music, a film or anything else. That downloaded file would then allow them to manufacture whatever object is was they wanted in their own home.[...]”
Check the embedded movie below by RepRap.org from which I took this quote (starts around 5:14) by Adrian Bowyer from. The RepRap raises a lot of interesting questions, such as is personal fabrication another nail in the coffin of intellectual property? Looking forward to this publication: “The Intellectual Property Implications Of Low-Cost 3D Printing by Simon Bradshaw, Adrian Bowyer and Patrick Haufe.” which as far as I can see will be available online here, the 15th of April.
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