Shapeways Legal Guru Breaks Down 3D Printing Copyrighting Protection Information

In order to help their community understand copyright laws and 3D scans as they exist now, 3D printing services bureau and marketplace Shapeways published a new whitepaper. In "3D Scanning: A World Without Copyright," Shapeways legal guru Michael Weinberg breaks down in what ways copyright protections do and do not exist for 3D scans, and what other legal ways they can be controlled and managed. 3D scans differ from still images and video in a few specific areas and for the most part are not and cannot be protected under current copyright laws. You can read more about how the law views 3D scans and copyright at 3DPrint.com: https://3dprint.com/137298/shapeways-whitepaper-scans/
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I wonder what the point of this “whitepaper” is. The question of whether or not 3D scans have the same copyright protection as photographs is not at all clear, despite the opinion of the attorney for Shapeways. It has not, as far as I know,been litigated at all, and there are no precedents to point to that are really on point. Perhaps Shapeways wants to feel free to print any scans that are presented to it, and this is their justification before the fact. But there are problems with their blanket assertion that they exist in “a world without copyright”.


Museums have for a long time tried to protect the IP in the items in their collections by asserting copyright over the photos of them, even though the items portrayed are firmly in the public domain. I don't think they could reasonably claim that their photographs are particularly creative as photographs, since they are simple reproductions that attempt to be as faithful as possible to the originals. In the case of 2D art,copyright claims have been rejected for mere “slavish”reproductions (although only in a district court, which doesn't constitute a precedent). But that decision didn't address reproductions of sculpture, which introduce elements of lighting and composition that could qualify them for copyright protection (see http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.c...act_id=2120210for a detailed examination of the issue).


3D scanning, likewise, is far from a“slavish” process of reproduction, at least in the current state of the art. Considerations of lighting and composition can enter into it, as well as a lot of work that's done in editing, cleaning up and solidifying the model. If simple snapshots deserve copyright protection, as seems to be the case (seehttp://blog.kenkaminesky.com/photogr...t-and-the-law/) it's hard to believe that a 3D scan, which typically takes a lot more work to produce, does not. If people who read this “whitepaper” are encouraged to violate the copyrights on 3D scans and are called on it, I wonder if Shapeways will send in a team of lawyers to defend them (not)...


Andrew Werby
Juxtamorph.com