EU sees industrial revival through 3D printing and biotech. Tue Oct 9, 2012 12:30am IST * EU paper promotes set of new technologies to boost GDP * Manufacturing job losses 3 million since crisis * Advanced manufacturing markets like biotech to double by 2015 BRUSSELS, Oct 8 (Reuters) - The European Commission wants to revive the European Union's declining manufacturing sector by asking countries to invest heavily in new technologies such as 3D printing, says a leaked paper seen by Reuters.
Key manufacturing industries in Europe have shrunk and the EU's main regulators want to ensure that new technologies are exploited to cheapen manufacturing costs and increase production. The paper which outlines the bloc's future industrial policy said the commission wants to raise manufacturing from 16 percent to 20 percent of EU GDP by 2020 using new techniques such as 3D printing which builds objects using instructions from a printer.
Some predict that in the more distant future households will have such printers to make mundane objects such as shoes. New Eindhoven. Clive Thompson on 3-D Printing's Legal Morass | Wired Design. Photo illustration: Andrew B. Myers Last winter, Thomas Valenty bought a MakerBot — an inexpensive 3-D printer that lets you quickly create plastic objects. His brother had some Imperial Guards from the tabletop game Warhammer, so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank. He tweaked the designs for a week until he was happy. “I put a lot of work into them,” he says. Then he posted the files for free downloading on Thingiverse, a site that lets you share instructions for printing 3-D objects. Until the lawyers showed up.
Games Workshop, the UK-based firm that makes Warhammer, noticed Valenty’s work and sent Thingiverse a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. “The DMCA knocked the wind out of me,” he wrote in an e-mail to me. When I first heard about 3-D printers, I figured the trend wouldn’t go mainstream for decades, if ever. This has all the makings of an epic and surreal legal battle.