By Arti Agrawal - Re-posted from The Optical Society Blog
The latest innovation that has caught the imagination of the world at large is 3-D printing. As many of you may know (see the OPN article - where we found the image below) 3-D printing isn’t a single technology but several different technologies (almost all use Optics) that have been around for a decade or so. The technology has many applications, some of which make people rather nervous.
There have been discussions on the advantages of 3-D printing and the problems it may bring to us as a society. The former include immense creative freedom, the ability to make prototypes for ideas, specialist devices not suited to high volume manufacture, give a great tool to research and many more.
Yet there are problems too: what happens to the Intellectual Property (IP) if anyone can produce a 3-D copy of a device or parts? People could make weapons and use them illegally. The legal machinery in different countries probably does not have laws that explicitly pertain to additive manufacturing or 3-D printing.
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Posted: 27 September 2013 by
Arti Agrawal - Re-posted from The Optical Society Blog
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