3D counterfeiting prevention to ensure royalty revenue stream
One of the challenges for writers, like me, is that when you publish a digital copy of your work, anyone can copy it and use those words or run those words through derivative software and steal them. That is why DRM or Digital Rights Management software was created. Many have considered that such a strategy could be used for 3D printing code as well, allowing the designer or company that owns that product a royalty guarantee every time their parts are produced.
Perhaps you can already see the challenges. In the writing format, anyone can take a book, scan it, and then digitize it, which means they can plagiarize it, steal it outright, or modify it enough to evade detection by copyright-checking software. Okay, what if someone uses a 3D scanner to scan a part or item, digitizes it, and then once digitized, just sells the code for others to 3D print? In essence, they have stolen the design. This cannot be avoided and leads to all sorts of dilemmas in terms of quality, brand reputation, lost revenue for the designer or patent holder.
Policing that challenge is as difficult as policing counterfeit clothing with a counterfeit label, see that point. However, many thinkers are now busy working on this problem, let’s discuss one of the possible solutions considered so far, shall we?
There was an interesting article in Manufacturing News where they discussed the issues with hackers and counterfeit thieves stealing the code on 3D printed parts, allowing others to steal those part designs without paying the royalty. The new concept is to put bugs in the code to prevent counterfeiting, that buggy code would be removed before printing, but only under a specific set of conditions, counterfeiters would create the buggy part but render it useless and the user would waste the material. with a defective part.
Wow, that’s pretty interesting, and maybe a good strategy, however, it could also wreak havoc on a customer ripped off of a major chunk. What if the part is a major part, say for a car, part of the brake system? So what if someone buys that part assuming it’s real, then that part fails and causes the car to crash and the occupants to be seriously injured or even killed? ? So it could be said that the manufacturer of the original part knew about the flaw and sabotaged the hackers of the code from him, knowing that the part might fail.
Who is to blame now? There is surely more than one culprit, the hacker, the manufacturer of the counterfeit product, the seller of the counterfeit product, and the original designer and/or creator of the 3D printing code for the product with an intentional and malicious flaw in the code.
Will national defense companies start doing this and will our copycat adversaries see their high-tech fighter jets, missiles, smart munitions and helicopters crash? Will they in turn try to inject malicious code into our 3D parts, have they already started? Will 3D printing vendors need to adopt a cryptocurrency-like strategy to ensure a part is authentic before printing to counter hackers? The stakes are high, so they will have to do something about it.
Suffice it to say; Is the future of manufacturing getting very interesting if you ask me? And I know you didn’t, but thanks for reading this article anyway.