So much for the constitution
They’re using weapon printing as the wedge, but this is really about protecting all manufacturers.
WOULD SOMEBODY THINK OF THE IP HOLDERS!!!
Even more pointless than DRM on movies.
https://all3dp.com/2/how-to-build-a-3d-printer-from-a-kit-or-from-scratch/

Don’t worry. It won’t be long before possession of an unregistered 3D printer becomes a crime, too.
That seems like a nightmare to set up.
Feels like people casually mocking car registration by pointing to the Hot Rod from Home Improvement.
I mean, sure. It can be done. But I failed to install a water cooling kit in my computer after a very long and harrowing weekend. I’m not fucking with this.
It more like mocking car registration because every neighborhood has a few people who can build you a car from scratch in a day, the city already has several thousand car factories that don’t require registration, there’s no mechanism to enforce registration, and the cost of building a new car is a few hundred dollars. The motivation for requiring registration is also to stop people from driving full speed into fast food restaurants is custom built murder buggys. Yeah, you don’t want people to do that but it’s not like it really happens all that often.
Building a 3d printer from a kit is different from building one from scratch. It’s basically screwing parts together and plugging colored wires into matching slots.
every neighborhood has a few people who can build you a car from scratch in a day
How many cars does the city demand be produced each day? Cause my own city of Houston sees over 380k new cars sold annually.
the city already has several thousand car factories that don’t require registration
Itty bitty ones, sure. And they take weeks to produce a working vehicle, of substandard quality.
there’s no mechanism to enforce registration
Until you get pulled over
the cost of building a new car is a few hundred dollars
A plastic car that can go maybe a few hundred miles before falling apart if it’s made perfectly.
Building a 3d printer from a kit is different from building one from scratch
You can build cars from a kit, too. But I’m not going to do that when I can buy a used Corolla or KIA for couch cushion money and drive it into the ground over the next fifteen years.
I’m not sure honestly sure what your point is, because you went a bit too far with the analogy.
Itty bitty ones, sure. And they take weeks to produce a working vehicle, of substandard quality.
This was about regulating 3d printers, not guns. A diy printer, a new drm printer and an old not-drm printer produce the same quality output.
A diy 3d printer is just as durable as a purchased one.
If your goal is to have an unregistered car, or in this case a drm free printer, the law seems silly when you can get one for cheaper than the “proper” one and have it out together in an afternoon if you have highschool level mechanical aptitude.
I’m not sure honestly sure what your point is
3D printers produce plastic crap.
Okay? What does that have to do with the drm mandate being easy to get around?
Is your point that it’s okay to put unenforceable, easily bypassed restrictions on stuff if you think they’re bad?What does that have to do with the drm mandate being easy to get around?
You can get around the DRM mandate with a bicycle. That doesn’t mean you’ve solved the underlying problem
Same. Unfortunately I wasn’t born blessed with those levels of autism. I see a complex project that’d be awesome for my hobby and I change hobbies.
You’d think with a title that says “California just passed a law”, that it would actually be about California passing a law. It still has to go through the senate and then get signed by the governor.
Edit: The bill was passed in the Assembly back in May. This is a nearly 3 month old article.
How would this even be enforced?
Like, it seems like it would be a trivial process to just install a firmware package without the blocks.
Digital signatures and closed firmware.
It can’t. They want to destroy 3D printers and Free Software in general entirely.
From Lewis Rossmans bit on this from this morning, an internet connection and third party AI scanning tools.
So its a whole bucket of “fuck that noise”.
I’d love to know how they expect printer manufacturers to do this, given all they do is read gcode. Do the legislation makers even know what a slicer is?
I went to a CA committee hearing (and I got to meet Louis Rossmann in the process) and I guarantee you the people supporting this bill and the committee voting on it generally have no idea what the fuck they’re talking about.
Serious question: why do they feel like they are qualified to make decisions on it then? Like if I was in that position, I would defer to an expert committee or professional association.
What happens is they do defer to the expert. The expert is a plant by which ever lobbiest chose to sponsor the bill. I’m had correspondences with my government about fields I am intimately familiar with and their arguments about technical feasibility were given to them by their Big4 “expert”. The problem is I know the field well enough to understand their expert is simply giving the opinion they were paid to give and the technical feasibility of the proposals take a back seat to the political desire of the people pushing the proposal.
Someone’s “lobbying” them to make this decision.
Also Michael Blomberg has spent over $50M to push for this bill to pass.
Of course they know what a slicer is. Most of these people existed long before pre-cut loaves were sold at the stores.
If it ever take forms, it will be absolutely unenforceable with how many devices currently operates. Aside from a ban on open hardware (good luck with that), nothing will happen.
Unfortunately, being technically impossible to enforce is of little consequence. It just becomes a convenient law to pull out if they want to hammer you down and you happen to have a 3D printer that don’t have this built-in.
Absolutely fuckin not
There’s pedophiles roaming the streets and no one can afford healthcare or housing but yeah, lets make useless laws to try and regulate 3d printers…
Roaming the streets? They are sitting in the fucking white house.
Trump fucks kids. Never forget
There’s pedophiles roaming the streets
That was oddly specific.
I mean, it’s a little bit of a funny example when “but child porn” is often the argument for removing all digital freedom.
Two crimes can happen at once in different places
This isn’t going to do anything about crime.
Well, no. It’ll create a whole new class of crimes.
Then why did you bring other crimes up? Sorry. But you have no idea how you sound. You directly said “there are these crimes, why are we wasting laws on these other crimes” and wonder why I responded as I did.
You currently can not fully 3D print a gun
Even if you could, distinguishing a gun from everything else is impossible. This is more about people using 3D printing for right to repair
You don’t know it’s impossible. That’s just insane to think that recognition software can tell that a person’s seatbelt is on if that there is someone at their front door with a package or a bicycle means it’s likely possible.
It literally is impossible. The only thing going to a 3d printer is a series of commands to the the various stepper motors and heating elements what to do. It would have to be capable of reversing this code to reconstruct the object being printed. A printer is not going to have enough processing power to do this if it’s even possible at all.
The computer it’s connected to does
My point was their priorities are completely out of wack, and also that this law is useless and shows that they have no idea how 3d printers work so they are wasting time on this to do literally zero good. If the concern is around preventing crime, this is not the way to do it.
Once again. Two crimes can happen at the same time. Prioritizing it is the authorities job. Not yours.
That’s why I’m here commenting about it for free on the internet instead of being paid to prioritize things that actually matter over ineffective bullshit.
The standards will not mandate perfect efficacy – they will allow for “an acceptably low level of evasion” against a bank of identified design files.
They’ve just admitted that it won’t work. It will rely on a bank of banned designs which means anyone can just modify them until the algorithm doesn’t recognize it as such while still being functional or simply make their own designs. Whoever finds a way to evade those restrictions will pass on the word.
Sucks that this will act as a push to lock down 3D printer firmware for everyone else though. Mass enshitification inbound. The only hope I see is that 3D printer manufacturers will simply get out of California as a result instead because the expense of developing such an algorithm and the risk of fines if it is not performing well enough are too great to be worth it.
Any such algorithm would be patched out of a jailbroken version of the firmware in minutes. 3D printers are already running on FOSS, so this is worse than useless. Anyone who wants to print a working gun will be able to do so trivially.
3D printers are already running on FOSS
That’s what the bill is designed to stop.
I don’t think they know what it’s designed to stop. Seems like this is pretty clearly just a piece of conspicuous legislation passed just to make it look like they’re actually doing something.
OP why are you posting a 3 month old article with no updated information or that needed context that this was in the past? There was a discussion then.
It’s almost like you are trying to upset people again for sport, because reddit broke your brain and you think internet points are important. Almost like that.
I think about this a lot.
Sometimes I learn about news that greatly affects my hobby but then notice it’s like a month old.
And I wonder - so I share it? Do I sit with it? Do others know about it?
Assuming positive intent, OP thought the former.
First time I’ve seen this.
3 months isn’t 3 years. First I heard of this
Good luck with that… 3D printers are not complicated and you could build one yourself if you wanted to.
Have a friend with one print you one.
The software might be complicated enough in the future that you would not be able to just make your own slicer with all the features, like we have with browsers now.
One of the most common uses for 3d printers is for cosplay props. I wonder if the lawmakers considered how this infringes on the rights of people trying to print prop guns from their favorite video games or anime?
They don’t even know what cosplays is lol
Yeah, sigh I know… It was facetious but an obvious argument I haven’t seen pushed where there is actually some money behind it.
They don’t care
they did not
Well it’s not like anyone in California needs lots of props.
California needs to start pushing laws to shut down hardware stores, department stores, shopping malls, and office supply stores since you can buy things in those places to also create makeshift weapons.
I have a mini mill in my garage. I makeb ghost firearms as a hobby.
I have a bit of experience with a mill, but even if I *didn’t * these are not hard skills to learn yourself. A couple hundred bucks for a mini mill on marketplace and a few hunted bucks for a blank and some tooling and anybody could be making ghost guns in their living room.
I had never heard of mini CNC mills.
Now I want one.
You can get a mini mill and do a CNC conversion, I know a few guys that have done just that. A few stepper motors and a little code gets you a long way.
Isn’t California the state where you need to be 18 just to by spray paint?
I think we are already headed in that direction
Many states have similar laws for things you can inhale to get high.
I can’t wait for the EU to eagerly adopt this like they do for a lot of these dogshit US decisions.
This what happens when a state is controlled by idiots. I wish we had opposition party that were not a bunch of boot licking freaks.
not just idiots. selfish fucks and idiots.
Idiots who don’t understand any industry other than public service, being useful idiots for the oligarchs that run the mega corps of the 5th largest economy in the world.
Fuck this country.
The first thing they need to add to their DRM thing is those flexible dragons that have taken over half the booths at a local comic con. That and The Rock’s head.
The dragon and Rock’s head is the Hello World of the 3D printer world.
I thought that was Benchy.
Why? They are great.
For a first print, yeah. This is more me bitching about the artist alley of all my local cons being filled with 3D printed garbage than it is an endorsement of terrible DRM practices.
No really what it is is it’s what people want it’s what people like it’s what people enjoy so of course they’re being made. You have to remember only a small percentage of people own 3D printers but a lot of people really like the stuff that’s made from 3D printers. So they’re not being marketed towards you they’re being marketed towards everybody else. And they sell really well.
You’re describing 3D kitsch, not 3D art
I never said 3d art. I said there is a place for these. They were created by artists and some are absolutely amazing.
This was a conversation about artist’s alley which is for, you know, art. Not kitsch slop. And no, the world really doesn’t have a place for more useless plastic garbage.
3d prints that aren’t even a person’s own design have no place being in a line up of artists
They’re like 3D printer 101.
This is like seeing baby’s first print and they’re trying to sell it.













