I’m a big supporter of the Second Amendment, and opponent of gun control. So, as you’d imagine, I’ve been supportive of Defense Distributed’s efforts to print firearm parts and eventually an entire gun. And when Cody Wilson’s group created DEFCAD, a repository for firearm related CAD files, I was likewise supportive.
But now he’s moving DEFCAD beyond the idea of a firearm files repository, and is turning it into a Pirate Bay for CAD files, where intellectual property rights are not respected. I can’t get behind that. (I know that quite a few in the maker community feel the exact opposite of how I do — they want to clamp down on guns and ignore copyrights. We’ll just have to agree to disagree.) I won’t go into a discussion of the value of patents and copyrights here, as it’s a subject that deserves more space; but suffice it to say that I believe ignoring intellectual property is theft, pure and simple. DEFCAD’s mission of actively setting out to host copyrighted and patented designs is promoting theft and that’s not something I can support.
Cody, you had me at guns. You lost me at theft. What a shame.