It's sad that it seems any story can be twisted into some way that entrenched powers can exert themselves, particularly over information. Such a shame.
The thing is that certain forms of 3d printing technology brings the costs down so far for manufacturing certain technologies, that not restricting it as a society means that you will win technologically overall, compared to more restrictive societies.
They are in basic form, the first generation of digital replicators and some of the open source variants are already under $500, with dirt cheap print costs.
Who only knows what the patent industry is going to do, because certain sections of it are now screwed far, far worse than the recording and distribution industry ever was over people downloading MP3s, especially given that the mashup and resharing of different objects will probably be an extremely common use of desktop manufacture-to-order technologies and is easily accomplished over many existing and popular MMORPGs, alongside all the standard web channels, so is an absolute nightmare to try and police.
And that's without even considering the issues raised by laser scanning, photographic 3d, or just artists with a good eye and memory.
