Napster Fabbing talk at O'Reilly

From: Marshall Burns (Marshall@Ennex.com)
Date: Wed Mar 21 2001 - 22:09:28 EET


Dear RP-World,

    A summary of the talk given by me and James Howison at the O'Reilly Conference is now available on Ennex.com. The title of the talk was "Napster Fabbing." It's about how people can share digital designs of physical products online the same way they share music on Napster.

    The RP-ML figures prominently in this talk because we gave several examples of people using RP-ML to request or offer sharing of 3-D digital designs. RP-ML members mentioned are:
        -- Glyn Churchman, Texas, USA
        -- Jean-Marc Boéchat, Switzerland
        -- Mark Culter, UK
        -- REH, New Hampshire, USA
        -- Eric Myers, Colorado, USA
        -- Bruce Okkema, Michigan, USA

    None of the requests or offers shown involved any sharing of proprietary data. But it is interesting that the day after we got back from giving this talk, someone posted here about sharing a file of Mickey Mouse. This started a thread of warnings and arguments about the dangers of sharing proprietary designs without permission. This is exactly the same legal controversy that the music industry is embroiled in today. The resolution of the legal issues of the Napster case are going to play directly into how you and I will be able to share design data for use on our fabbers.

    The Napster Fabbing talk can be seen at http://www.ennex.com/publish/200102-Napster. Comments from members of the list are very welcome. James and I also thank those who participated in the topic of the same name on Ian Gibson's Internet conference, which helped us refine our thinking for this presentation.

Best regards,
Marshall Burns
President, Ennex Corporation

Marshall@Ennex.com
Los Angeles, USA, (310) 397-1314
http://www.Ennex.com

For more information about the rp-ml, see http://ltk.hut.fi/rp-ml/



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Fri Jan 04 2002 - 09:56:59 EET