Making, piracy, profit: sharing 3D printing files online as disruptive communication practice

This paper challenges axiomatic interpretations of piratical communications enabled by sharing 3D printing files as part of an ethical sharing economy, and instead forwards an argument grounded in innovative communication methods being perfectly compatible with new forms of capitalist accumulation. In short, it aims to provoke a discussion on the normative assumptions of disruption tied to peer-networked communications of intellectual property, specifically as it pertains to communicating the 3D printable designs of objects. It incites Adrian Johns’ (2009) understanding of the piratical to explore alternative peer-produced pirate, profit, and property economies through a case study of a 3D printing start-up in Singapore. The paper suggests that peered sharing of 3D printable goods will become categorised as piratical as their sharing practices confront the ‘morality’ of existing institutional communication norms. This mirrors historical examples as far ranging as pirate sheet music of the 1890s and Pirate radio barges off the coast of England in the 1960s. The paper compares these practices to the discourses of ‘sharing’ in the digital economy: as one infamous government advert put it in retaliation to the illegal distribution of digital music files, “You wouldn’t download a car”. Communication practices enabled by 3D printing force a re-evaluation of teh morality behind such claims. Communicating 3D printable designs radically shift the chains of equivalence that tie norms of ownership and production to certain moral structures. Specifically, the paper uses Johns’ observation that normalising ‘piratical’ production has historically incited processes of capitalism and shifts to laws of property. Further, it argues that communication practices of digitised objects that are rhetorically deemed ‘open’ will not necessarily challenge capitalistic processes. As such, decentralised network communications via 3D printing will disrupt industry and law, but possibly not in the in a communal utopian manner that some peer production scholars suggest. Evidence for these claims is reported from an in-depth case study of a consumer-oriented 3D printing firm from Singapore, which models itself as both ‘pirate’ and capitalist, as its business model induces new forms of communication between its users in order to turn a profit.