Charles Stross' Rule 34 dealt with this concept: fabricators with DRM that only allowed them to print legitimate items, and a thriving black market of hacked fabricators and illegal or unlicensed designs. Good stuff - futurism, but perhaps the not-too-distant future.
This isn't really about printing a car, in the short term at least. This is a response to the kinds of DMCA takedown notices that Thingiverse has been getting lately, on Warhammer figurine models for example.
Essentially anything that can be made of plastic or other, similar materials could be printed in the near future, assuming it doesn't have to meet any rigorous engineering standards.
I, for one, remember watching a video of a man printing and playing a number of different instruments. They didn't work perfectly, but the definitely played.
Does copyright apply to physical object? I understand a sports jersey has to be licensed because it has a copyrighted logo on it, but if there is no trademark or logo on a physical object I don't think you can copyright it.
I would bet there is some kind of functional vs. ornamental test. Yes you can copyright a sculpture, but no you can't copyright the bolt pattern of a fuel pump to prevent others from making a replacement part.
If that is true, then I would think a figurine is more ornamental than functional.
I really like this idea, but with current technology its a non-starter. 3D printing would need materials which improve in orders of magnitude upon the strength, the heat resistance, the hardness and the printable accuracy. Not to mention that the materials must be available in a reasonably abundant supply.
I do however think there is probably scope for 3D printing small replacement parts (I'm thinking of things such as plastic pump impellers etc) , if not at home certainly at a main dealer. I doubt this would come cheap but that might be balanced against the reduced turnaround times and ability to maintain a smaller supply chain.
So...just looking really far down the road here, but it seems that a common theme among lots of films set in the future is that currency is a thing of the past. If you could print any physical item, especially if you could pirate the plans, then there would hardly be a need for a currency because everything would almost be free. The only way to make money would be to either produce the printers or create new products and sell the plans.
I want to build my own Matrioshka Brain out of Jupiter.
Post-scarcity is interesting from the point of view of the necessities of life being so close to free as to make no difference. But it's a long way to go before we truly will have more resources than we know what to do with. Our desires show a clear trend of scaling with our resources; we already have more wealth than any Mesopotamian farm peasant could ever dream of, and most of us could probably easily figure out what to do with another $100,000.
And if they evenly distributed them to everybody in some borderline mythical manner (because wealth isn't actually that portable), it would still roughly double or triple your personal wealth, tops. Again, I think most people could figure out what to do with that and would still after a year or two resume wanting something or other they can't afford.
Even if replicators could completely replace manufacturing and agriculture (and that would be looking pretty far down the road), the change in society wouldn't be as big as you'd think. The service sector already constitutes about 75% of GDP in just about any mature economy, and we all still use money.
If you can replicate material at will, you can spend all your time perfecting robotics to perform service work. Said robotics can than be replicated en masse across the world with previous "replicators".
I don't think you grasp the entirety of the service sector. Creative services (programming, consulting, design, etc.) can't yet be readily replaced be robotics or machines. Creating beings that can themselves create is a significant undertaking.
I presume you'd still need to pay for the cost of materials.
Even if you had a printer that could machine whatever you wanted, and the plans were available for free (and not licensed to the printer as software,) then you'd still need to pay for a rather large amount of steel, plastic, rubber, copper and all the other materials that go into the manufacture of a car.
This. Just because labor is no longer a factor in production functions doesn't mean capital is not.
Specifically, raw material scarcity will actually have a larger impact on price and availability of items than it does at the moment, even though the majority of items will be generally more available as a result of less constraining factors.
That's assuming that money is still an adequate motivator in a (word I just learned) post-scarcity world. Governments might be responsible for providing the raw materials?
Automatic printing of items doesn't create a post-scarcity world.
The printing machines can only print from plans. People who create those plans may sell them, and those plans may be pirated, but there's still industry. There's still supply and demand.
If nobody is compensated for the manufacture of the plans, you're either on your own to create them or perhaps they'll be donated. Given the state of charity in the world, one can assume that they won't be donated, but given the state of open source, one might assume that they will. Regardless, the plans aren't self-creating and/or limitless.
Why would the governments supply the raw materials for you to purchase a car? If they aren't currently motivated to just buy you a car, why would they be suddenly motivated to pay for all the materials that go into a car's manufacture, even if the labor cost is reduced? If the materials were free, what's to stop everyone from printing out 20 different types of cars and luxury mansions?
And who would mine, gather, process, prospect, and distribute the materials? What motivation would those individuals have? (Actually, I would love to see a candidate who was actively sinking a shovel every day to produce or driving a tractor trailer to deliver raw materials for her/his constituents.)
Based on the current trend, however, I doubt we'd ever see a post scarcity world: oil, rare-earth metals, gold, silver, and even wood and stone are all scarce at scale. Sunlight may be one of the only things available on earth that humans can't destructively consume.
"I would love to see a candidate who was actively sinking a shovel every day to produce or driving a tractor trailer to deliver raw materials for her/his constituents."
Haha, yeah that would definitely have to be done by robots. Robots certainly help move us to a post-scarcity world though, don't they?
> Robots certainly help move us to a post-scarcity world though, don't they?
Anything that makes more stuff with fewer input resources (especially in terms of human time and effort) moves us closer to a post-scarcity world.
Implicit in all of the treatments of a post-scarcity world I've ever seen, though, is the idea that humans will be only doing the jobs that only humans can do, such as acting, painting, programming, advanced mathematics, governing, and so on. Robots certainly help us move towards that.
Oh that's insane. It says it's self-replicating, but can it assemble the parts it creates or is a human needed? And what about the microchips? Those still take expensive machinery to produce, right?
Well, their goal is to make it self-replicating, but it's far from it for now. I think it can essentially make the specialized parts, but you still need to buy various common parts and assemble it yourself.
> Well, their goal is to make it self-replicating, but it's far from it for now.
Indeed. Replicators are at roughly the same point today that personal computers were in 1975. So expect that in a few decades everyone will have one in their house, able to make a very wide range of objects.
Energy wouldn't be free, it may be vastly more abundant and for practical purposes free for "consumer uses", but not exactly free in the general sense. To print you also need raw materials, some of which may be more rare but in high demand (and therefore more expensive). Lastly, there would presumably be high technological processes (like chip manufacturing) or simply huge industrial ventures ({space} ship manufacturing) which can't be readily replicated with semiportable 3d printers.
I wonder if someday you could take a material like a rock (or something with the proper atoms) and convert that into something like a shirt. I mean, look how far technology went from 1900 to 2000. Imagine 200 more years.
I oppose the concept of Intellectual Property as we know it. It is something up with by the entertainment industries to line their own pockets, and it stymies progress and good art.
For the majority of human (art) history, no such concept existed. Ideas were communal (for instance see Bach's famous "Goldberg Variations", which borrowed a lot from popular songs of the time). In what sense is an intangible idea property at all? In what sense do I "own" a riff if I randomly strum it out one day on my guitar? It didn't create it. It existed prior to me playing it.
It has been shown the monetary incentive is not required for great things to be produced. Projects like wikipedia are testament to this, as is the immensity of excellent fiction, music and other art that is available for free on the internet.
The concept of Intellectual Property is outdated, and the world needs to realise this as it adapts to deal with the incredible implications of the developing internet.
Intellectual property isn't something the entertainment industry invented. It's something every six year old independently invents when telling her younger brother to stop being such a copycat. Creating is hard, copying is easy, and making the two equal is not fair.
Nor is the problem limited to art. Engineering design is currently sheltered from the problem by manufacturing, just like music used to be sheltered by physical media. When we can download cars, that won't be true anymore. If you think the argument over what you can do with an MP3 is ugly, just wait until we're arguing about printable handguns, airplanes, medicines, and combine harvesters.
I'm firmly convinced that that future is coming. Not quickly; some manufacturing processes will take centuries to replace, and some may never be replaced. But such a world does seem to get steadily closer with each passing year.
We need to figure out a practical and fair way to deal with information BEFORE it gets here.
This is a thread about printing cars and your answer is "whatever, kill the RIAA"? This proves that the whole discussion has been reduced to meme-pingpong.
Have you considered that you are not paying for materials when buying a car, but also for R&D?
1. Your reductive analysis of my comment inculpates you, not me. "Whatever, kill the RIAA" is not what I said at all.
2. I was reply to someone who was talking about intellectual property as a concept. Thus, I was engaging in discussion with him, not with the thread in a more general sense.
What bothers me is that the whole issue is always reduced to the most vulnerable example, which happens to be music. But there is no reason for why the role of IP should be the same for music as it is for movies, or games, or cars, or ... - even copyrights and patents work in different ways.
To name one notable difference, great music can be produced on a hobbyist budget by a single person nowadays, and often is. The R&D that goes into cars cannot. Yet, the results of millions of dollars of R&D are just as "always existent" as an MP3 of Lady Gaga is, so by your logic must not be protected.
The interesting question is, then how do we fund it? What is the incentive for any car company to waste money on crash tests if people will copy their car as soon as they have a matching 3D scanner?
It is not a simple situation. In my opinion, the existing systems are all broken in some way -- including even the fully open ones. I don't want all of R&D to look like YouTube and Wikipedia.
I believe there are four hard truths about information that any solution must address:
(A) Copying is easy, and will continue to get easier. This is the essential to nature of information, and fighting it is not practical.
(B) Creating is hard, and will always be hard. Failing to recognize and compensate creators is not fair.
(C) Creating by improving on a copy is more than just an effective way to create. It is essential to the nature of creativity. Fighting this effect is not practical.
(D) Creative contributions are not additive. Determining the exact value of any one creator's contribution to a project is not practical.
Copyright as a concept fails hard on (A) and (C). I think licensing doesn't handle (D) very well. Fully open solutions have varying problems with (B). The best solution I can think of is academia's system of tenure and elaborate recognition -- and even there, the system's failure on (B) pushes people to resort to secrecy, which damages (C).
I don't have a good answer. I haven't even heard a good answer. I even think it's likely that the best answer will be many answers -- secrecy here, censorship there, openness here, copyright there, depending on the field. But I do know the problem will get a lot harder when the objects in question are not merely valuable for entertainment, but might be highly valuable for survival, highly expensive to produce, and dangerous or even potentially criminal.
I can confirm that the local motors guys are really cool. They were at maker faire Phoenix a few months ago, and I think they're pretty involved (or at least supportive of) the hacker community in Phoenix.
(And by that I mean Heatsync Labs, which is a magical place)
Board games are at an interesting cross. On the one hand they don't usually require tight tolerances for their parts so 3D printers seem a perfect fit for printing board games. On the other hand you have board games moving to the digital devices like tablets. How will things play out?
There's already a number of board games out there where you are essentially buying the rulebook and are asked to provide your own game pieces (pennies, figurines, whatever). Yes, they're very easy to pirate, but they usually have a low enough price point that piracy is not a huge issue.
I'm watching Games Workshop with interest on this one. They make a large amount of their income on selling tiny, expensive plastic figurines and are notoriously litigious. They stand to lose out big time if people start fabbing their own models.
I'm really excited about the potential for personal 3D printing. One thing I wonder, though, is how much would actually be made that way. It seems like economies of scale are such that the current model is more efficient for most products.
You still need the raw materials and the energy to construct the object. Wouldn't large factories specialized for certain products be able to produce them faster, cheaper, and in larger quantities, and by such a margin that doing so and then shipping them still requires fewer resources than everyone individually printing their own?
They're really cool for prototyping or in certain niches, but I can't imagine it taking over all manufacturing.
I wouldn't cash your chips in yet. We don't really know what's possible in the realm of personal manufacturing. Theoretically, if it costs a certain amount of materials and energy to produce something, producing it in a smaller factory will cost the same but require more fine grained control of the instruments. I don't think that makes it impossible, just challenging and interesting.
Also, there is a hidden cost to re-tooling factories for new products that goes away if you can create a factory that can produce anything with the same tools, so you can save there as well.
producing it in a smaller factory will cost the same
No, it will cost massively more.
The factory that builds millions of the same thing has access to pricing and supply chains that are completely out of reach of the factory that builds 100. This is so different that there is really no reason for the smaller factory to build the same thing. They will likely compete on turnaround time, quality, or something the large producer can't do. Any of these will drive their costs even higher.
No, but I would like to print car parts. For example, the bit of plastic that fell off the back of my rear windscreen wiper in the carwash, which undoubtedly would cost me $$$ to replace, could easily be printed by me at little cost if I had the plans for my "open source car".
I spent a ton of time years ago making molds for some of the hard-to-get plastic parts for an unusual car of mine so that I could produce my own spare parts. Simply being able to print them would be amazing.
Of course, many of those parts might have physical requirements (elastic deformation tolerance, heat resistance, et cetera) that would not be met by 3D-printed materials, so it's not a panacea.
Sure, but it might still be more cost-effective to print a shoddy non-critical part. I bet rwmj doesn't care if the wiper widget falls apart in six months if he can print another one.
(Which makes me wonder how recyclable printed parts can be made.)
The initial use of 3D printers was largely to produce parts that could then have moulds made from them. Moulds are pretty cheap and depending on the materials it is easier to print the part to copy than the mould, although both can work.
I was going to make a joke about 'crashing' but it's actually a serious issue. What happens when people can freely build complex objects like cars where a 'bug' or unofficial 'patch' could potentially cause a risk to public safety? Is anyone culpable? How would the regulations work? Could they be enforceable?
Some people already build their cars (and car parts), 3D printing just makes it more accessible. What happens is that you have to license the car in order to be able to (legally) drive with it.
I suspect the licensing costs will prevent self made cars from becoming common.
I know that GM (and probably others, but I know GM for sure) has large, accurate, and very expensive 3D laser printers. It focuses lasers into a vat of resin and creates a heat-tolerant and reasonably strong car part, that can be added to an actual car and test-driven for a while before disintegrating.
If you can print car parts that means that you mastered nanotechnology. and assemblying it would be no problem, it would probably assemble itself. by printing car factory first.
The way they talk about spare parts, sneakers, etc. makes me wonder how we would ever be able to store all of that material. Maybe there will be ways in the future, but with that much variety in things they think we'll be able to print, literally how will we be able to keep it all stocked? Printer ink is hard enough for some people. Of course, this entire thing is about how stuff we take for granted now seemed absolutely ridiculous in the past, so I won't dismiss it.
You are correct, of course. One of the things I find amusing about the breathless talk about replicators is that people conveniently ignore such mundane problems as maintaining material inventory, the various types of material in any nontrival product and the ability of the consumer to evaluate the quality of a design they downloaded off the net. If I give you a design for a new replacement part for your car how do you know it won't cause more harm than good? Now we've moved the concept of malware into the physical realm.
3D printers are certainly an exciting technology with a bright future. But it's just another manufacturing method that's better in some ways than what's popular now, and worse in others.
Cars and 3d printers? That's short term thinking. Just wait until we have the technology to print people. That's when people will really get pissy about pirating.
In this likely future you won't really download items 'for free'. You will still need the raw materials (plastics, metals, thread, etc.) that you would have to pay for. You will simply download designs/blueprints that your printer/fabrication machine can manufacture. You could probably get a bulk shipment delivered to your house of these materials. Or you could just go to 'resources' depot and pick them up.
Granted there are many issues that would arise regarding pirated and trademarked designs. Research, development, marketing, and other costs go into the price of these products when they are sold to us. The disruption this could cause corporations will make our current worries over music, books, and movies seem trivial. Then again, imagine open source product designs. Platforms for creating physical designs that can be sold, and unparalleled product customization. It should be very interesting.
LEGO bricks are made to fairly rigorous standards. I suspect DIY bricks would be closer to existing knock-offs: very much like LEGO bricks, but they don't necessarily fit together "just so" all the time.
It seems to me that, in many cases, getting one's hands on the materials necessary for printing a car would make things prohibitive for the individual.
Still a very interesting idea, but I'm not seeing something like a car being printed without some major economic shifts.
> It seems to me that, in many cases, getting one's hands on the materials necessary for printing a car would make things prohibitive for the individual.
Seventy-five years ago (1937), in the era of cellulose film, your statement would have been identically applicable to the equipment and materials necessary for recording a "motion-picture".
Move forward seventy-five years to 2012, and you can walk into just about any store, and for a small amount of money walk out with a "motion-picture" recording device, affordable by an individual, that can record a "motion-picture" every bit as good, if not infinitely better, than what the "professionals" had to work with in 1937.
Seventy-five years from now (2087), 3D printing just very well may have advanced to the point where it would be quite feasible to "print" a car, and at a price perfectly affordable to an individual.
Interesting idea. So you go to a download site and grab the latest offering from Ferrari... Everything of value is then IP -- ie the plans and design. Does Ferrari bother selling it's designs if they can be downloaded from a torrent? How does Ferrari stay in business at that point? I've never taken "open source" like this to the logical conclusion before, where anything physical can be constructed if you have the materials and a 3D printer...
We propose a society where scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all physical items can be copied at will, where the idea of "owning" a physical thing is as pointless as the idea of "owning" an idea is, where (as a natural consequence) world hunger is probably a thing of the past, as are poverty, industrial labour, and many other things we take for granted...
And your first question is "How does Ferrari stay in business?"
Worth noting that this is more or less the same thing as what's happening with art at the moment. I could paraphrase it as:
"We propose a society where information scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all information (sound, video, text, etc) can be copied at will and instantly all around the world, where the idea of "owning" a bunch of bytes is as pointless as the idea of owning the shape of a cloud in the sky, where (as a natural consequence) education, art, civilisation and all those things that make mankind worthy of existence are infinitely more powerful than before because of their ubiquity and availability to all, and your first question is... How does Sony Music stay in business?"
The question, I think, is more relevant than you make it appear.
The only factor of production eliminated by the introduction of what is, essentially, automated labor is labor. A similarly important factor of production is not - raw materials.
Just because you have some way to produce something doesn't mean you can create the materials to do so. Regardless of whether or not you can produce something when you have the materials, you still need to purchase or otherwise obtain the materials to do so.
I think the more important question is, "How does Ferrari stay in business, when the only thing that they truly control is the code for producing a Ferrari?" What this essentially does is transform everything into an intellectual property issue, much as the Internet has done for digital media.
The 3D printer is just a manufacturing method. The scarcity problem will still exist in the form of raw materials -- somebody's got to pay for it.
Information is a completely different animal. If there were actual physical costs to the person downloading copyrighted material illegally, do you think the RIAA and MPAA would be as agitated as they are?
Matter and energy are somewhat interchangeable (with SF technology, anyway, which is what we're talking about).
We (as in, the face of the Earth) receive 1.7E17 J of energy from the sun every second. That's 53.6E23 J of energy per year.
Worldwide energy consumption as of 2008 was 4.74E20 J. It's risen a bit since (thanks China!), but not by more than an order of magnitude. So that means we're receiving enough energy from the sun to power today's civilisation a hundred times over. And that's just the energy which lands on the face of the Earth.
My point is, really, that energy (and hence matter) is quite plentiful if you know how to make efficient use of it. By the time we have cornucopia devices, we'll probably have the technology so that accumulating the energy/matter for making a car is just a question of leaving it outside in the sun/rain/air for long enough and/or dumping a bunch of dirt into it.
The interesting part is the 'long tail,' to borrow for the previous decade.
If you can print cars, you can print open source clothes, homes, appliances, solar panels, greenhouses, robots and more printers. Everyone who currently works a full/part-time job to pay the bills while their real passion lies in painting, or programming, or partying, or golf can stop working. Even the people who want to stay up on the latest DRMed fashion trends without breaking the law will have a hard time finding work to pay for it.
That said, there will still be people with power who can lure others into helping them, by offering in exchange the opportunity at a cut of that power - because you can't print power ... or, well ... with printable smarter than human AIs, can you?
Think of 3D printers as version 0.01 of a Star Trek replicator. It won't be until these "3D printers" use nanotechnology that we can make such complex things in one go.
Right now most of them work with plastic, but it won't be that long until they can use liquid metal, too. They should become a little more useful then.
this technology of 3d printing and self-replication is probably postponed consciously because it means the end of todays economy system. and danger if it goes out of control.
I mean printing guns and stuff like that.
The parent comment is perhaps a bit too thin on content and too much on the conspiracy theory side (edit: it was grayed out when I wrote this reply), but it does touch on an interesting question: is our progress limited more by technology, or is it limited more by socio-economic factors?
Consider that a toy steam engine was built by Heron of Alexandria around 2000 years ago, and yet nobody got the idea of harnessing it to replace human labor. Perhaps this can be explained in part by not-quite advanced metallurgy, but what about the fact that society back then relied on very cheap slave labor? What role did that play?
Think about what the business model for making 3d printers pervasive could be. If you manage to do that, you might become the next generation's Bill Gates. Too bad I don't have an answer there...
"Consider that a toy steam engine was built by Heron of Alexandria around 2000 years ago, and yet nobody got the idea of harnessing it to replace human labor. Perhaps this can be explained in part by not-quite advanced metallurgy,"
Exactly, it is explained by not quite advanced metallurgy and tools.
The steam engine works thanks to the small tolerances industrial lathes gave us that let a cylinder to carry a piston without fluids getting out. Watt had to create himself special tools for the creation of his engine.
I have a link somewhere in my browser but zotero search is bullsh*t.
The guys at open source ecology might not have the business model, per se, but I think they're headed in the right direction.
Rather than selling the 3d printers (and related technologies), 'sell' a community which requires of you only 4 hours a week of work to participate and all it takes to join is whatever it takes to transport your body there. Maybe its not 4 hours a week, but 8 or 2 - either way its not going to be much and it will only get smaller.
Oh, it's all well under way - including multiple projects "printing" gun magazines (and I don't mean periodicals). There is nothing "postponed consciously" about it; some of us think such new technologies are a great way to preserve & restore old Constitutional rights which legislative busybodies are he11-bent on trampling.
The technology of 3d printing is in its infancy, and it has nothing to do with Conspiracy theories but with real problems people will have to find a way to solve(they will but it will take time and effort).
A gun is not dangerous per se, it is the man or woman that carry it who is, you could kill other people with knives or invite people to eat poison, or use a DIY bow and arrow, or trow stones or make a bomb with fertilizer or fire a house.
There is no doubt in my mind that this step must be taken, but I'm fairly certain that as the number of parts and types of material increase any cost benefit from 3d printing will be wiped out.
Sneakers for example would be really tough to just print out and assemble due to all the different types of parts.
Scale in assembly continues to beat out lack of scale. It could change, but I think 3d printing is better for custom applications rather than mass market goods.
I think RepRap et al could have a huge impact in poorer countries. Spare parts for out of production goods can be impossible to find, and replacing an old (regular paper) printer or something like that is a big cost. Imagine a small factory in every village. :-)
Fablab is also a very interesting project. They provide free access to 3d printers, scanners and other equipment, provided you share your design. GPL IRL!
Easy maintainability is a general policy in third world countries already though, eg India makes 1950s design british motorbikes and cars (Norton, Morris Oxford) because they can have replacement parts made by low tech means.
However 3D printers potentially do make more kinds of materials buildable, especially when combined with printable electronics.
I am wondering, if something in that "printed" car fails to operate and leads to a crashes with lethal resolution, who will be to blame? The printer manufacturer? The plan developer? The material provider? I really don't want to see that coming in future, I better go and by a car from Toyota and put all responsibility on them rather than have myself doing all the hard work.
I apologize for my lack of imagination, but what does this mean? "We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal."
Researchers have been able to print organs from tissue. You basically have a gel medium for the tissue to grow in, and then you spray human tissue (stem?) cells into the medium, layer by layer, and given enough time, they'll grow into an organ.
By that notion, it's not too infeasible to print your own food. If you can print organs, you can probably print muscle meat, or plants. But this sort of thing is a long long ways off.
How do we feed the programmers, artists, and designers whose work appears on this site? As a distribution platform Pirate Bay is absolutely amazing, as an ethical business, not so much, Pirate Bay is making money from ads.
The same government forces that protect a company's IP protect employees in a union.
Many times, companies can't automate certain jobs (not just in the US) because it would mean one less job for a person and the wages are artificially inflated.
Wages are usually high because of scarcity (IE: not anyone can do it). Unions, like copyright, allow workers that would normally get paid $8/10 to get $20-30 an hour because of government sanctions.
However, many people here on HN hate copyright but are pro-union. Doesn't really make any sense.
Unions are a voluntary arrangement, copyright is not.
Please do not address the "HN Hivemind", that has a strong tendency to be a straw man argument that does not really address any specific points, or anyone.
Technology is at odds with capitalism. We need to upgrade our belief systems and our societal structures. See also a related issue http://marshallbrain.com/robotic-nation.htm
Think about printing a car when we have point to point instantaneous transportation (beam me up, Scotty)? Perhaps cars will become just another form of entertainment.
Perhaps the cost of recycling the material your boat (used to be your couch and XBoxen-5D) into a car via some futuristic process will be negligible, such that it would resemble downloading an MP3 today (after all, you do need some sort of storage medium that you bought to hold the MP3).
Go read it. It will only take a couple of minutes. http://craphound.com/?p=573&title=PrintCrime