The next battle over copyright and trademark is coming fast and it’s going to be huge

As we deal with the morning afterglow of our success in making Congress rethink the whole SOPA and PIPA, even if only temporarily, the push against all things meant to supposedly protect copyright and trademark laws continues unabated, as we have seen with the take down of Megaupload by the Department of Justice.

The problem is that the battle we are fighting right now over the protection of the entertainment industry and their inability to move into a modern world of digital creation and distribution it is nothing compared to the war that is headed our way, and coming faster than we might think.

Shortly after CES 2011, where the quiet hit of the event was 3D printing I made a comment on Google+ about what this could portend

like I said the other day – 3D printing will be the biggest thing to affect our world in a very long time and it is happening faster than most people might realize – the genie is out of the bottle

This is something that I believe quite strongly. There is an incredible shift coming our way and it makes the copyright and trademark battle being fought by the entertainment industry and their bought and paid for Congress look like an afternoon playing paintball.

I think that 3D printing, while it is only in its infancy at this point, will be the source of the biggest upheaval of our society that we will ever have seen next to the Industrial Revolution.

Sure right now the 3D printers that are available oar big, bulky, and meant for the geeks and nerds of the world but even in the few short years that they have been available they have gotten better, more compact, and able to do more. For example the big news out of CES this year was that the new 3D printers coming out were able to print in two colors whbich might not seem like much but like I said this is still early days.

It isn’t just about printing out cute little toys or figurines but as Bit Rebels posted there is a company that is taking 3D printing large scale and producing a home made out of 3D printed parts – it’s called the FACIT home.

Now today we hear that The Pirate Bay is opening a new section on their site that will let you download digital files that can be used with 3D printers to create physical goods. As TorrentFreak wrote on their site about the news:

You wouldn’t download a car, the Internet meme predicted. But if The Pirate Bay has its way that action will be a reality in the years to come. In preparation for this world-changing day, the world’s biggest torrent site has just premiered a new section containing the plans for physical items that can be downloaded then printed out. Today its a plastic pirate ship, but one tomorrow in a decade or two it may well be a car.

As we as a society struggle to deal with the copyright and trademark fights we are already fighting with the entertainment industry just imagine the battles and political repercussions that we will face when you or I can download a data file, feed it into our personal 3D printer, and within minutes have the same product that a major corporation was trying to sell us a few years ago.

If 3D printing takes off, and I see absolutely no reason why it wouldn’t, yo can be assured that the fight we have been having with the entertainment industry will pale beyond belief when compared to the battle we’ll have when global corporations that make the entertainment look like the small fish in the pond start to feel threatened by our freedom to create the goods they are making their fortunes from.