The California 3D printer law has progressed forward in a significant way.
This week, the California Senate Appropriations Committee voted 5–2 to advance AB 2047, but with further amendments. The committee’s official suspense-file results list it as “Do Pass as Amended.” The vote was 5-2 in favour.
This is in spite of very considerable opposition presented to the committee by the public. I spoke with David Tobin, who has been unofficially leading the efforts to stop the bill from progressing, and he’s been quite busy. I asked him how his summer has been going, and apparently, he cancelled his vacation to work on this effort. He seems to be the “Erin Brockovich” of this situation.
Over 250 people appeared to show opposition to the bill, with 50 testifying. This included a number of notable scientists and 3D printing experts, along with the ACLU. Over 70,000 people watched the livestream of the event, as well.
In spite of countless explanations of the infeasibility, cost, and impact of the legislation, the committee voted for it anyway.
The committee vote is significant because the suspense hearing was a major potential kill point. Bills placed on the Appropriations suspense file can simply be “held in committee,” effectively killing them for the session. Quite a few bills met that fate yesterday; AB 2047 did not, so it proceeds forward.
The next step is that it will be put in front of the full California Senate for consideration. If passed, it could mean that any 3D printer sold in California in 2029 and beyond MUST include the magical gun-detection feature.
There’s one catch here: the bill was voted in favour “as amended”, but there doesn’t seem to be any public record of those amendments as yet. These mystery amendments could theoretically clean up the bill to be something more realistic and feasible — or not.
The intent of the bill is to prevent “ghost guns” from being 3D printed. However, there is no feasible way to perform an automatic detection: an algorithm cannot determine the intent of your parts. Is that a gun, or a toy gun? Is that a pistol barrel or a tube? You get the idea. This is essentially impossible to do.
The side effects are horrendous, however. It means that every print job on these machines would be sent electronically to a central point for verification. That is a massive invasion of privacy, exposure of intellectual property, and a potential means of controlling printing far, far beyond this initial purpose.
There has been a surprising silence from the big players in the 3D print industry on this matter. We don’t see, for example, any official statements from Stratasys, 3D Systems, or similar companies denouncing this development.
The reason might be that they would be exempt under the proposed legislation. The law would not apply to:
“Printers manufactured for and sold exclusively to aerospace, biomedical, automotive, or chemical or mechanical engineering companies or government contractors that are not also sold on the consumer retail market.”
So, for a company like Stratasys, this has nothing to do with them.
However, this is quite curious, because there are plenty of other non-consumer applications, including: architecture, dental labs, jewellery manufacturing, universities, research laboratories, contract manufacturers, service bureaus, foundries, tooling shops, consumer-products companies, electronics manufacturers, footwear companies.
Any company making those devices would be affected.
Effectively, this legislation would create a “two-class” 3D printer regime, regulated and unregulated. It gets interesting when there are machines that cross the application borders. Consider Formlabs’ Form 4 device: It is commonly used by industry for dental, machine parts, production, etc. But it is also used by consumers, too. Formlabs might consider speaking up on this legislation because they would be affected if it were passed by the California Senate.
Overall, this week’s development on this legislation was bad for 3D printing.
The next hope to stop the bill would be to lobby individual California Senators to have them consider rejecting the proposal.
