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3-D printing attracts the copyright vampires

Are we really going to have this fight all over again with physical objects? I guess this is what vampires do–rise from the dead to drain our blood, in this case the lifeblood of our culture.

As 3-D Printing Becomes More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise

Many people think 3-D printing could help spark a manufacturing renaissance in the U.S. — even President Obama highlighted this technology in his State of the Union address last week.

But as 3-D printers and 3-D scanners get cheaper, this nascent industry could be roiled by battles over intellectual property.

Not so long ago, a good 3-D scanner that could create accurate digital models of objects in the real world cost more than $10,000. Then, Microsoft released the Kinect — the video game controller that allows you to play games by just waving your hands.

“But it turned out that the Kinect was actually much more than that — it was a 3-D camera but one-hundredth of the price,” says Nicolas Burrus, co-founder of manctl, a 3-D scanning company.

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Business News

Copy, an alternative to Dropbox or Google Drive

Here’s an alternative to Dropbox and Google Drive that just appeared. Since I’m interested in moving PDFs and EPUBs around, I tried that out. Unfortunately, the Android app does not know what to do with EPUBs. You can ask the app to open the files as text, but none of my readers are available as a choice for opening the file. Same situation with PDFs, although PDFs are recognized as such and viewable inside the app.

Compare this to Google Drive. If I click on an EPUB from the Drive app, it just downloads and opens in Aldiko.

Copy

Copy is the easiest way to store, protect and share amazing things. It keeps your computers in sync and your files available from anywhere, even on your mobile devices. With Copy, you can also easily share files with anyone publicly or privately. Copy for companies extends the cloud storage and sharing benefits into corporate environments with user and group management and added control of proprietary company data..

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