Actually, it sounds like a great idea: tax every printer, display or playback device and telepathic transmission mechanism, because that's the only way most copyright holders will ever see any money these days.

Plus, the NSA is working on software to charge your bank account every time you play a piece of music in your head or imagine a scene from a Hollywood movie. The higher the resolution of your mental processing, the higher the fee.... Guys who can do 4K or 24 bit music will be bankrupt in two weeks.

This is an preemptive move to impede the proliferation of 3D printers right?

Yeah, sure, go for it.. tax us and get a few cents each time off to the appropriate holders of intellectual property.

But..

PRINTERS ??

@Walker

3D printers are very badly suited for production. resulting time spent is large and cost is not small. They are devices made for prototyping mostly.

But give them five years, sophisticated "ink" formulae and a $100,000 printer? Watch this space, I say.

5,10,50, does not matter. You can't change physics and nature.

Media is very eager to find another breakthrough tech. They are just looking at the wrong places.

@jimmykorea @Vitaliy_Kiselev

Why spend all that effort to make some some plastic crap when it can be done in split second in a factory in China/India.

Like I said: A Land Rover vent has to be sent over the sea in a container in the correct quantities, stocked at various warehouses and at a local distribution network just in case someone orders one. The part - even a thin gasket - has to be given a number, put on an inventory, a box with a bar-code, a place on a shelf where it waits for a purchaser. It has to be paid-for by the dealership, cash-up-front. If the dealer pre-orders, the Landrover vent might wait on that shelf for quite a while, because some items only sell 5 per year. So the dealer decides to order ex-Germany. The price gets inflated by 12,000% - and the customer still has to wait.

In Australia we sell too many models of, say, cars. Even with the current just-in-time stock practice, this country cannot maintain enough warehouses with enough different parts available at acceptable wait periods. Which has got the Toyota dealerships talking.

And don't get the wrong idea touted by the media that we, as consumers will be producing these items. Rather than being called a printer, these robotized CAD-to-product machines will be de-centralised strategically and specialised.

I didn't make this up - this is what manufacturers are predicting. My original source was a designer on ABC radio last week.

Some molecular biologists are even using organic compounds to try to print cells, skin and even more.

Now, back to the idea of taxing the printer as a means of protecting the copyright - or rather, patent to a particular CAD design. -I think Dazza might be pointing us in the right direction as to what the EU is trying to achieve - (they're certainly not talking about all us people printing websites onto paper!) - even if the the idea would be premature and naive.

I can imagine some European countries may be looking to what we are calling "3D printing" as their light at the end of a dark tunnel in terms of manufacturing. Right now they own own the patents, but are losing the manufacturing process to the countries which can do it cheaper.

Producing some items locally in an automated fashion might save their bacon. A computer, a machine out the back with a sack of plastic pellets is a tempting prospect for them.

But, as the music and entertainment industry has learned, it's almost impossible to keep a music file, a movie or a patented design CAD file from getting pirated, out in the wild and distributed. As @Dazza says, taxing the machines could be an attempt to glean some revenue from feral production the way the French taxed the VCR .

@dtr

It's a system which works surprisingly well. In the 1980's the French did sample surveys of what people were actually listening to and discovered kids were passing around recordings of Led Zeppelin from the 70's - while this popularity was not reflected in CD or Vinyl or official cassette sales at all! So a simple tax on cassettes was imposed and Led Zeppelin distributor (and eventually the band) received some belated, surprise revenue.

These days the pay-per-download system is the only thing that seems to work - for music, but not-so-well for films.

Personally I find that the download system takes too much of the fee before distribution. For 6 months I have been looking for a voluntary system to pay artists and rights-holders directly. It seems to me I should end up paying a little less - and the artists should receive a little more. A system would need to exist which would consolidate thousands of tiny amounts and make incremental payments. Anyone want to start one up?

In the meantime, taxing all media, from SD-cards, hard drives and so on is feasible. So is taxing downloads via ISPs. But governments could easily end up taking out a big slice of the revenue pie in administration costs, so we're no better off.