Legal and Ethical Issues
Just as with the piracy issue in regards to downloading illegal content such as videos, music, and books, there is also the concern for that to extend over to the 3-D printing industry. Illegal product prints could put at risk the intellectual property of its owner, and enable the user to profit unfairly from a product that is copyright protected. Another issue has to do with liability; predicting from past human behavior, there is little doubt that as the technology becomes ever more affordable, certain people will try to produce novel drugs, guns etc that could prove to be potentially hazardous in how reactive and volatile they are. If the user get injured, who would be liable for the injury, himself or the company that manufactured the 3-D printer? (Coraggio, 2015). A most pressing issue would be that some 3-D printed replicas could contain personal information that third parties would then use to change their treatment to a customer, for instance the printing of 3-D organs (Coraggio, 2015).