The most surprising thing to me about working at Shapeways so far is how people respond to copyright takedown notices.  In fact, it is fundamentally changing the way I think about online copyright debates.

Like many Americans, Adafruit decided to celebrate the recent 4^th of July with some patriotic music.  They scored a video celebrating the 4^th of July and US manufacture of Arduino with America the Beautiful, as performed by the United States Navy Band (a work on the public domain – more on that below).  Soon thereafter, they received a note from YouTube telling them that someone had issued a copyright claim against the video.  After some outrage, the claim was dropped.  But what actually happened here?  And why did it happen?

No, this isn’t a post about President Obama being “absent” from some policy debate or another.  Instead, this is really about President Obama being missing.  More specifically, this is about the missing high resolution 3D scan of President Obama being missing.  The file exists – why isn’t it public?

This article originally appeared on 3DPrint.com.

Yesterday the Copyright Office released all of the answers to the questions they had after the unlocking hearings.  Turns out that Stratasys, Public Knowledge, and I all agree!  We all told the Copyright Office that there is no meaningful way to make some sort of distinction between “commercial” and “non-commercial” users of 3D printers for the purpose of the exemption.  What’s going on here?