Other file sharing sites may be shutting down in the aftermath of the MegaUpload raid, but the Pirate Bay is expanding instead. The site announced Monday that users can now download physical objects as well — sort of, anyway. The Pirate Bay introduced a new content category called “Physibles†that’s being used to trade digital designs that can be used with 3-D printers to recreate physical objects. From the announcement blog post:
We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.
The idea to share these kinds of designs online is, of course, not new. Thingverse has been offering tinkerers a way to share their own 3-D designs for years. However, the Pirate Bay’s approach is to completely ignore any property rights to these objects. The category itself currently only contains a handful of designs, but the folks at the Pirate Bay seem to think it’s a big enough deal for them to almost change the name:
We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We’re thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay – but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we’ll download one.
It remains to be seen whether the sharing of “physibles†will be as popular as traditional file sharing any time soon. But it could complicate the copyright debate even if it remains a fringe phenomenon for the foreseeable future, as one of the Bay’s users pointed out in the comments to a torrent labeled “1970 Chevelle Hot-Rod 3d modelâ€:
