The US government has demanded designs for a 3D-printed gun be taken offline. The order to remove the blueprints for the plastic gun comes after they were downloaded more than 100,000 times. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22478310 Before making the Liberator, Mr Wilson got a licence to manufacture and sell the weapon from the US Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The Bureau told the BBC that any American could make a gun for their own use, even on a 3D printer, but selling it required a licence.
The US State Department wrote to the gun’s designer, Defense Distributed, suggesting publishing them online may breach arms-control regulations. Cody Wilson, who founded Defense Distributed, told the BBC that the genie was out of the bottle. The Office of Defense Trade Controls Compliance emailed Mr Wilson a document demanding the designs be “removed from public access” until he could prove he had not broken laws governing shipping weapons overseas by putting the files online and letting people outside the US download them. Mr Wilson said that Defense Distributed had complied with the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) rules. He said the rules were pretty convoluted, but he believed his project was exempt as Defense Distributed had been set up specifically to meet requirements that exempted it from ITAR. “Our gun operations were registered with ITAR.” Unlike conventional weapons, the printed gun – called the Liberator by its creators – is made out of plastic on a printer. Many engineering firms and manufacturers use these machines to test prototypes before starting large-scale production.