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California just passed a law forcing mandatory DRM in 3D printers
(www.theregister.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2026
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It more like mocking car registration because every neighborhood has a few people who can build you a car from scratch in a day, the city already has several thousand car factories that don't require registration, there's no mechanism to enforce registration, and the cost of building a new car is a few hundred dollars. The motivation for requiring registration is also to stop people from driving full speed into fast food restaurants is custom built murder buggys. Yeah, you don't want people to do that but it's not like it really happens all that often.
Building a 3d printer from a kit is different from building one from scratch. It's basically screwing parts together and plugging colored wires into matching slots.
How many cars does the city demand be produced each day? Cause my own city of Houston sees over 380k new cars sold annually.
Itty bitty ones, sure. And they take weeks to produce a working vehicle, of substandard quality.
Until you get pulled over
A plastic car that can go maybe a few hundred miles before falling apart if it's made perfectly.
You can build cars from a kit, too. But I'm not going to do that when I can buy a used Corolla or KIA for couch cushion money and drive it into the ground over the next fifteen years.
I'm not sure honestly sure what your point is, because you went a bit too far with the analogy.
This was about regulating 3d printers, not guns. A diy printer, a new drm printer and an old not-drm printer produce the same quality output.
A diy 3d printer is just as durable as a purchased one.
If your goal is to have an unregistered car, or in this case a drm free printer, the law seems silly when you can get one for cheaper than the "proper" one and have it out together in an afternoon if you have highschool level mechanical aptitude.
3D printers produce plastic crap.
Okay? What does that have to do with the drm mandate being easy to get around?
Is your point that it's okay to put unenforceable, easily bypassed restrictions on stuff if you think they're bad?
You can get around the DRM mandate with a bicycle. That doesn't mean you've solved the underlying problem
Did you forget we were talking about 3d printers?
You compared the people making fun of the drm mandate to people making fun of car registration because you can build a kit car, implying that building a 3d printer was a nearly insurmountable hurdle.
Being able to trivially bypass the drm is exactly why it's laughable.
Cars, bikes, or your dislike have nothing to do with the DRM mandate being toothless and stupid.
I genuinely think you might be talking to an LLM. Completely missing the analogy was one thing but supposedly being able to get around a 3D printer DRM with a bicycle is... an interesting proposition