[jjoonathan]

Self replicating production facilities dramatically lower the barrier to entry for leasors, giving market leverage to consumers. If you can download open source specs for a personal farm and pit manufacturing shops against one another to build the thing, you're still going to get a nearly rent-free price (in this ideal future where the technology exists to, e.g., print an automated tractor). To be more efficient, you could lease rather than buy, but this doesn't change the underlying power balance: if production infrastructure is sufficiently cheap you can disintermediate the system for less than it would cost to be "financially independent" by subsiding on investment revenue. The system would be forced to compete.

[walterbell]

Is there any public analysis of copyright/IP threat models for distributed manufacturing, both on equipment and content?