Defense Distributed has removed CAD designs for their 3D printed Liberator gun at the request of the State Department. However, the plans have been downloaded at least 100,000 times in three days before the ban.
Company founder Cody Wilson says “the practical, reasonable person should assume it’s going to be a long time before it’s back online.I don’t like it—but I do think that it actually ends up helping the message of the project a little more, that, look, in the end we’re going to be having a fight about what it means to be controlling information.”
The problem isn’t that the gun designs are illegal in the US. It’s that they could be in violation of arcane regulations forbidding export of certain items. But the plans are already all over the net, on servers out of the reach of the US government, like on the Dark Net.
#DEFCAD has gone dark at the request of the Department of Defense Trade Controls. Take it up with the Secretary of State.
— Defense Distributed (@DefDist) May 9, 2013