Some people have already been thinking about the legal implications of 3D printers. You might be interested in the following paper:

"The Intellectual Property Implications of Low-Cost 3D Printing"

This reminds me of a funny situation which happened on the 7 FISL early this year.

At one of the conference rooms, while everybody was waiting for the speaker to start, suddenly out of somewhere comes a Windows boot sound.

Everybody started yelling at and criticizing the person with that laptop (why would someone use Windows at FISL?).

That until the person explained: he was using Windows just because some of his laptop's hardware was not supported, was using it just for VMWare (where Linux would be running), and in fact the Windows install didn't look like it got much use (apart from a couple of VMWare icons, it looked like a new install).

He was loudly applauded when VMWare started (booting Linux, of course).