> Think of it like the early stages of internet copyright protections, the first step is just cross-referencing the design with a list of known banned designs. Just like an early Youtuber could have mirrored banned videos to bypass copyright detection, people will likely still be able to manipulate designs in certain ways to get past this sort of ban. That's ok. Regulation like this doesn't have to be 100% effective to still be worth doing. The goal here is to make it more difficult for some random person with no expertise to buy a 3d printer, download some files, and print a weapon.
Yes, I agree, and I understand that the law is narrow in this way. However, I still have worries that make the problem of matching STLs harder and less effective than the US dollar printing ban in ways that would force their hand to strengthen the legislation to make it not completely toothless. For one, STLs don't have consistent tells like money does - if you just match it by hash or something, even the most trivial modifications like an irrelevant metadata change or shifting the entire print to the side by 0.01 or something would be enough to thwart the detection. This would be far less effective than the money printer ban, and is so easy to execute that it would nearly nullify the value of this law, because it could be bypassed with a one-line instruction. Matching STLs by geometry within certain tolerances would be better, but still circumventable. This approach would give us the scenario you proposed, so I'm hoping it will go in this direction. However, now that the door to discussing 3D printing regulation is open, there's nothing stopping this law from being dialed up further, especially if they go with the first approach and find it completely ineffective.
