Prevention of Product Piracy - Potentials of Additive Manufacturing

Additive Manufacturing (AM) is often deemed to be a driver for product piracy in public media. The reasons for this are mainly seen in the fact that it provides a possibility to easily copy three-dimensional objects when used in combination with scanning technologies. This contribution will not focus on the knowledge and skills needed to master AM technology but on its potential contribution to prevent product piracy and reverse engineering. The reverse engineering process will be analyzed to understand the practice of imitators and to transfer the characteristics of AM into specific measures. Finally a five-step methodology is presented which can be used as a guideline to implement protection measures in products to be (re-) developed. This guideline is supposed to be used by industrial companies since an expert survey has identified them as being very likely to profit from the use of AM (Echterhoff et al. 2011).