As we adventure into our new-found future and legislation struggles to keep up with technology with Big Media companies fighting tooth and nail against digital copying what happens when we invent an era where physical copying is possible. This is the world of futurism and it’s also the domain of science fiction authors—but it’s also nearly today.

In what The Pirate Bay is calling the advent of the “Physible” they posit that the next step from digital copying will be “made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical.”

It’s not like humanity hasn’t imagined this moment with replicators from Star Trek, the Feed from Neal Stephenson’s book Diamond Age; but what we might be facing is the oncoming rush of copyright wars as once again powerful copyright holders look at new technology capable of compelling into existence nearly perfect renders of trademarked and copyright characters from cartoons and TV shows. Just to name drop another science fiction author for the connoisseurs out there we will be in the era of Charles Stross’s Rule 34.

The concept of 3D printers is still primitive—it’s nowhere near the technology necessary for a Star Trek replicator—but as we’ve seen from CES, the capabilities of the MakerBot 2-color hot plastic injector is actually quite amazing.

Now all we need to strike the match (and set the entire merchandise and big media industry on fire) is for someone to model Mickey Mouse or some other extremely popular character in their 3D printer. Action figures with no moving parts will probably become the forefront of those produced by these sorts of machines—not very useful to the usual consumer—but look at what people have managed to do with ordinary printers in being able to create transfers that make T-shirts.

The Pirate Bay may be looking a lot further into the future than we currently can, but they’ve got some vision:

The benefit to society is huge. No more shipping huge amount of products around the world. No more shipping the broken products back. No more child labour. We’ll be able to print food for hungry people. We’ll be able to share not only a recipe, but the full meal. We’ll be able to actually copy that floppy, if we needed one.

We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We’re thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay – but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we’ll download one.

Actually, with the MakerBot (and attachments that use gels like peanutbutter) can make edible 3D sculptures…although I’m sure that’s not what The Pirate Bay meant.

In a physible future, 3D models could be traded as data on the Internet and loaded into controllable replicator units in order to make products. This would provide an entirely new set of challenges for the current state of copyright and the law. Already we’ve seen business interests attack devices that can copy (from VCRs, to TVs, to Xerox copiers, to scanners, to even computer software) and we’ve seen governments look at printers and scanners as devices that could readily be used for forgery. After all, forgery is just making perfect copies of things.

The advent of readily sharable and printable stuff also raises the specter of controlling what people can do with their things. Cory Doctorow recently wrote an article based on his keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress in Berlin, Dec. 2011. If this is what we can expect to come down on computer for their capability to digitally copy, the firestorm that will arrive over being able to physically copy will only that much hotter.

I don’t think that we’ll have devices capable of making action figures with intricate moving parts even within the next ten years—sorry Transformers people, we won’t be printing those lovely things anytime soon—but what we might see is devices a lot like the MakerBot that can make extremely complex objects in molten plastic.

In fact, we already have.

We will probably see them first at the local supermarket as toymakers take advantage of the print-on-demand aspect and offer the press of a button to produce products from the most recent movies, books, and TV shows. However, eventually they will become cheap enough and easy enough for people to take into their homes and that’s when things will start getting really fun.

[Image credit: Replicator image is from Memory Alpha Star Trek wiki.]