But the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), which is an agency of the Department of Commerce, has been making patents accessible online free of charge since 2010. These often consist of descriptions and drawings of the invention, which may as a set of instructions on how to construct the invention.
Kurt Opsahl, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Daily Caller that “you can get a wide variety of detailed plans for building weapons” at the USPTO’s website.
Opsahl, whose organization advocates for digital rights, said that “concerns are overblown” about the 3D-printer gun designs because “there’s plenty of information that is available, and has been available for years, on how to make weaponry, and society has dealt with that.”
“The first machine gun patent is online,” he said. “If you want things that are relatively low-tech, you can go back a hundred years and get the patents for the first semi-automatic handgun.”
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