Protecting the Values of Consumer Law in the Digital Economy: The Case of 3D-Printing
Geraint G. Howells, Christopher G. Willett, Christian Twigg‐Flesner · Warwick Research Archive Portal (University of Warwick) · 2019
One of the most significant challenges for modern legal scholarship is to consider how disruptive new (especially digital) technologies are for existing legal regimes. In order to tackle this challenge, one particular new technology, 3D-printing has been chosen as a case study here. 3D-printing brings potentially radical changes to the consumer goods market: new forms of production, new types of producer and a greater role for digital content. This paper considers what these changes should mean for the underpinning values of consumer law, and what this in turn should mean for consumer private law doctrine: as will be explained further below, there has been very limited work so far on these issues, and the work that has been done is grounded in a very limited understanding of consumer law values. We argue that the values currently underpinning our consumer protection regime in relation to consumer goods should guide our response to the challenges of new technology.