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Deadly Gifts
March 14, 2024
Yesterday Defense Distributed filed its long-delayed 3D gun brief with the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. This one has become the grandfather case to determine the free speech value of CAD files. Its anomalous procedural history shows just how dangerous the federal courts have found it over the years.
Justin Lee at Compact Mag has written a thoughtful piece about Jessica Solce’s film Death Athletic, and the philosophy behind the founding of GunCAD. I encourage you to read it: https://www.compactmag.com/article/cody-wilsons-deadly-gift/#
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VanDerStok Respondents’ Brief
March 8, 2024
This week saw FPC’s and New Jersey’s briefs at the Supreme Court in VanDerStok, the “frame or receiver” rule case against the ATF. Today we filed our brief as well, joined by Polymer80 and JSD Supply.
The differences are merely in emphasis. Where FPC spends paragraphs on Due Process vagueness and the Second Amendment’s necessary inclusion of a “right to make”, the Defense Distributed brief devotes pages.
Thank you for your enthusiastic feedback on our recent podcast about the history of GunCAD.
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Gatalogy
March 2, 2024
Last night I joined Garret on YouTube to answer questions concerning DEFCAD in support of victims of domestic FOSS.
One of the questions we take up is: Why does DEFCAD require a membership even though most 3D gun files have free software licenses?
On June 1, 2021, BIS sent Defense Distributed the first and only EAR enforcement letter concerning the 3D gun question since the completion of the Export Control Reform Initiative, the settlement of Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dep’t of State, and the regulatory transfer of firearms technical data from the USML to the CCL in March of 2020.
So a simple answer. But this little letter hides a lot.
The policy statement in the BIS letter would seem to contradict the reading of 734.7(c) suggested in 85 FR 4172, which provides for a “CAD/CAM distinction” as an answer to the First Amendment questions raised in Defense Distributed v. U.S. Dep’t of State. Everytown, among others, pressured BIS in the spring of 2021 to erase this reading of the CAD/CAM rule, and BIS would eventually bury a contradictory interpretation (now a distinction without a difference) in official online guidance that they’d tweak for weeks. Their May 28, 2021 publication follows:
Gun people understand rogue federal agencies can subvert Congress’ legislative power through the process of official rulemaking. This isn’t even that. This is lawmaking by FAQ.
The BIS revisionism in Question 2 of this FAQ is a fun point of departure, for those still interested. It frames the four most fateful weeks in modern guncad. Shall we read it together?
This story about the Ninth Circuit decision (which allowed 3D gun files back on the Internet) is necessary because DEFCAD immediately published, for free, every 3D gun file from across the Internet on April 28th. And published loudly. You’ve read the DEFCAD newsletter. When DOJ threatened to prosecute Defense Distributed again, we immediately went to court for a TRO.
An excerpt from our emergency injunction request that same week in Texas:
In short, the feds were saying “No, you can’t publish yet.” And so was The Gatalog.
To ensure judicial notice of their public domain status, we included the best of the Gatalog designs in our re-release of free files. But this was an outrage for which Gatalog high command required payment. While it may offend modern sensibilities (in 2024 we all know it’s wrong to ask for money for free files), in the wild weeks of May, 2021, free files were pricey things. Just try to remember these were men of their time!
For the FGC-9 Mk II alone, the Director of The Gatalog (then, as now, a little-known figure) demanded a wire payment of $2,500 to his personal shell company. And so this was the price to officially open source the FGC-9 Mk II.
The reader will note I paid for the FGC-9 the day after the Ninth Circuit mandate issued, on May 26th. But it’s also the same day The Gatalog Foundation was formed in Florida. Could these two facts be related?
By June 1st, 2021, DEFCAD went back to a paywall, The Gatalog became a corporation, and BIS would assume jurisdiction of 3D gun files, pretending nothing had happened the previous four weeks.
JStark was dead a month later.
VanDerStok 2024 and John Walker
February 8, 2024
ATF petitioned for cert in VanDerStok v. Garland, our “frame and receiver rule” case that The Fifth Circuit just won’t let Joe Biden win. It’s nice to read the words “Defense Distributed” in yet another Supreme Court petition. Polymer80 and JSD Supply have agreed to join our pending brief, where we will also request the Supreme Court grant cert to at last consider the grand question: what is the definition of a firearm?
We’ll know something here by June.
In DD’s longest running case, Defense Distributed v. Attorney General of New Jersey, No. 23-3058 (3d Cir.), I’d like to highlight the role and contributions of John Walker, who we learned passed on February 2nd.
Mr. Walker was the founder of Autodesk, a libertarian philosopher in the Atlantic tradition, and the earliest financier of Defense Distributed. In our New Jersey line of free speech cases, beginning in late 2018, Mr. Walker contributed authoritative declarations supporting the speech value of CAD files. I’d like to share one of his original declarations below, which will be used in our upcoming Third Circuit brief :
Kind of difficult for Everytown and the New Jersey AG to contradict the testimony of the inventor of AutoCAD. May he rest in power.
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On Getting Supremed
October 20, 2023
For the second time in as many weeks, the Supreme Court had to intervene to rescue Biden’s “Ghost Gun” rule from the judgments of O’Connor and the Fifth Circuit. Defense Distributed’s injunctions were vacated twice! Winning hurts, and in our experience is one of the fastest ways to lose.
The press buried us everywhere. It makes all their quiet in our weeks of victory more conspicuous.
The Court’s second order comes without explanation or dissent.
I guess being “Supreme” means never having to issue an opinion.
So that’s it for kit guns by mail, at least for a couple of years. Can’t say we didn’t fight Old Man Biden. The only advice I have is that you have to aestheticize these kinds of reversals. Appropriate your defeats and integrate them with strong plastic powers. I gave a speech about this last month in Prague.
There’s a movie about our ten years of official defeat premiering in Austin tonight at AFS. It’s called Death Athletic.
If you would like to support these legal defeats, please join LEGIO.
Freeman’s Folly Part III
October 13, 2023
To answer my charge that Freeman1337 is a coward, Everytown defendant Gatalog-Printable Magazines, joined by the owner of the Gatalog, have offered to make an appearance on this weekend’s Out of Battery Live. Discerning readers may note this is not the traditional way a man answers the charge of cowardice. Nevertheless, Freeman’s keepers have two hours to explain why trapping him in the Everytown case with them, why persuading CtrlPew to perjure himself, and why hiding the fact they were identified by Odysee are all 200 IQ moves that you, too, would have made.
You are free to believe the “no worries” above is actually a coded message. By “no worries”, Freeman (a known Straussian) secretly means: “Actually, you guys, I’m very worried, and with any pressure at all I’ll probably, understandably, abandon my post.”
Anyway, now that he’s missed his show-cause hearing on the 11th, a chain of events begins which will include final judgment, takedown orders, and–most likely–Freeman in jail or underground. Though no longer with us, he can at least take comfort in the gravediggers at the Gatalog releasing a printable Freeman figurine. The Gatalog: Where dead developers bury the living.™
The dearly departed’s files are restored at DEFCAD, where they will remain safely archived according to our mission of preservation. DEFCAD will always be home to files censored by enemy actors, even when those enemy actors are the creators themselves. We’ve now finished archiving the Gatalog as well.
Help us celebrate by reading our companion guide to Open Source development.
xoxo crw
Freeman’s Folly Part II
October 5, 2023
I’m amused by the large response to our last post, and the readers who shared Freeman’s identity. Thank you, but this isn’t the point. Freeman’s information has been an open secret among 3D2A developers for at least the last year. And this shouldn’t be a surprise given his daily commitment to maintaining a certain kind of profile on social media. Profile work requires producing a constant stream of information about oneself, and advertising this information in public and private spaces.
We should instead consider Freeman’s weakness of personality as a notable kind of failure within our community. A failure to engage with what is actually happening.
As I said in the previous post, the cause for the loss of this winnable case was the profile politics of the Gatalog. The only coherent response I’ve seen from them is: “it’s ok we were all immediately doxxed by Odysee, they have to obey subpoenas.” Sweethearts, not only is this not true, there was not even a subpoena.
And don’t take my word for it. Behold Twitter’s third party motions to intervene from November of 2021:
This defense of the rights of 3D gun printers by Twitter was made a year before Elon Musk bought the platform. I am telling you that our avowed enemy, Twitter.com, put in more work to fight this judge’s ex parte discovery orders than Odysee, who produced instantly and without any kind of objection.
Defendant “TheGatalog-PrintableMagazines” made a decision not to join this case at all. His big bet was Odysee wouldn’t ID him if Odysee wasn’t a named party in the lawsuit. He was instead ID’d within ten days. Realizing their entire organizational identity was built on sand, and that any of their devs will be ID’d whenever any authority so much as asks, “The Gatalog” invented and popularized fantasy defenses to their real trauma: “We were the victims of a mean lawyer (one must never confess to being unfortunate)” and “Actually it was DEFCAD (who would take the anonymity fight to the Second Circuit three times) who was doxxing creators.”
You cannot make it up. Anyway, I’ve agreed to share what’s left to say about this on Out of Battery Live on Saturday.
On Free Men and Freeman
October 3, 2023
In VanDerStok v. Garland, No. 4:22-cv-691 (N.D. Tex.) and No. 23-10718 (5th Cir.), the Fifth Circuit confirmed Defense Distributed and Blackhawk Manufacturing are now the only two companies in the country who can legally sell printable gun build kits and build kits containing receivers and fixtures.
Remember: though this case was billed in the media as being about 80% receivers, it was actually about ATF illegally squeezing every combination of unregulated parts into the meaning of the word “firearm.” Many in our industry gave up creating and selling build kits after the last two of years of this mess. But, unless the ATF can get *another* emergency Supreme Court order, partially complete build kits will survive until the Fifth Circuit rules on the legality of Biden’s ATF2021-R05F. The “F” now stands for FUBAR.
In Defense Distributed v. Platkin, No. 3:21-cv-09867-MAS-TJB (D. NJ.), which will always live in my heart as Defense Distributed v. Grewal, the district court has dismissed the case after five years of high stakes procedural games and a demand from the Fifth Circuit that the case be returned to Texas. I wonder why. Oh yeah, because this is the case that will decide whether CAD files have First Amendment protections. Perhaps a Third Circuit panel will actually do their job when we appeal.
Finally, the judge in Everytown v. DEFCAD, No. 1:21-cv-08704-PGG-RWL (S.D. N.Y.) denied the last motion to dismiss and ordered Freeman1337 to identify himself to the court and to Everytown tomorrow. The court further ordered that Freeman show up in person at a hearing on October 11 in New York. This is ironic.
I’ll say a few things about this case now.
I organized the attorneys, the common defense agreement and financing for this case back in 2021. The co-defendants and I had separate counsel and understood our common purpose was to fight Everytown’s efforts to tie CAD files to the law of trademark infringement (and thereby establish a new mode of threatening CAD developers and polluting 1A protections).
The first surprises in this case were that the judge was *very* hostile to 3D guns, and would not allow the co-defendants to litigate the court’s jurisdiction anonymously. He even ordered expedited discovery from non-parties to the case, including Odysee and Twitter. To our dismay, Odysee provided all the goods they had on the co-defendants, including identifying every Gatalog Odysee account and their relevant communications with Gatalog members and representatives. Odysee did this without any kind of fight, and ignored our requests to at least wait while we appealed to the Second Circuit. Even Twitter would object and eventually join our effort to produce discovery under a protective order.
The declaration of Erin Galloway of Everytown, below, is a decent summary of the goods they got during expedited discovery. Feel free to download it and learn something.
Once we had appealed (and failed) more than once to the Second Circuit to fight the judge’s hostile orders, we began to prepare interrogatories and bunker down for a discovery fight with Everytown. Freeman at this point showed his cowardice and abandoned all contact with his attorney from fear of eventually being identified. I guess no one told him lawsuits don’t always go the way you want.
The story has since evolved that mean old DEFCAD doxxed poor Freeman, but the record, finally unsealed, shows otherwise:
Freeman assured us well before litigation that his email and Signal number (acquired outside of DEFCAD) were insufficient to identify him, and he agreed to join our lawsuit, which quickly became about the very right to litigate anonymously. A fight worth having in New York and the Second Circuit. Even after Freeman shit himself and abandoned his post, and even after all his howling that DEFCAD is a honeypot, I paid for his attorney and appeals for another year. These are the last words addressed to Freeman from the Second Circuit.
Meanwhile, at the very same time, Freeman was out self-soothing on Reddit. He bragged about settling out of the case and lying to his attorney and a federal judge to feather his Twitter profile, which is his only real product.
I have trouble imagining being such an absolute, post-literate prole. Is it possible to forget that you’re involved in a federal case? What magical thinking got him there? The mere assurance of his “attorney” at the Gatalog? I include so many pictures in this post because so many of you share Freeman’s disease.
So now, because he cannot shut up about how private he is in public, Freeman is stuck and alone in the Everytown case, and Everytown will press their advantage. The sanctions they want are a final judgment (which will produce bad law related to CAD and trademark, as well as the right to litigate anonymously in NY), and an injunction against Freeman, which, because he is a coward, he will almost certainly obey anyway. So why did he fight at all?
Some advice: If you fight, you should not be a coward. And if you are a coward, you should not fight.
Freeman allowed his “friends”, who know he’s suggestible and suffers from a personality disorder, to convince him this case was about him. But the case was truly about the profile politics of the Gatalog. After a couple of years of fighting the case, I came to understand that the Gatalog’s only interests were in hiding the facts that they were 1) a corporation owned by three dudes in Florida, 2) that they censored and read the private messages of users in their Rocketchat, and 3) that their relationship with Odysee was completely unprotected. Is this not public knowledge by now? Is this not the story of the origin of AWCY? Was this worth scuttling an important question of law in enemy territory?
The second generation of 3D gun printers largely succumbed to the mere presentation of practical politics. It is enough for them to ape the slogans on Twitter. To play struggle before the general peer of social media with empty rhetorical positions and pique. To administer the surplus enjoyment of the pure “process” of engineering and releasing open source files, without doing either of these.
I discussed some of this at a recent speech in Prague. And I’ll likely do so again. Fighting gun control will eventually require you to fight gun control, dear hearts.
If you would like to support these legal actions, please join LEGIO.
O’Connor Strikes Back
September 14, 2023
Last month a cringing Roberts Court blinked under protest and preserved the Biden frame and receiver rule for the life of the first appeal from a final judgment of the Texas district court. Big sad. That appeal isn’t exactly going well for ATF, as you can hear below, but Roberts is still giving the agency the next two years to have their rule.
VanDerStok CA5 Oral Arguments:
This month, judge O’Connor strikes back with forty two pages of just why he has the authority to issue an injunction against the frame and receiver rule, as to at least two VanDerStok plaintiffs: Defense Distributed and 80 Percent Arms.
DOJ probably appeals, but the Biden admin is now in the worst place they could be: The true believer fanatics in this industry have achieved commercial monopoly. Oops.
In other Biden gun law news, the president’s son will have to argue Bruen to beat his federal case.
* * * *
Hey, let’s launch a new product together. We like to do that when we win things.
crw
If you’d like to support our legal efforts, please join LEGIO.
VanDerStok and a New Contract
July 13, 2023
VanDerStok v. Garland, the federal case against the ATF’s new frame and receiver rule, has ended with a summary judgment for the plaintiffs. The ATF noticed its appeal to the Fifth Circuit today.
This is the first federal court case that Defense Distributed has been a party to *and* won. In ten years, one win.
Which goes to show there are many more ways to win than officially winning.
We at DD would like to thank our Legionnaires, many thousands strong after all this time, for your contribution and attention. We’d like to thank Jennifer VanDerStok, Tactical Machining and the FPC as well. VanDerStok went from being an outside shot among many attacks against the ATF frame and receiver rule, to an iconic decision against ATF overreach.
This is a great time, however, to remind those new to our movement that even in the wake of decisions like Bruen and VanDerStok, which are emotionally satisfying if only because they make sense of the law and the institutions, federal cases in guns and gun technology are desperate ground. The judiciary is overwhelmingly stacked against us.
Maybe we can talk about it at Bear Arms N Bitcoin 2023, which has recently opened for registration in Austin.
Anyway, as a Defense Distributed tradition, we release new private defense contracts with the public when we win lawsuits. Though I’m proud of our G0 release and its reception with the DIY pistol community, we’ve got a special piece of technology to show you in August.
You’re going to love it. Thank you for building our company for ten years.
crw
