I found some of my 3D designs from Thingiverse on shapeways, uploaded by some guy named Chewyy.
Is that legal ? Will he get money for that ?
It depends on the licence you applied when you posted the models on Thingiverse. Likely as not, if you alert shapeways to this, they will take them down. Either way, please let us know what the outcome is.
If it’s the share-alike licence, they need to point to the original source of the design, make it clear it exists under the creative commons licence and provide the URI to the original. Failure to do any of those would constitute a licence breach.
Full legal blurb here:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode
You could also put the model on shapeways yourself :).
A few weeks ago, I asked Shapeways to take down a derivative of one of my designs (which I had released with a non-commercial, share-alike license) that Chewyy put on their site. I got a response from someone who said he/she “couldn’t” take it down, but would ask Chewyy to do so, which Chewyy did immediately.
In Chewyy’s defense, it was the derivative he got from Thingiverse that broke the “share-alike” chain for a period of time (it has since been fixed).
Chewwy’s got over 2000 designs on Shapeways. Legal, yes, but not really contributing to the community from which he or she is profiting.
Thanks for your comments. Looks like I did not pay enough attention to the license in thingiverse. Most are share-alike and free for commercial use. Anyhow, I will ask Chewyy to take them down since he did not even point to the original source.
I found some gear of mine on there which seems to comply with the license I chose.
However, I don’t think the content, like the images and text I posted, is part of that license. This content is not made available by thingiverse for ditribution like the files. I thought the license only applied to the files that are available for downloading.
Is there a breech of copyright by scraping the thingiverse page for text and images? I’m not sure.
@Mathias_Dietz I’ve talked to quite a few people who are going the non-comm route. I have on a couple designs too… I still consider those designers “open” as sharing designs are what it’s about, right?
@Jason_Ray yeah, for most design I would be even ok if it is modified/extended for commercial use . But just cloning the thingiverse entry incl. photos, text and org. stl files and not even adding a attribution to it is really brazen.
“It’s all about the Benjamin’s”
Just cloning stuff add to the noise level in thingiverse. It would be nice if the put a limit on it.
There’s a few of my designs there too but the all have the correct attribution on them.
One of mine and one of a derivative of mine, both properly attributed.
He’s not doing anything he isn’t allowed to do, but it doesn’t feel right for someone to make money off a copy of something you gave away for free.
You’d hope that anyone who wanted a print of one of these items would upload the design from Thingiverse to Shapeways themselves and print it, but maybe that is the service he’s providing?
It just feels wrong. It’s legal but feels wrong. Ugh. I’ll probably use -NC because of this.
It doesn’t feel very good since it was not the spirit with which I shared the designs. But if someone is willing to pay $5 for a printed shopping trolley coin …