Creative commons abuse 3D

#SadFace

Image by Loubie

First off I will declare an interest the 3D modeller involved in this incident is an old friend of mine, so I won’t claim to be at all impartial. Now that that’s out-of-the-way I want to talk about the self entitled, ill-informed, delusional attitude of Ryan D. Simms of Just3Dtheft. The world of 3D printing is a new and burgeoning field and creating new and tested models that print reliably takes a huge amount of effort, so that the people who create such models release some of them for people to learn from and print for personal use is a very generous act. Not generous enough for the self-entitled little scroates over at Just3Dprint, who have decided that license agreements such as the Creative commons Non-commercial attribution license doesn’t apply to them. So whilst they wait for their 3D printing business to become profitable on the back of their own work they’ve taken to downloading other people’s work and selling prints of them on E-bay. This is the equivalent of downloading other people’s photo’s and selling prints of them as your own work, oh and Just3Dtheft do that as well. Doing this deprives the people who created the models of the chance tp profit from their own work. Just3DTheft also steal photo’s of the 3D models because judging by their own website their print quality from a commercially purchased printer is shockingly poor.

Just 3D steal it Here’s a picture of our jolly thieves. Now obviously they’re young and just out of Wharton University but they’ve reportedly had so many complaints about their activity that they have a boiler plate reply to send to the people whose models they rip off. This boiler plate response prompted the creation of the SadFace model. Sad that such no talents as Just3DPrint.com think that they’re entitled to steal anyone’s work just because it’s on-line. It’s a tragedy of the American University system that someone who worked as a research assistant to a Professor of Management could send this sort of response:

“”When you uploaded your items onto Thingiverse for mass distribution, you lost all rights to them whatsoever. They entered what is known in the legal world as “public domain”.
The single exception to public domain rules are “original works of art”.
No court in the USA has yet ruled a CAD model an original work or art.
Therefore, you have no right to exclude others from utilizing the CAD models you have uploaded.
Furthermore, if in the future we do get a precedent in the USA for establishing CAD models as “original works of art”, we would still likely be just fine as we are not re-selling your CAD models, but rather “transformative” adaptions of them in the form of 3D printed objects.

SFE
P.S. When you created these CAD files, did you really want to limit the amount of people who could enjoy them to the 0.01% of the USA with a 3D Printer? 100% of America can purchase the items from us at a reasonable cost and enjoy them-creating made in the USA jobs in the process as well. Furthermore, if you hate the idea of people profiteering from your work, you may want to take it up with Makerbot/Stratasys who only hosts Thingiverse for AD revenue, to sell more 3D printers.”

They have seemingly posted an even longer and more incoherent defense of their theft in the SadFace comments, as a great man once said it’s “so bad it’s not even wrong”. More learned people than me have written a very clear article explaining just why they’re wrong and going into depth on the may ways in which they’re wrong. They are wrong in so very very many ways.

Now obviously when you have a new business set up by wet behind the eras just out of Wharton University special snowflakes making such mistakes you like to assume that they’re just making naive mistakes. That they have a boiler plate response and have broken so many license agreements does though tend to suggest other wise. But it gets worse if you look at Just3dTheft’s honours and awards section they claim to have awards from:

So with so many awards to their name you’d really think that they’d know better. I have reached out to all of the above organizations where I could find contact details to see how they view their young alumni’s behaviour.

In a spirit of friendship and keeping in mind that Just3Dprint feel that anything on the internet is in the public domain, I’ve fixed their logo for them. It is after all odd that a company offering “Product design/CAD modeling ($50/hour)” (obviously a value offering) doesn’t showcase any of their own designs either on their website of in their E-bay shop, but instead just rip off other people’s work. So here you go Just3DTheft I’ve fixed your logo for you.
Just3DPrint honest logo

As a final thought, for anyone ever considering using Just3DPrint or working with Ryan D. Simms would you really trust them with your intellectual property when they seem to have such scant regard for anyone else’s? Also 3d Modellers you might want to check out Just3dTheft’s E-bay store to see if they’ve used any of your work when they shouldn’t have.

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