Just 3D Fib

Just over a year ago I wrote an article about some charming gentlemen with an interesting view of how copyright and licensing work. Well those self same gentlemen have got in touch with me as they’ve apparently been taking people to court and they seem to have the same creative view of how courts and the law works as they do on how copyright works.

Here’s what they have to say for themselves:

They also attached two PDF’s. A Notice of money and an initial statement.

Now having been asked in such a nice and an entirely non threatening manner to update or take down my article I thought I really should update the record, especially as it turns out I’m not the only person to have received such a letter. Needless to say I was interested to check out the details to make sure I didn’t in anyway misrepresent the factual record. How handily the Philadelphia municipal court has a public search facility, so we can all look at the case dockets for ourselves. Once I worked out what to actually search for it turns out that they had more than once case open and it had obviously just slipped their mind to mention that detail to me.

Joel Telling(3D Printing Nerd) who they also got in touch with found a 3rd still open case, and has made a rather good video on the matter – which in all fairness I’m going to largely repeat.

So what of this other case, well from what I can see and have been able to ascertain by talking to people – that other case against Tech Crunch didn’t go quite so well for them. This was probably because unlike in the case which they “won” Tech Crunch’s lawyers actually turned up. Pro Tip – the easiest way to “win” a case is if the other side doesn’t turn up. Of course if you win by default nothing has actually been proven. Lets put that aside for a moment and look at the claim that Just3dPrint actually made, again thanks to the Philly courts we can look at the just3Dprint complaint ourselves so we don’t have to bother Ryan D. Simms for the details.

The complaint it seems is that:
“Among numerous false claims made by your company, you allege that my firm was engaged in violating thousands of copyrights when, in fact, we had not received even a single DMCA, Cease and Desist, or other formal allegation even alleging that we were infringing on a single copyright-let alone be found liable in court for such an infringement.”

They then go on to list some a load of quite frankly fantastical projected profits that they’d expected to make from ripping off other peoples design, printing them badly and selling them on e-bay. Does anyone make $2,000,000 a month in gross profits on e-bay? Lets ignore such flights of fancy though. The passage of time seems to have caused a rather impressive lapse in memory for the Ryan, as he seems to have forgotten all the boiler plate letters he sent out telling people that:

“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”.”

Obviously all those people complaining that he was breaking their copyright weren’t making a formal enough allegation. I guess that E-bay taking down all of Just3DFibs listing due to copy right infringement reports also doesn’t count as a formal allegation either, and certainly wouldn’t have counted as any sort of proof that maybe just maybe they’d failed to understand how copyright works. It’s a bit like claiming that you’ve never been caught drunk and disorderly because whilst you’ve spent many nights sleeping it off in the drunk tank you’ve never gone to prison for it. I do hope for their sake that Ryan and the other self entitled ignorant pond scum at Just3DPrint don’t take the same sort of approach on all legal matters.

Given that they lost one case one the same claims, and only won against Stratasys by default, I think we can safely say that despite the impression Ryan would like to give neither he nor Just3DFib have been cleared of anything. Now I’m not going to say that they’re Walter Mitty types as I think that would be most unfair on Walter Mitty. I will say though that telling people you’ve “been cleared of all wrong doing” because you won a case by default and neglecting to mention that you lost a very similar case is more than a little bit dishonest.

So Ryan I’m glad to have been able to post an accurate update with regards to your previous actions and your current dishonest behavior. If you can provide me with the full transcripts of all your cases where it clearly shows that you’ve been cleared of all wrong doing then I’ll happily post a retraction of this and my previous article. As I realise you have problems with understanding how laws work I should probably explain that other people being punished for saying mean things about you isn’t the same thing as your being “cleared of any wrong-doing in court”. So until I see actual evidence to the contrary you and your colleagues remain in my opinion – dishonest, self entitled, ignorant, copy right infringing, untalented, four flushing dick of the first water.

Glad to have been able to put the record straight for you.

Oh as a final side note Donald Trump like Ryan and co at Just3DFib is also an alumni of Wharton College – what on earth do they teach people there?