Unfortunately nobody will pursue any true legal remedies. The only way I see the original author succeeding is by establishing themselves as “the original” and making their model stand out amongst the crowd. The folks who should be policing all of this are part of a culture which completely disregards the entire concept of IP. There is little hope.
I am unaware of a culture making the more used websites that cares about policing IP beyond what they are forced to do at thread of lawsuit. Is there a prominent cultural group who goes out of their way to help self police and moderate themselves? More specifically, is there a 3D printing model collection that has no unauthorized IP models?
I am not trying to defend China, they don’t deserve any protection. I just think the issue is broader than any one country or people when it comes to profiting off of anything we can get our grubby mitts on.
Oh, by no means am I placing the burden only on them. Everyone stealing and reposting models for profit is in the wrong (or posting slop). I’m making the point that the folks who have assigned themselves the responsibility of policing this particular model repository perhaps don’t have the necessary respect for IP. It’s kinda like expecting a flea market not to have knock off products. This may deter legitimate creators (or sellers in my analogy) but at a core level it conflicts with the business model.
I feel like we are generally in agreement. I just wanted to point out a fundamental issue at the top level.
Point Farming. To what avail? What does one gain with these points?
If stealing a design to gain money or other benefits, there is a point.
But points? Hardly seems worth the bother. Like some pat on the head.
Points can be used to make purchases in the Bambu store. Each one is worth approx. $0.066 USD.
At scale, point farming can be quite lucrative.
OK. I guess I just don’t worry about such things. I would worry if it was hundreds or thousands…
Of dollars.
Well, the scammers are siphoning off tens of thousands of real dollars from the system. This money is then missing for honest designers who use it to fund their hobby. The scammers are getting what the honest designers, who also want to be paid, are missing out on.
For years now, this has led many professionals, but also hobbyists, to leave MakerWorld. At first, you don’t notice it; you don’t hear about it; you only see it when the names are missing. More and more models that were on people’s favorite lists are disappearing.
Dying is slow and quiet, but it’s been happening already for a long time…
But before anyone asks: No, Bambu doesn’t care; despite numerous complaints from the community, all those scammer accounts have been operating undisturbed for months.
So, out of curiosity, does other platforms also suffer this? I don’t know because I only browse here to try and learn more about my P2S and Bambu AMS2 Pro’s.
I only do this for fun, not fortune.
It really depends on the worth of the rewards on those platforms. Those offering worthwhile rewards or direct monetization draw parasitic uploads like flies…
In this context, most printer manufacturers nowadays feel the need to offer something similar to MakerWorld. To grow quickly, rewards need to be tangible and easy to obtain.
So I was not surprised to have a strong feeling of “familiarity” when looking at Qidi’s new platform…
& 
Most of them do in some way or another.
MW sees it the most because of the popularity (in comparison), but it happens everywhere.
I know I have said this a million times, but the problem is not people trying to be scammy, it is influencers that are encouraging people to do scammy things in order to get rewards.
It’s less about this for me and more about watching these scum provide less than nothing and getting enriched on other’s peoples work, and the fact that MakerWorld does little is beyond frustrating.
https://makerworld.com/en/@user_4186545507/profile and the related botnet or similar accounts add new less-than-useless print profiles almost daily and they do it with impunity.
an average of 3.52 models a day is insane.
And it actually works - if I do a rough calculation based on the points, it’s a free P2S / X2D without AMS. That’s a very rough estimate - and that’s just one account from the bot network.
We’ve already listed a few in the other thread and informed MakerWorld, but that was months ago. I think you posted a few there, too, if I remember correctly?
Conclusion: They aren’t doing anything about it.
This account was created in April 2026. Five months. Not bad for such a short time - first, to get a free printer, and second, to flood MakerWorld with ~700 models.
Yet another, newer account:
@MakerWorld how are actual, honest, good-faith makers supposed to compete with an account that’s flooding MakerWorld with many new models per day, everything is AI generated and the actual models are nothing like the cover image?
…and it seems like I can’t even report these models now since Handy seems to have removed that option. If you won’t let us report issues and you aren’t aggressively dealing with this issue then your platform is simply headed for failure.
Surely you can flag accounts uploading six extremely similaritems in a single day, and anyone with eyes can see that the “layer lines” don’t even remotely make sense with how the model is meant to be printed.
The interesting thing is that when you click on it, even more accounts are displayed as “recommendations”:
I’ll just give two example out of hundreds from one single account:
An AI ring every day: Cover
Reality: Although, admittedly, not that bad, but have nothing to do with the cover. The 3mf was also not made available in a multicolor version.
This is how you lose an audience. People will get fed up with models they can’t actually print or that don’t look like what they thought it would and vote with their feet.
But people also don’t figure this out until after they’ve bought a printer.