I have had 2 models removed, an old model of mine from 2020 and a model made in collaboration with another Maker who is the author. Both models are sold for a few dollars on various stl aggregators and some idiot reports my model as copyright! I’ll start by saying that I have all the original files and also the collaborative model, the authorization and the citation of zsculptors in the post, but my models are easily removed!! Now I’m really tired! I make works available to everyone, there are those who steal the models and resell them and then I have to see my model removed for copyright on Makerworld? This is truly SHAMEFUL!! And despite the evidence, I don’t see my models restored!!!
Furthermore, I report many models that are clearly remixed and copied, without even reporting the original author and these models always remain there.
It seems to me that Makerworld is starting to manage things in a really random and absurd way!
I will no longer post my patterns where hours and days of work were needed, but only ■■■■, in fact I will start copying too like everyone else does!!! And I don’t care about the stitches, it’s a matter of principle!!!
Also the other my reported model inserted in a file aggregator!!! Absurd!
Fake website where a facebook, youtube and instagram account is indicated that do not exist! And there is no way to claim the model other than a dubious email from google
I guess one thing we might want to look at is watermarking the images in some way.
There are watermarks that add special noise to an image that we don’t notice but computers can read that persists/can be read even after edits and cropping. There’s also the intrusive watermarks that are clearly visible.
Won’t stop them but makes it easier to establish ownership/provenance.
Although this adds another workload on honest designers, I fear there’s really no way around it.
Perhaps not just the images but even the stl/stp/3mf files themselfes.
It does however give rise to another race: Rippers rushing to provide images and stolen files with watermarks before the original designers have done so…
Sigh…
Yeah. Stuff that’s already out is kind of a lost cause except it would prevent new thefts. It would be most effective on new stuff, but unfortunately true - more workload for designers.
And some do tag their models with features hidden in them. You can spot that when slicing but the thieves probably don’t bother.
As the adage goes - why we can’t have nice things. There are just some people who see people like us as fools and marks to be fleeced.
In images it’s surprising how hard it is to get rid of a digital watermark. I played around with it some years back when I wanted to protect some other stuff. Once you watermark an image, you can crop, blur, change contrast, etc, quite a way before the ability to read the watermark is lost. It was very resilient. You could also tune how deeply it was embedded. The images would get noisier the more strong the watermark. But where you couldn’t detect it by eye, it was still there. But make big enough edits and it can be unreadable.