You are prohibited from sharing,
sub-licensing, selling, renting,
hosting, transferring, or distributing
the digital file, 3D printed versions,
or any other derivative works of this
object in any digital or physical
format, including remixes of this
object.
I reread it a few times, and every time it tells me that if I print a model distributed under this license, then I am not allowed to share or give away the plastic thing that I get from the printer. Because it is a “3D printed version”, and if I give it to someone then I am sharing or distributing it. What am I missing? I am asking seriously, not nit-picking, and I do hope that it’s my understanding of English (or Legalese) that is wrong. Otherwise, what, I can’t print a thing for someone, or even share it with someone?
To be clear, I am not asking about the intent or the spirit of the license, only about what it actually says.
There seems to be a common misconception here that a license is a list of things you can’t do. So for example, if it said “STANDARD DIGITAL LICENCE” and then had an empty box below it you could do anything you want with the file. In other words you start with all the rights and the license removes some of them.
But that isn’t how licenses work.
You start with no rights. To have any, the license needs to grant them to you. Those rights can come with restrictions. But unless the license grants you permission to use the copyrighted work in some way that is otherwise protected you don’t have a right to use it that way.
But why, why would you want to give the model to people under such conditions? It’s sorta like you want people to use the thing, but only people who have a printer. Families and friends are not welcome.
As a user, it means I am only going to print it if it’s something I will never show or tell others about. There are things like that in my life, but not many, and I can’t think of any that are 3d-printable.
Realistically, if there is a model on makerworld among those exclusive ones, that people like, a good percentage of them will violate the license terms. They will print a thing and gift it to someone, because it’s so awesome. It’s built into the license, and now we aren’t talking about bad people who want to profit off work of others for free, we are talking about good people who use printers to print nice things and share the joy with friends and loved ones. Or print a thing for the kids classroom/animal shelter/insert your favorite do-little-good-for-others thing. What is the point of that part of the license?
[ADDED]
To be clear, I am not talking about big(gish)-scale operations where you print tens or thousands copies, even if it’s for charitable purposes. If you do things at scale, you might as well ask for permission or pay for it, doing good costs money. I am talking about printing one cute panda and giving it to someone, or printing a cool gadget for my kitchen which I share with others. That sort of stuff, that nobody will ever think that it may not be allowed.
Here’s exclusive models that I see on the website, the first ones. Shower thing: don’t print it if you don’t live alone. Cute thingies: don’t give them to anyone. I mean, seriously, that’s what the license says?
For the laptop cable thing it kind of makes sense. Life’s tough, if you want a cool gadget, buy it or buy a bambu printer. Not sure how much sense that makes, but okay. But others, especially the useless in practice things whose purpose is to bring joy by looking cute or awesome, how does “you must only have and use it yourself” make any sense?
And that child better buy her own printer to print the thingies for her hair! (That might be an adult owning the printer, I don’t know.)
In the US, Section 106 of the Copyright Act would make printing something under makerworld’s “standard digital file license” actionable. What country are you in? It might be different there. In the US, all of the rights belong to the copyright holder exclusively by default, they don’t need to explicitly say “X is not allowed” in order to keep and exercise their rights under the Act.
I don’t think that if you (hypothetical, not you personally), a copyright holder, upload a model to makerworld and I print it, then you can successfully sue me, because your explicit intent in that upload was to allow me to print it. (Talking about US here).
As a copyright owner you have exclusive rights to decide what you want to do with your thing, and by uploading it to makerworld you provide a license for me to do stuff with it. Just like if, as a copyright owner, you sell me your book, I am allowed to read it and even sell it, that doesn’t in any way strip you of your rights as a copyright holder, and I am still not breaking any law. (IANAL, obviously.)
It’s very much possible that the license terms legally aren’t valid, IANAL, but it’s not obvious that they prohibit printing. They definitely don’t say so, and the whole makerworld.com + license combination imply that I can indeed print it. (As long as I comply with what the license spells out.)
What you are talking about here is an “implied license”. And you are right, in the absence of an actual license their would be an implied license to do what you would normally expect someone to do when you supply the file to them.
But there is a license.
As a copyright owner you have exclusive rights to decide what you want to do with your thing, and by uploading it to makerworld you provide a license for me to do stuff with it.
Unless that is in the terms and conditions of using makerworld, of course not! Uploading files to anywhere doesn’t give everyone in the universe a “right” to do whatever they want with it, that is the fundamental reason copyright protection exists!
Just like if, as a copyright owner, you sell me your book, I am allowed to read it and even sell it, that doesn’t in any way strip you of your rights as a copyright holder, and I am still not breaking any law. (IANAL, obviously.)
You are correct, that is section 109, commonly known as the First Use Doctrine. The fault in your reasoning is that reading a book is not the same as copying a book. You can read the makerworld STL file as often as you like, but you don’t have a license to make prints from it.
It’s very much possible that the license terms legally aren’t valid, IANAL, but it’s not obvious that they prohibit printing.
A license doesn’t need to prohibit anything, if it doesn’t say “you can use my copyrighted work in way X” then you cannot legally use the work in way X.
No creator will sue a user who download his model from a 3D model sharing platform and print it , nor if the user gives the printed model to someone as a gift
I have always used the Standard Digital License with all my designs, from the very beginning.
My intent was to have others enjoy the designs for themselves, not intending for them to sell the printed models (like on Esty), and not copy my files and post them on another site as their own. I don’t want someone making money off my work without my permission.
In my opinion the license can only act as a benchmark, especially when it comes to copyright , it is a mark of respect if you adhere to them and basically has no legal standing , because most of 3d printing is a copyright infringement that id assume is assessed as unharmful to proprierte`s
Imagine I start a business buying and selling STL’s as a venue for creators to make money, lets call it Fab366. Things are going great, but then I decide I want even more money. I have the STL’s from the creators, in fact I even have them with their permission. So what I do is I start printing their designs on etsy. The creators get upset and start yelling about law and licenses and other unimportant piffle. You know what I say to them? I say “Come on, the main use of a STL is not to be read by a human and a 3MF even less. Those are instruction for a 3D printer on how to print the 3d model.”.
How well will that go over?
To make this clearer, it’s perfectly reasonable to have licensing that includes distribution of STL files but not their rights to use them. Your argument that rights to use files “goes with” the files because that is “main use” means that it would never be possible run a business like Fab366 that didn’t include the right for Fab366 to also print models. Or how about a movie studio and a movie distributor? The “main use” of a movie print is to project it, does that mean a movie distributor could also open a chain of movie theaters and show the prints for free?
For whatever reason they chose the makerworld license doesn’t allow for personal use at all. It may seem stupid or be an or oversight, but it’s perfectly legitimate and it’s what the license says. Someone could, for example, upload models to makerworld and have them online just for their personal ease of use. Or they could upload them as advertising with the intention of selling rights to print them separately. These are perfectly valid and allowed uses of makerworld, and fully supported by the SDL and makerworld terms of use. And they’d be fully within their rights to chase after people who violated the makerworld SDL on their prints by printing them.
That’s just not true. If you tell me “here, you can print it, but you must also honor these license terms”, then it’s totally legal for me to do just that. And that’s what the model designer plus makerworld tell me.
That’s why I specifically asked about what the license says, and not about the intent. The intent, as far as I can see, usually is exactly like you described, makers want users to print and enjoy their models, but they want to be in control of commercial distribution (simplifying here, ignoring other makers). That’s totally fair and reasonable, and as a user of makerworld, it works great for me. But the license is more restrictive than that! When I download your model, the license is what you tell me, in writing, and that trumps what I think you think.
To be perfectly clear, I do not expect to be sued for giving someone a cute panda I printed. But if you, collective makers, and Bambu don’t take the license terms seriously (as in, users should actually do what the license says), then what’s the point?
That’s just not true. If you tell me “here, you can print it, but you must also honor these license terms”, then it’s totally legal for me to do just that. And that’s what the model designer plus makerworld tell me.
I’m not sure what you are saying isn’t true since you didn’t include it. But your rights to use a copyrighted work in the presence of an explicit license are not the union of “what you think it should be” and the license, it is just the license. You seem to be making that point yourself here:
That’s why I specifically asked about what the license says, and not about the intent. … When I download your model, the license is what you tell me, in writing, and that trumps what I think you think .
The whole disagreement is about that and the following (which is the same thing really).
This sentence has a correct part and an incorrect part. The correct part is about “what I think it shoudl be”, the incorrect part is “it is just the license”. The license does not exist in isolation, it only exists in context, and it complements that context. If you print it and post it on your wall, then whatever it says does not matter unless you point to your wall when you give me a thumbdrive with your STL file. If you post your file on a website and say “public domain” there, then the license on your wall doesn’t matter at all.
Here we have Joe Themaker who posted his model on makerworld.com. Makerworld.com tells me that I can download and print it, provided that I respect the terms of the license, and here’s the license text. The license text does not prohibit printing, so I can print it, because the website tells me I can, and it does not contradict the license terms.
Regrettably, we are armchair-lawyering about something that the license doesn’t say, while the really bad part is what the license actually says, but that’s probably got lost in this thread.
Yup, sorry about that. But the 1st sentence of the 1st reply you got was pretty much the answer, you did read the license correctly and it means what it says. There isn’t much more to say on that subject.
What is amusing is that Makerworld can’t actually change that license (either to add “personal use” or “ok to give away”) because that license was exactly what the creator selected and meant. They explicitly picked it. They’ll need to add another license with different terms.
If you are thinking that a creator could add terms to the listing itself like “ok to give away” they could, but Makerworld would be insane to allow license modification in the listing text and a user would be gravely ill advised to rely on any such modification.
