There are people who steal photos and projects on makerworld and resell them on Etsy despite the non-commercial license. Here is one of them.
Check that there isn’t also one of your projects and report it to Ersy
You can ask the seller to remove the project otherwise if he doesn’t, you can report to Etsy by following the procedure. 2 of my works have been removed from Etzy
Unfortunately this is very true. So nothing against “China” but it’s even worse if your model/design makes it over there and is used because they absolutely don’t follow intellectual property or creative common policy’s… it’s free game…
This is also very true within the United States since there isn’t anything statued over 3D printing copyrights. I’ve looked deeply into this because of our business. This is also why I didn’t and still don’t plan to release anything anywhere else. Our files and work is done strictly with clients so it’s end to end protected and the files aren’t anywhere but our encrypted work drive.
It would cost an individual tens of thousands of dollars and resources to go after 1 person for copyright infringement. The only people able to do it are major corporations such as disney, nintendo, lego, etc. Of course you’d have to gain their attention first.
All in all, if you don’t want anything stolen. Don’t give anyone something to steal.
It’s frustrating to see this happening, especially when they’ve also used your photos of the models! I think contacting Etsy to have them taken down would just end up being a cat and mouse game as even if they remove it, another will pop back up.
I have suggested a couple of updates to Bambu which they’ve acknowledged and sent over to the relevant dept.
Prevent users from being able to copy the model photos from your site. There are ways to prevent this that can be written into the website code.
Stop allowing users to be able to export to STL from Bambu Studio when they have selected to copyright their models, or at least give the uploader the option. This would help to prevent this from happening and still allow genuine users to print the models.
I’m going to work through my images and watermark them, which I can already seen a number of users have started doing.
There is no foolproof way to prevent this. You can make it somewhat more time-consuming, but that’s about it. Ultimately, the image has to be transferred to the user’s computer to be displayed. Mechanisms aimed at ‘preventing’ image download, such as blocking right-click actions, using canvases, or employing tiled images, can be easily circumvented. However, these measures might still serve to reduce image theft. It’s worth noting that these approaches also inconvenience legitimate users, and I have not encountered any cases where addressing this problem has had a significant impact. And will this deter people from selling stolen models on Etsy? Probably not.
How does this prevent individuals from printing the model and selling it on Etsy? If anything, this primarily affects legitimate users. The 3MF file essentially acts as a zip file, containing the STL file within as a .model file. It only takes seconds to open the 3MF file and extract the model.
Watermarks at least make it a slight bit easier to identify who own its. But from what I have seen, the thieves don’t care about watermarks and generally upload the full image even when it would’ve been possible to trim down.
One thing came to my mind:
As Makerworld focuses on their own eco system they should be able to provide only the G-Code for the prints. They could keep the 3MF and STL files secure on their server. But I think this would take away too much from the user experience as it would not be possible to change anything.