Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Ebay Shop Scrapes Thingiverse, Sells Designs In Violation of Creative Commons (all3dp.com)

Posted by timothy on from the thou-shalt-not dept.

He Who Has No Name writes: A little over a week ago, Thingiverse user Loubie posted Sad Face! to Thingiverse, protesting the use — without permission — of their designs and those of others by JustPrint3D, an Ebay seller marketing physical prints of the designs in question (over 2,000 by some counts). Despite a terse and legally shaky denial of any wrongdoing by JustPrint3D, there are obviously multiple violations of various iterations of the Creative Commons licenses (several forms of the CC license are options for Thingiverse uploaders to assign to their Things when uploading, and one is the default). Now MakerBot itself is wading into the uproar firmly on the side of its users, and has released a statement mentioning potential legal action.

8 of 138 comments (clear)

  1. Empty by pcjunky · · Score: 5, Informative

    Their Ebay store is empty.

    1. Re:Empty by The+Eight-Bit+Link · · Score: 4, Informative

      I'm guessing eBay went in and slapped them to prevent it from crawling back to them, or the seller closed shop and is waiting for it all to blow over.

  2. But the license does NOT ban profit by mi · · Score: 4, Informative
    As I type this, the license link on the product's page leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use:

    You are free to:
    Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format
    Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.
    The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

    What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?

    --
    In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
    1. Re:But the license does NOT ban profit by He+Who+Has+No+Name · · Score: 5, Informative

      Mixed in among the 2,000 odd items lifted by JustPrint3D - not just Sad Face! - were various forms of the CC license, including Non-Commercial. Beyond simply profiting, JustPrint3D wasn't providing compliant attribution on anything. It was a mess.

    2. Re:But the license does NOT ban profit by samkass · · Score: 5, Informative

      As I type this, the license link on the product's page leads to the variant of the Creative Commons License, that explicitly allows commercial use:


      You are free to:

              Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

              Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

              The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as you follow the license terms.

      What's the problem? Did the author pick wrong license by mistake — and will they apologize to the folks now harmed by eBay's overreaction?

      You forgot the "Under the Following Terms" bit, which is the whole point!

      Under the following terms:

      Attribution — You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

      No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits.

      --
      E pluribus unum
    3. Re:But the license does NOT ban profit by Khyber · · Score: 4, Informative

      You must not understand CC. Since I happen to have various works licensed under it, let me explain it to you:

      If you don't attribute, you implicitly do not have permission. It's that simple.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  3. Re:"scrapes"? by Pseudonymous+Powers · · Score: 4, Informative

    "Scraping" refers to "copying the content off of some website". It is adapted from the older term "screen scraping", which is copying the data from someone else's visual presentation of this data. This usually implies that you don't have access to the underlying data in a more convenient form (such as files or a database or an API), so you have to reconstruct it from some source that either wasn't intended to promote the efficient transfer of the data or was actually designed to make that transfer as difficult as possible, for IP reasons.

  4. Pretty much a non-issue due to licensing. by kruug · · Score: 4, Informative

    This was also covered about a week ago on HackADay: http://hackaday.com/2016/02/22... "Most of the uploaded CAD models on Thingiverse are done under the Creative Commons license, which is pretty clear in its assertion that anyone can profit from the work. This would seem to put the eBay store owner in the clear for selling the work, but it should be noted that he’s not properly attributing the work to the original creator. " The only part that he's violating is that there's no attribution.