As 3-D Printing Become More Accessible, Copyright Questions Arise
One of the more popular things on the site is a bust of Yoda, and some designers on Thingiverse are doing amazing things with it. Someone turned it into a vase for flowers, another used math (fractals) to hollow it out in an incredibly beautiful, illegal way.
"Yoda is not just something we can copy and duplicate — Yoda is protected by copyright," says Michael Weinberg, a lawyer at Public Knowledge, a group that advocates for an open Internet.
He recently wrote a couple of white papers on 3-D printing, copying and the law. He says even when designers take an object like that and change it, it's still legally protected.
"That at least triggers a copyright analysis," he says. "So the question is sort of two fold."
The first question that arises is copyright violation, Weinberg says. Someone might be worried about copyright infringement when creating some incredible Yoda bust. But the real question is how the owners, Lucasfilm and Disney, react to that, he adds.
So far, the two companies haven't done anything. But the era of benign neglect on Thingiverse may be coming to an end.
'Sue The Genie Back Into The Bottle'
Recently, Moulinsart, which owns the rights to the cartoon Tintin, served Thingiverse with a Millennium Digital Copyright Act takedown notice. The company insisted that the site remove printing designs of Tintin's cartoon moon rocket.
Weinberg says Moulinsart was well within its legal rights, but he thinks the move was a mistake. People printing out copies of Tintin's rocket were the company's mega-fans, he says. Instead of attacking them, Weinberg adds, the company would have been better off selling digital designs to print out Tintin himself.
Moulinsart didn't respond to our request for comment.
"The technology is coming whether we like it or not," Weinberg says. "And so, as a CEO of one of these companies you can spend a lot of time and money trying to sue it out of existence — and sue the genie back into the bottle — or you can spend that same time and money and apply it towards finding a way to use the technology to your advantage."