Den of Thieves

Thanks for joining me on Rob's Rants. This is a blog section where I basically bitch about things that are on my mind this week pertaining to anything and everything. This week, I wanted to vent about something that has been really irking me lately... design thieves.

3D Printing has been around a lot longer than people realize. Actually dating as far back as 1983 with the SLA-1 by Chuck Hull. However the first commercially available retail printer for the home was actually produced by Makerbot in 2009. A cumbersome thing that gave people more aggravation with 3d printing than actual joy. I however made my debut into the field around the time of covid. Absolutely bored out of my mind in the house, unemployed and quarantined my first machine was an absolutely mess of just breaking and fixing, breaking and fixing, however, that's what I love doing, as so many people also shared in that love.

Initially the concept of 3D Printing to most people was some sort of black magic or mystical art form. When 3D printed pieces were shown to people in the general public there were oooo's and ahhhhh's over how something like that could be created in your house. Eventually however 3D printing became so commonplace with companies like bambu labs and creality making machines that could sit in your living room and allow you to upload a file with an app from your phone. Now it's a common kids toy you can purchase off amazon, with the Tina2C, a machine my nephew owns and loves using every day of every week.

With the ever increasing popularity of 3D printed products, businesses started to emerge that sold exclusively 3d printed products. Two classifications were born, creators and makers. There were those who designed impressive 3d models of functional parts, figures and kids toys. Millions upon millions of dollars were suddenly available to be made with simply the push of a button. Those who designed the files made tens of thousands of dollars per month by keeping designs behind paywalls like Patreon which requires subscriptions to actually access those files.

However, like with all things...the thieves came. Not just foreign counterfeiters copying designs and mass producing them in big factories in shanghai, but actual people like you and me that went out of their way to not just steal a design file and call it their own, but make spinoffs of that design to make their own profitable business without ever giving credit to the original designer, in an attempt to steal away customers. Thievery now is at an all time high. This week alone, 5 of our designs from our commercially licensed creators had their designs stolen. Using AI modelers like meshy and to tripo; they take a picture of the original design, upload it, and within 3 minutes it spits out an almost exact copy of that design. And the funny thing about it? Every time these thieves are called out, they feign ignorance like they had no idea that this exact mesh for mesh replica of someone's design was already created by someone else. Unironically, it happened to us just last week where our entire listing for the Liberty Eagle was copied on Etsy by a company called "ClikWorx" from Alabama. When politely asked to remove our photos from their listing, they again feign ignorance and then try to flip the script claiming it was OUR fault, claiming there is no such thing as IP infringement on photos. This is why you see now all our images are heavily watermarked.

I take a lot of pride in the fact that we support our designers financially to further their great creations and designs that everyone loves. Every design you see on our page is either through a revolving commercial license, designed in house or purchased out right with commercial rights. Please people, stop doing this, for the sake of the community you know that what you are doing is wrong. It devalues the entire industry of 3D printing and makes it far less fun for people to create designs. We need our creators!

/end rant