Back in 2008, I had started archiving dxf files on a domain I wasn’t using. Zach and I were hanging out a lot at NYCResistor and we started talking about a future of downloadable things. It was a Saturday in 2008 and we agreed that a free library of digital designs for actual things was a good enough idea to spend an hour on. We got the domain name and Zach started coding. I started the blog up and Thingiverse was born. Our friends started uploading things.
I decided that we needed a terms of use and so I went and looked at Blip.tv’s and Etsy’s and Youtube’s and I basically copied them and changed the names to MakerBot. This made the document sound very official. Laywers the world over are shaking their head scornfully in my direction upon hearing this, I’m sure. Thankfully, I copied the part that says that we can change the terms of use or we’d be stuck with those terms!
Thingiverse is a website that’s growing up. We’ve had DMCA takedowns, flamewars, and always more things. It’s time for Thingiverse to have a more grown-up set of policies that aren’t cut-and-pasted from around the internet.
We’ve made some changes to the secondary licenses that let you specify what other Thingiverse users can do with the files for your Things. We’re dropping the “All Rights Reserved” option, which has caused a lot of confusion in the past, and we’re replacing the Public Domain option with the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication license, which adds legal protections for jurisdictions where there is no concept of public domain.
Dropping the “All Rights Reserved” is kinda a big deal. When people used that license on Thingiverse it made it so that you could no longer click “I Made One” on that page. This caused confusion and it just turns out that license doesn’t work with Thingiverse. RMS weighed in and told us we should take this license option down and we’re excited to make it so you can’t use traditional copyright on Thingiverse going forward. With this change, we are transitioning into being an even more powerful place to share your work. Everything on Thingiverse going forward will be under some sort of open license that gives others permission to download and copy it.
Effective immediately, we’ve updated our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and Intellectual Property Policies. The new docs are in serious legal language and for that I’m sorry. They were crafted by actual lawyers and a lot of conversation and consideration went into them. As much as I’m secretly proud of the days where we could just hit “ctrl + c” and get away with it, I’m glad that we’re now in a place where we’ve got the right legal language in place to support Thingiverse going forward.