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.

Hey Thingiverse users! The Crabitat at MakerBot is live (as seen above) and we need new shell shapes to try out and see if they’ll move in. Join the project to help help hermit crabs. Please upload designs and tag them with “Shellter”.

More info!

Recently there has been a lot of discussion around guns since the lower arm of an AR-15 model went up on Thingiverse. It’s a beautiful model. It’s also the only part of the AR-15 that you can’t just mail order. It’s been possible and legal to make your own firearms since the beginning of the USA, but is Thingiverse the right place for deadly weapons?

We’re discussing this internally and we’re spending time exploring the legalities of firearms on Thingiverse. We want to make sure that Thingiverse can be accessed from schools and is student friendly and we are exploring the implications of weapons on Thingiverse for classrooms.

It’s a controversial subject. For myself, I get a lot of satisfaction from shooting guns in the woods at tin cans, but I also had my best childhood friend commit suicide with a gun he bought by routing around the registration process. I’m not convinced that 3D printing is easier than buying a gun illegally, but it does offer another avenue for weapons to enter the world. Will the next war be armed with 3D printers? One thing that’s for sure, the cat is out of the bag and that cat can be armed with guns made with printed parts.

Before we make a decision, I’d like to get the Thingiverse users’ feedback. We’re going to either change the terms of service or not, but we want to get your feedback before we make that decision.

On Thingiverse you’ll find a poll in the sidebar with three possible choices. Below the choices is a place for you to leave your comments. This poll can only be seen if you’re logged in. Each Thingiverse user can only vote once and once you’ve made your choice, the poll disappears. I hope you’ll take the time to tell us what kind of Thingiverse you want and use the comment section to tell us why.

Here at Thingiverse, we love Flattr. It’s there so that if you like something, you can sign up and click on it’s Flattr button. At the end of the month, you decide a flatrate that you want to give and it divides that amount up between all the things that you Flattr’d!

At Thingiverse we max out every month and give 100 Euros a month and split it between all the things that can be Flattr’d. This month, there are only 76 things to be Flattr’d so each thing uploaded that can be Flattr’d will get at least a Euro from Thingiverse. Woo Hoo!

Money is one of the things that motivates some people so if you like what you see on Thingiverse and you see a Flattr button, Flattr it!

If you are unfamiliar with the DMCA and/or the Safe Harbor provision, there is an excellent FAQ at Chilling Effects. In this day and age, knowing is half the battle.

As a result of this, we’ve also had to learn more about the DMCA. To this end, we’ve updated our legal page with a new DMCA specific policy. Thanks to our friends at Etsy, we were able to quickly add the appropriate language to that document. Please take a read and feel free to give us your feedback and opinions in the comments.

In the interest of openness, you can also read the email that prompted our new policy below the fold. You may have noticed that this design has been getting a lot of attention on Boingboing and imaterialize.

Von: Ulrich Schwanitz <[redacted]>
Datum: 17 February 2011 18:22:51 CET
An: “info@thingiverse.com” , “support@thingiverse.com”
Betreff: Copyright infringement

To whom it may concern:

The nature of your complaint and an exact description of where the material about which you complain is located within the site;

The electronic models “Penrose Triangle by artur83″, located on your site at

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6456

and “Penrose Triangle Illusion by chylld”, located on your site at

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:6474

infringe on our copyright.

In the case of a copyright/trademark dispute, identification of the copyrighted/trademarked work that you claim has been infringed and a statement by you that you have a good-faith belief that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright/trademark owner, its agent, or the law

The copyrighted work that has been infringed is called “Impossible triangle 5″ – 12 cm” and located at

http://www.shapeways.com/model/206411/impossible_triangle_5____12_cm.html

Since I am the copyright owner, I have a good-faith belief that that the disputed use is not authorized by the copyright owner.

Your name, address, telephone number, and email address

Dr. Ulrich Schwanitz
[redacted]

A statement by you that the above information is accurate and, in the case of a copyright/trademark dispute, that you are the owner of the copyright/trademark involved or are authorized to act on behalf of that owner

I hereby certify that the above information is accurate and I am the owner of the copyright involved

Your electronic or physical signature

Signed,
Dr. Ulrich Schwanitz

Intellectual Property (IP) is protected and guarded worldwide. People & companies zealously guard their creations, lawyers lobby governments to draw up ever tougher laws. The offline IP world is intensely formal and legal. Online however these laws are defied more than observed. My favorite example of this is The Pirate Bay’s legal section. Generations are growing globally up without any real affinity for IP.

This illustration characterizes this.

An increasingly more tenable looking compromise will have to be reached between ever harsher laws and an ever more disdainful public. As more and more technology becomes digital more and more IP will be subject to these issues. Even the “e-readers will save the publishing industry” crowd must realize this and hopefully will undertake action soon as the smoke has drifted lazily some distance away from their crack pipes.

The gap between IP owners and the public is not the only worry on the horizon however. The image above not only illustrates the IP gap but also shows us a far greater emerging problem. This problem is one of attribution. The joke above was made by someone and has dutifully spread round the web. But, who made it? Where does this person get their credit, their karma, their reward however intangible? The web’s increasing lack of attribution as a “copy paste” culture takes hold will stifle innovation and creativity even more than gross disrespect of IP laws will.

If your movie gets pirated then you still receive the credit for having made it. Now, I don’t think James Cameron would have make quite as much money from Avatar if he would have had to earn it with an accompanying spoken word tour. But, his having received credit for making the film at least opens doors to various potential business models. If your name is stripped from your creation on the other hand you have no future recourse. The graph above could be by Bacrist or someone else. Crucially, I can not know for sure. Attribution is essential for a world to emerge where global creativity is maximized for everyone. Only then can creativity be rewarded and future creativity be stimulated. Only then will misappropriation be less rewarding than creation.

So what is the solution to this IP gap and the lack of attribution on the web?

Well Thingiverse is. Not only Thingiverse but also Flickr, Deviantart, and similar sites. At first glance these sites are for sharing designs, photographs and art. Fun communities for interaction, props and creativity. But, these sites, as Flickr’s size shows, are becoming some of the largest repositories of intellectual property the world has ever seen. Tens of thousands of people are relying on these sites for safe storage of their files. These sites provide a home for sharing, giving away, showing and selling files. I have to be clear on this: the following does not constitute legal advice.  But it could be possible for an upload to one of these sites to become a “poor man’s copyright” to provide proof of ownership of a particular design, trademark, copyright etc.

Most importantly these sites also spurn creativity while giving the public the appreciation for the effort & individual talent that goes into a photograph, a 3D model or a story. These repositories of IP could be the solution to regulating IP and attribution. By creating indexable verifiable “homes” for designs as well as paths to attribution a balance may well be struck between appreciation & reward of individual IP and  the unencumbered sharing and exchange of information. It is a precarious balance at its present state. If it is maintained and strengthened however the exchange and interplay of creativity will accelerate the spread of knowledge beyond what we could even imagine.

You can follow Joris on twitter here or check out his blog, VoxelFab, on the future of manufacturing here. Joris is the Community Manager of 3D printing service i.materialise.

For awhile now, I’ve wanted to embed an RSS feed of the latest stuff I’ve printed from Thingiverse on MakerBot 131′s page. To kick things off, I asked Zach to implement an RSS feed of the Thing’s I’ve Made page on Thingiverse. It’s been awhile, but I’ve finally gotten around to creating a WordPress plugin that I’m calling Thingiverse Embed.

Whistle by Zaggo

Better Living with MakerBot, Episode 2 You probably all know this situation: You're supposed to ref a soccer game in less than 1/2 an hour and you cannot find your whistle. You're screwed! But from now on you're out of trouble: Fire up your trusty MakerBot and print a new whistle in 26 minutes! This object prints the pea right inside the whistle. Since the pea is connected to the rest of the object only at one tiny point, it's quite easy to break it loose after printing with a small screw driver or tweezers. I probably pushing luck a little bit with bridging the top layer. So far I printed the whistle twice without problems. As always, I added the object as .obj file (wavefront), which can be imported into AOI and Blender. The gcode file is the one I used to print the whistle on the image. The gcode file contains an experimental raft with additional "blobs" on the second (interface) layer. You might want to generate your own gcode file with skeinforge settings, tested with your MakerBot. Be sure to setup Skeinforge to create an (almost) watertight object, since the whistle won't whistle if it's full of holes... [Update] I added a second version of the whistle. "Whistle_v2" is an attempt to fine tune the object a little bit. My brother (he's a pipe organ builder) gave me some tips how to optimize the whistles mouth. Whistle v2 should start whistle with less airflow than v1 and thus be (somewhat) less loud. I also downsized the pea a little bit and changed the shape of the lanyard loop. Whistle v1 is still available for reference and also since it's more "tested"...Since you blow the whistle with your mouth, be aware of possible problems concerning "food safety" of printed plastic. See the blog post "For foodies out there" ( blog.thingiverse.com/2009/09/13/for-foodies-out-there/ ) for more information.

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Check it out! you can embed snippets from Thingiverse and make a cool sidebar widget! You can see this example on the page for MakerBot 131.

SketchChair from Greg Saul on Vimeo.

This is the tool I’ve been dreaming of ever since we got a lasercutter. So cool! SketchChair!

I am going to fill my apartment with this type of furniture!

Cathal Garvey, the man who brought you the makerbottable dremelfuge and micro-lathe needs a mousetrap and he’s willing to pay $25 for someone to design it.

I have a problem. There lives in my house a tiny mouse, and as I am friend to all animals I wish him no harm.

The live mousetrap I tried didn’t work: crafty mouse escaped it repeatedly. I also invented a few wacky methods involving pitfalls, narrow bottles full of bloating foods and even tried to suck him out onto a vacuum cleaner head covered with cheesecloth. No avail!

I am offering a bounty for something:
$25 to the first design that catches the mouse. It must:
- Not harm the mouse
- Be printable on a Makerbot
- Work

Mouse get!

Whichever design Cathal chooses, we’re going to sweeten the deal and send them a MakerBot t-shirt if they will upload the design to Thingiverse under an open license.

Can you build a better (MakerBottable) mousetrap?

2-Dominic-Muren-Part-1 – Dorkbot Seattle Feb 3, 2010 from christopher prosser on Vimeo.

3-Dominic-Part-2 Dorkbot Seattle Feb 3, 2010 from christopher prosser on Vimeo.

Dominic Muren is an occassional contributor to the Thingiverse blog and he gave a great presentation on personal manufacturing at the Seattle Dorkbot! This is very much worth the watch! Check it!