Occupy Thingiverse?

[futurejames 0]

So I read this morning that Makerbot is now claiming ownership to all models on thingiverse. People are drawing attention to this using the "Occupy Thingiverse" . See:

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:30808

I thought I would post this here because a) Many of us have submitted designs to thingiverse and b) Ultimaker has uploaded their Ultimaker plans to thingiverse as well.

[Daid 306]

It's a bit different then that. Their license doesn't claim ownership, but it does gives them certain rights that are "dodgy", like using the models without attribution, even if the selected license requires it.

This license is also not new, as the internet-archive shows it had this claim in it before. People just noticed it now. It would be wise to wait for a response from Makerbot.

[futurejames 0]

I understand they require certain rights in order to host and distribute material. If I recall correctly, some of these legal changes were to address those concerns.

However, there's also a way to write it up which specifies that it requires these rights only for hosting. I don't see any of that kind of legalese in there at all. And I'm not sure how legal it is for them to just retroactively change licenses that users granted to them.

Do I think Makerbot is a sinister company that's looking to take over all my objects? No.

But, I didn't think Sun was a sinister company either. Then Oracle bought their stuff and started acting belligerent. What's to say someone won't buy out Makerbot and do the same?

In the meantime I just don't feel comfortable hosting my objects there, until things are very spelled out. I'd feel even better if it was a community driven site that couldn't be just taken over by one corporate entity.

[fuchs 0]

MakerBot came up with a statement, read here: http://www.makerbot.com/blog/2012/09/20/fixing-misinformation-with-information/

"Could we make that more user friendly? Yes, but lawyers cost money and making it simple for people to understand will cost many hours of lawyer time."

*sighs*

[jeremie 13]

Don't they now have millions of VC $ to get this sorted out quickly without losing many of the designers?... Yep, plenty of money to pay for lawyers... unless these are the very same lawyers that came with the brilliant article 3.2 in their ToS, and probably at the time they already knew that the next move would be to drop the open source approach (VC putting big bucks in a company do want some safeguards obviously, this is normal from their point of view) :evil:

Sorry, but in between I still will wait or look for another place to claim my intellectual property. Bah.