GrabCAD Community User Group

It would be great to hear people's thoughts and suggestion for how to solve this problem.

This is a very long and ongoing debate across other CAD communities as well. One of the famous case was that of a CAD model from Thingverse which got sold in ebay platform.

http://consulting.stratasys.com/2016/02/cad-copyright-and-creative-commons-the-infringement-saga-continues/

According to "User submission" section in website terms of GRABCAD.

"User Submissions made publicly available will not be deemed (or treated as) confidential or sensitive to you."

Since this is a case of stealing and selling it to third party, you and rest of the members whose models have been downloaded can report that member.

This has been a hot topic for some time, not just in the CAD sharing communities but for every design operation that offers a product to the public. My opinion, after nearly 25 years of design engineering across multiple disciplines, is this...

If your product is simple enough that it can be produced without any of the pertinent data one would actually need to ENGINEER it, then you may not have anything all that special on your hands in the first place. If it's conceptual and you think it's of value, then it should be protected at the very least, with a provisional patent.

You have to protect your IP if you truly believe the design to hold value. That means, the information needed to manufacture the product; the GD&T, the feature controls, the coatings and tolerances and all the other stuff that is necessary to producing something worth building. If you don't and haven't safeguarded it, then put it on a public site? IMO, you didn't think much of it in the first place.

I agree with both of you @cmalco & @Logan but those people who steal cad models will still earn money right ?

Yes, that potential is always there.

You can preempt it though, whether your goal is monetary or not. Simply post your models there first, before placing them on GrabCad. Protect any IP that makes the design tick; the materials, heat treat, tolerances, coatings, stress relieving, etc.. Work out a provisional patent and cover all your bases.

If you're simply protecting 'models', then a preemptive stance is likely the only one that is going to work. Laws are only as effective as the ability to enforce them...

I have to agree with cmalco.

Nobody likes it when their stuff is "stolen", but we are talking about a CAD model which is uploaded to a public website with a giant DOWNLOAD button.

Preventing the theft will come at the expense of other legitimate users. I've seen many people upload amazing looking assemblies, but they only post the rendering, and one or two of the dozens of parts needed. Absolutely useless.

I think most people have a problem with the idea that someone else is generating profit by reselling these free models.

Maybe it would help to see the theft as a tax on stupidity? If someone is stupid enough to pay for a model which is freely available, then I guess they deserve to be paying for it.

On a similar note, if I get paid by the hour, and downloading a model from GRABCAD saves me N hours of time. Am I not in a sense getting a financial gain by making use of the model? Does this scenario differ a lot from actually reselling the model on other sites?

I'm going to start a website that charges people for air. Payment plans will range from per breath taken (you'll need to wear a breath meter), all the way to lifetime plans which offer significant savings.

I hope my previous comments didn't come across too harshly. As someone who had to learn his lesson the hard way on this, I can surely empathize with what Dhana is saying. The world becomes a lot easier to understand once we accept the fact that everyone's ethics are not calibrated to the same standard and even when they are, some will do the unthinkable where money is involved.

If someone steals my Naboo ship, cup or pot for monetary reasons, I'm okay with it. :)

If I put something up here that I truly care about and may want to make money with one day, you can rest assured it will be just enough to get the concept of the design across and nothing more.

Like FredSWUG, I have used numerous GrabCad models in my own designs as a means of saving time. I mean, why spend hours modeling something that someone is offering up for free? I didn't use them to make 'money' but yes, if time = money, and it often does, then we've certainly injected some gray into our black and white with this one?

If a model is available from a manufacturer, I will use it for the very same reason. That said... what most of them are starting to do, for the very reasons we've brought up here, is offering 'simplified' models. I'm always expressing to our guys, because we often work to very specific weight limitations for 1-person lift etc, is to not trust the model to yield a correct weight. To always check the model to manufacturer's specifications and adjust it accordingly. Why? Because a lot of the circuitry, hydraulics and other internal components, are often missing or represented as dummy components.

Another example of companies protecting their IP. One you can use on your own designs.

I just now created and made the best 3D printer I have ever designed. It cost me serious design and build time. I actually designed it especially for the Grabcad community. I was aiming to get my first badge on my account with this one.

However I am in distress now, I don't know what to do after reading a comment a couple of weeks back in the Grabcad Community User Group (How to avoid theft of 3D models comment) about china stealing thousands of users uploads and selling them for production. Truthfully I am quite devastated putting all this design and build time in to a project and now I am worried to upload it.

This 3D printer is more than a match for others on the market. What if someone else rips off my work and then makes a giant success story out of my design.

I have to sit here and watch them get rich knowing that is my work. I just don't think I could take a sucker punch like that !

I may have to just sit on it until I get the time to go through all the creative commons copyright or something.

I don't know what to do any advice would be helpful.

Xgentec,

If I had the next generation of 3D printer figured out, I'd look to produce and market the product, or sell the design.

Creative commons, copyright, patents, and other protections are nice, but they offer no guarantee your design, or pieces of it will not be stolen. Such protections can grant you a legal means to fight back, but that can lead to very high legal costs.

I'm not sure about China stealing thousands of uploads and selling them for production. Most of the "theft" is in the form of downloading free models from GrabCAD, then uploading the models on other sites which sell the models.

The majority of models on GrabCAD are not production ready, it might be best to think of then as concept models, art, and practice parts.

Hello Fred, thanks for the comment.

It is far from the next gen of 3d printer, It is a brilliant home and business printer. it was originally designed for everyone in the gragcad community, easy to move around, very very solid, strong, very precise, large build area, based on cnc technology and reasonably cheap in design. Ive been running it in the lab now for 3 months solid every day and I use it for professional level prototype printing.

I think I am going to leave it a few months and release it on Grabcad anyway.

Thanks for the feedback Fred much appreciated.

All you are saying is very interesting.

For my part, GrabCad has helped me very often, the idea of sharing work with other to improve our possibilitys is of great importance.

We live in a world of money, but there is something else much more stronger.

For some people, Grabcad can be a way of showing there talent. So we are rewarded, for some it is a way to seek peoples interest, so their are rewarded.

Maybe the better way not to be stolen is to put just part of a product, if the aim is to seek your own selling profit.

Hello Christie,

Thank you for the comment, I completely agree sharing work and ideas is of great importance. This was originally designed for the grab cad community to help others get started so I have decided to release it soon.

Mikk OlliSTAFF Mar 7, 2018

It would be great to hear people's thoughts and suggestion for how to solve this problem.

The best, and most logical way to combat this problem would be to eliminate fake profiles. Make sure that every member of GrabCAD is an actual person living in an actual location. This means that a member engaged in 'illegal activities' can be tracked, persecuted (in theory), warned, deleted, etc.

But, for whatever reasons, GrabCAD is infatuated with boasting of having millions of users, even though the statistics clearly shows that the majority are fake profiles and a small minority of dedicated users constitute the community.

Please get rid of the pertinently false profiles, starting with the good people from Antigua and Barbuda, such as:

https://grabcad.com/ttutr.s.sgh.ff-1

https://grabcad.com/makeleleprou_u.gamer-1

https://grabcad.com/hab.ich-1

https://grabcad.com/thomasfdsg.hannigangfdgffd-2

https://grabcad.com/sss.ssss-22

https://grabcad.com/sdfdsf.wfdfd-1

https://grabcad.com/spam.spam-22

https://grabcad.com/hjfgdgvf.gghg-1

https://grabcad.com/hvrwv.wtftfbu-1

https://grabcad.com/hvrwv.wtftfbu-1

https://grabcad.com/hkos.fgt-2

https://grabcad.com/123.123-197

https://grabcad.com/assasdffa.asdvqa-1

https://grabcad.com/asd.dsa-152

https://grabcad.com/cherry.cola-1

https://grabcad.com/dfgzdfdzf.xcfbdfzg-1

https://grabcad.com/fda.adad-1

https://grabcad.com/f.f-318

and so on ad nauseam. There are literally 100s of pages of this nonsense. They probably represent people who have wanted to download something anonymously. In what possible way do these non-entities contribute to the community?

When I hear of someone stealing models from GrabCAD, this image comes to mind:



I also came across the sale of my models by Chinese sites. And not only Chinese. Once I came to the 3D printing studio and saw that my grip were being printed for rifles. I ask the owner, buy well? Says yes, only this order is 50 pieces. After a conversation where he told how difficult it was for him to make a model. Then he offered me to buy my own model. I say ok, but I need to look (rotate) before buying. The fact is that I leave a digital footprint in all of its publicly available models. But this was not necessary. The owner opened the folder "With my own developments" which was called my nickname on GrabCAD and in which all my developments from the site lay. Here is such a funny and a bit sad story.

I watch very often. Some user follow me, usually from China or India (No avatar, 0 models, 0 comments, etc.) After that, all my models get +1 downloads. Wrote GrabCAD, how to deal with it, but perhaps the letter did not come, or they do not care.

I understand what you mean about the digital footprint in your models, I've seen several members watermark their renderings, and 3D models.

I spent ~10 minutes editing this STL file to remove the watermark from inside of the cup to see how difficult it was. It was easy.