Oddly enough the many legal and moral issues surrounding CAD have never much crossed my mind before reading Michael Weinberg's posts on Just3DPrint. It seems unthinkable for someone to blatantly take pre existing designs and sell them with out permission from the original designers. With the ready availability of CAD files on the internet being a fairly recent thing, many of the legal issues are only just being discovered. Being no expert in legal matters I can hardly attest to the legality of Just3DPrints actions. What I have ascertained from Mr. Weinberg's posts is that the majority of the CAD files appropriated by Just3DPrints are protected by some form of copyright (the exact form of protection I am not sure of). I gathered that it would have been okay for Just3DPrints to sell these files if they had followed a certain protocol (it sounds as if they disregarded those protocols completely).
From a much more mundane point of view, what Just3DPrints did was pretty scummy. Thingiverse provided such a wonderful virtual environment for designers, artists and makers to share their innovations with each other. I fear for the longevity of such websites as Thingiverse now that the unspoken respect for each makers work has been disrupted. As a budding 3D designer this calamity has provided me with an unfortunate but beneficial lesson on sharing and protecting my work. It saddens me that I have to think twice about sharing my 3D designs with the world and I sincerely hope that the negative impact this adversity has is minimal and not too lasting.
Weinberg's Posts:
http://michaelweinberg.org/post/139607754335/abusing-models-on-thingiverse-or-the-plight-of
http://michaelweinberg.org/post/139675844685/the-plight-of-thing-1350837-continued
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