Just my opinion, but I really hope I don’t screw myself over by putting this out there. But in my opinion, when I see people being rewarded for bad behavior, and I feel I have something to contribute to put the world right, it’s not right, in my opinion, to sit back and do nothing.
Of course this is all my opinion.
Looking over the court documents I discovered something interesting.
Lookie here. Not only did they list my items for sale, but it seems they sold one of them. Did I see a penny for that sale? Of course not. Maybe I should sue them back? Generally this isn’t my game. I’m too busy actually contributing to the world.
So what does this mean? Can someone take 3D models available online and sell them without compensation or even attribution to the people who created it? This court case doesn’t answer that, but it does throw that into question again. Because saying that these statements were defamatory says that it was these statements that damaged their reputation. But, in my opinion, that reputation was already damaged by the individuals own actions and statements. Their damnation was already decided before Stratasys’ subsidiaries reported on the same. It wasn’t these reports that caused eBay to shut down their store.
It was me.
Or rather is was us. The community rallied together on Thingiverse, the Thingiverse Forums, Google Groups, G+, more Google Groups, and elsewhere. We decided as a group that this was unacceptable, we took action. I took action and notified eBay that my models were being infringed upon. And afterwards, Makerbot, Stratasys, TechCrunch, All3DP, and others reported on it. But by then the damage was done, the reputation was destroyed, and the revenue was prime to be ended. These news outlets contributions to this was so minimal as to be indistinguishable. Just3DPrintIt’s claims are exaggerated and spurious.
This, in my opinion, is the real story.
(Apologies about the mouth sore I’m currently sporting. It’s pretty gross. In my opinion.)
