angela daly_inside 3d printing melbourne

Darcy Allen @DarcyWEAllen

Angela Daly @angelacdaly

Cultures of sharing in Thingiverse

Swinburne

SCIENCE | TECHNOLOGY | INNOVATION | BUSINESS | DESIGN

Culture of sharing in Thingiverse

- We conducted research to show how intellectual property is managed – and thus information exchanged – in Thingiverse

- We look at how intellectual property in the form of design files is ‘shared’ among Thingiverse participants and between those participants and MakerBot (Thingiverse parent)

- Analysis of IP provisions in T’s terms of use (and the disputes around them) and then empirical research examining licence choices for 68,000 ‘Things’ in Thingiverse (all data from Jarkko Moilanen)

- Forthcoming academic journal article written in collaboration with JM (Tampere) & Ramon Lobato (Swinburne)

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Overview

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What is Thingiverse?

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- Most popular online repository for sharing design files for 3D printing

- Owned by MakerBot, which itself was bought by Stratasys- MakerBot’s printers were initially developed based on the

RepRap 3DP open source/open hardware project designs- Thingiverse is the design hub in MakerBot’s 3DP

ecosystem – over 100,000 designs held – M provides online platform, users provide online designs for free – M doesn’t have to pay designers to create design files for use with their printers -> adding value to M’s printers (where the ‘real’ money is)

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History and role of Thingiverse

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MakerBot’s sharing rhetoric

“If you’re not sharing your designs, you’re doing it wrong.”- Bre Pettis

We’re hoping that together we can create a community of people who create and share designs freely, so that all can benefit from them.”

- Thingiverse

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- We looked at ‘sharing’ in two ‘directions’:

- ‘vertically’ between MakerBot & Thingiverse users (hierarchical relationship)

- ‘horizontally’ among Thingiverse users (peer relationship)

- What we mean by ‘sharing’ is the least restrictive use of intellectual property rights (mainly copyright) by MB & users over their creations

- i.e. no cost to use IP (gratis); can reproduce, remix, use for any purpose the IP (libre) -> typically actions restricted by traditional/orthodox use of copyright law

- This kind of ‘sharing’ of materials & software often attributed to maker and hacker communities

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Sharing between and among MakerBot and Thingiverse users

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2012 was a game-changing year for MB – they got a US$10m injection of venture capital funding

Causation or correlation? MB started changing their terms and practices around IP that year!

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Sharing ‘upwards’: MakerBot & Thingiverse users

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- Unlike previous printers, MB did not release the designs for that printer’s components – move away from ‘open hardware’ ethic

- Also released software to accompany R2 which was not open source

- highly controversial among maker community


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Sharing ‘upwards’ controversy #1: Replicator 2

Swinburne



In 2012, Thingiverse updated its Terms of Use:“You hereby grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Company and its affiliates and partners, an

irrevocable, nonexclusive, royalty-free and fully paid, worldwide license to reproduce, distribute, publicly display and perform, prepare derivative works of, incorporate into other works, and otherwise use your User Content, and to grant sublicenses of the foregoing, solely for the purposes of including your User Content in the Site and Services. You agree to irrevocably waive (and cause to be waived) any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with

respect to your User Content.”

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Sharing ‘upwards’ controversy #2: Occupy Thingiverse

Swinburne


- Changes:- Thingiverse could now

assert moral rights over users’ IP

- T could use those designs for its own commercial purposes inc incorporating them into 3D printer hardware


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Swinburne



However, Thingiverse’s justifications for these changes framed in terms of ‘sharing’:

The assertion of moral rights by the original users would be ‘fundamentally inconsistent with the intention of Thingiverse, which is to share things and their derivatives’

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BUT - backlash from users: Occupy ThingiverseMany users chose to remove their designs from Thingiverse site to give them more control than Thingiverse’s terms GitHub was a popular, ‘openness’ friendly, alternative

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These examples demonstrate MB’s willingness for users to share with them, but no longer their willingness to share with users (aside from

providing the Thingiverse platform) – representing a distancing from MB’s open roots

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Sharing ‘upwards’: MakerBot & Thingiverse users

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- ‘Primary’ Licences – Thingiverse users must accept the Terms if they want to use the platform vis-à-vis what MB can do with their designs.

- ‘Secondary’ Licences – Choice of ‘secondary licence’ determines how other users use the Thing

- Choice includes Creative Commons and a few free software licences Thingiverse encouraged the use of CC licences by users so “that anyone can use or alter any design”

- Act as a general permission for others to use the work (in accordance with any stipulations) – normally copyright would require specifically asking the rightsholder each time

- ‘Public’ / ‘Private’ Things

- ‘Work in Progress’

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Sharing ‘sideways’: Thingiverse user licence choices

Swinburne



- Variety of CC licences, each with varying degrees of ‘openness’

- Most ‘open’ and high ‘sharing’ factors are CC licences which only require attribution to the original creator when using or remixing

- Most ‘restrictive’ CC licences are those which do not allow derivative works (i.e. no adaptions and no changes) and do not allow the works to be used for commercial purposes

- Also important is the ‘share alike’ restriction which permits derivative works but only if they are licensed under the same terms as the original work. This is known as ‘sticky’ as it ‘sticks’ to all future, modified versions of the original work

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Sharing ‘sideways’: Thingiverse User Licence Choice

Swinburne



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Creative Commons Licences

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- Empirical analysis of metadata of 117,450 Public and Private Things in Thingiverse

- Information extracted by screen-scraping with a custom-built Ruby program by our collaborator Jarkko (extracting information from the site by parsing its web pages)

- What does the metadata tell us?- Public, Private and/or ‘Work in Progress’- For Public Things:

- The licence chosen by creator

- Number of ‘makes’

- Number of ‘remixes’

- Number of times added to a ‘collection’

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Empirical Data

Swinburne

17SCIENCE | TECHNOLOGY | INNOVATION | BUSINESS | DESIGN


A Thingiverse Thing

Swinburne



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Number of Designs

Release of MakerBot Customizer in January 2013

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‘Things’ Over Time

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Top 5 Secondary Licence Choices

Data: For ‘Public’ Things as of 11/2013

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By ‘Makes’ and ‘Remixes’


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By ‘Makes’ and ‘Collections’


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- Surprisingly, 42% of files are Private – they have not been made available to other Thingiverse users via the platform

- They are not ‘shared’ – or, may only be shared by a small group of collaborators who have access to login & password of that user account

- Seems that over time, number of Private Things has been growing

- Why? We are not sure!- But seems that ‘sharing’ among users not as

prevalent/dominant as Thingiverse’s rhetoric suggests

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Going against the sharing grain: Private Things

Swinburne



- Conduct of Thingiverse/MakerBot & users in terms of sharing somewhat contradictory/inconsistent

- Thingiverse is the ultimate by-product of user innovation fertilised by open source/maker culture – but it is a commercial, proprietary platform owned by a large global corp with self-interested conduct vis-à-vis IP

- Users also not consistently ‘sharing’ – while CC licences used for 89% of all Public Things, a large proportion of Things overall is kept Private - adds a thick layer of ‘off-stage’ activity to what is intended to be an open, transparent system dedicated to sharing

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Preliminary conclusions

All graphs and tables used with permission of Jarkko Moilanen.

@social3dprint

blogs.swinburne.edu.au/3dprint

angela daly_inside 3d printing melbourne

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