A philosophical question about selling files

Several times every week, I'm approached by an eager entrepreneur who has invented the idea of selling STL files, or licenses to them, or something, to people with printers, or retailers with printers, or something.

Can you explain to me what's going through these guys' minds? I feel like if I sold a file to ten people, it'd be on Thingiverse and Piratebay inside a week, and I'd never make another dime off it. Why would I take that risk?

I don't answer these emails anymore. I used to write back and we'd have this dialogue:
Me: How would I know my files would remain confidential?
Them: We would make our users check a box on our website saying they won't share your files, so they would be safe.
Me: Are you prepared to assume liability for any financial damage I might experience if they were leaked?
Them: No.
Me: (in my thoughts only) Well if you don't have any faith in that box, why should I?

I feel weird dismissing this trend outright, because it clearly seems like a smart idea to a lot of people, but does it actually make any sense for designers?

Do you sell files? Does it work out for you?

I also get a ton of email from folks like these. Early on I gave a lot of feedback, these days I ignore them. I've yet to see any proposals that seem viable and I'm willing to put my work behind. I'd like to see a platform that works - I'd like to deliver my designs to 3D printer owners, and I think in the next several years, the market will be there. When I hear the right proposal, I'll sign on, till then, I'll sell prints, and post creative commons work.

Glad to hear there's someone else with similar experience. I'm sure these businesses are viable of themselves; I just don't understand what would be in it for me, other than some $2 sales and an insane amount of risk.

Will I sell? Sure. That'll be $5,000,000.00 per file front-load payment, please. You can sell as many as you like and I'll take my 20% royalty on each item sold. When you have exceeded the $5,000,000.00 front-load royalty fee, you can pay my royalty monthy for all sales made in the previous month. Why so expensive? Because you have provided no security against loss of intellectual property, to which I retain the rights. Now... nut up or shut up.

Seriously, I just send such people to TurboSquid. When they see the prices there, they get very quiet.

Alan, you'd better file a copyright on this idea tomorrow

I'm thinking several years down the road here, but somewhere, somehow, yes, we need to develop a "library of parts" for 3d printing.
A properly parameterized ShapeJS module could auto-scale as just one part of larger/smaller designs.

Thingverse+Markup is a pretty cool concept.

Sure Dr. Hudson, I'd play ball. Always happy to sell stuff, in any way that I can protect the data.

Remembering back, an early idea which never came to fruition here was a scaling option: you'd upload an object and give it a size range and people could order within that range. Different from Co-creator because customers would pay for the size they get, not a flat rate. (S******o has this feature, then again they offer a much less comprehensive range of materials. Here the workable size range would depend strongly on the material choices which makes everything more complicated.)

I liked the idea, and I'd be in favor of your concept as an expansion of it. I've long felt that the mature state of the 3DP market should be that customers can pull designs in any material or size they like, from platinum pendant up to cement gazebo.

Anyway it might be worth asking the powers that be why the scale option never happened. Was it too complicated to build into the entire interface of SW, in which case a cleverly coded interface designed and labeled for power users might be eminently reasonable? Or was there another reason it got nixed?

I've been selling downloadable files for years and I'd say that it is currently not worth the risk. They, the hackers, sell my designs from time to time and it's really not that big of a deal in that regard, but what makes it not worth it I think is the market is currently so small.

For years I've sold to people with CNC equipment and only recently started making moves to sell to people with 3D printers. Nothing exciting ever happened with the CNC crowd. Out of about 500 unique visitors per month to my website I sell about 5 to 7 items per year and they download about 3000 free items per month. If I ever get around to it I'll try lowering the prices to something like a dollar per item for each item and see what that does, but I'm not too interested in it overall, cuz there just isn't a huge market. And so, the 3D printing related market may even be lower. Yet, on the other hand, they are completely differently minded people so it could be different.

It sure is nice though! Wake up and there is money in your account without doing anything! HAHAHA!

What I envision happening is, 3D printer prices will come down as major manufacturers get into it, like HP for example. Then a trend will occur with the masses getting involved just so they can say they have a 3D printer at home currently printing such and such. The masses won't ever know how to run 3D modeling software for the most part, so what they'll do is look for files to buy or download for free. If that happens, it could turn into a goldmine for people like us!

In the meanwhile, in addition to creating your art, I know you build software that enables people to create printable designs without any 3D modeling experience whatsoever. I WOULD DEFINITELY KEEP WORKING ON THAT! THAT COULD END UP BEING THE HOLY GRAIL OF MAKING MONEY WITH 3D PRINTING!!!

I think that ultimately, selling files is a good idea....but not yet. If we reach a time when downloading 3D models is as desirable and common as downloading an app, book, or piece of music then we will have reached the point where it will be profitable to sell files. I'd like to be able to sell models for a few dollars each. Sure, there would be people who pirate the content; but, there would also be a significant number of people who purchase it legitimately out of laziness, stupidity, or moral conscience.

For now, I just tell all the people who email us no.

If you do decide to look into it, a problem with S******o's implementation of scaling is that when you're scanning the thumbnails for a lot of objects, so you just see pictures, titles and prices, for scalable objects the price shown is the top of the range. This is, from the selling point of view, wrong -- the default price shown should be either the bottom of the range, or specifiable by the designer.

To go back to your OP...

This is a meaty subject and the more I think about it, the meatier it gets. But, fwiw:

1. Once the files are out there, you have effectively lost control of them. If the interweb has taught us one thing it is that a very significant proportion of its users like 'free' as a model and are not too worried about the ethics.

2. How are you going to make money out of this model of business, even if it works? How many people have/will have access to 3D printers (of the required type/quality)? Of those people, how many want your object? What will they pay for the design only of your object? What is the cut of the promoter?


I think it seems like a good idea for many people to make money out of other's work - it's clear what's in it for them. Does it make sense for designers - without some sea-change in the 3d world, I don't think so. If one had a design that would sell enough copies under this model to make money at the necessarily smaller margins, that design would be ripped off so quickly it would be impressive if it were not so galling. It is difficult to steal a moderately complex design from a physical object: 3d scanning is getting better, but it's only (imo) ever going to be as good as recording an audio feed with a microphone.

As I wrote this I knew someone would pick me up on it...

My point was (kind of) yes, if you have the right equipment (expensive, probably tricky to set up) you can get great results but if you are in that situation you're not bootlegging concerts....

But I take your point too. Touché

Can I add my tuppence on both topics in this thread?

First, licensing files is a big risk for the designer (as has been explained repeatedly above!), unless the middleman is a huge company with a reputation to maintain, and the requisite team of lawyers needed to maintain it. Small start-up entrepeneurs just don't have the muscle to fight the inevitable piracy, so your designs become de-facto public property with no recompense. Just look at how much effort the big boys in music are expending to fight digital piracy, or how much effort went into fighting the use of blank cassettes in an earier time...

As for scalability, this presumably means designing to the smallest size due to minimum dimensions etc, and allowing it to be scaled up bigger? If so, this only works if the larger versions won't appear lumpen and crude. Still, it could be handy! Would it be possible to set predetermined scales, for those of us designing miniatures for the scale-modelling hobbies? (Offering a part in 1:87, scalable up to 1:64 and 1:48, for example?)

As someone who, I must ashamedly admit, MAY have sailed on the Pirate ship in the past (luckily wisdom came with age, hence why that hypothetical situation would be in the past), I would never, ever, ever make publicly available any models I intended to 3D print and sell as jewelry or whatever. It's just too damn simple. Software and files can be copied infinite number of times with no degradation. All it takes is one file to be out there, and it can morph into dozens, hundreds, thousands.

As an interesting dichotomy, I also do sell 3D models on The3DStudio - the difference is that they aren't print-ready and I never intend to 3D print them. People are most interested in 3D printable models because they can MAKE something out of it - but a 3D model of an HP printer that cannot itself be printed? There may be interest from fellow 3D'ers, but not from the general public, which - I find - preserves it's integrity. Us artists have enough respect for one another to make that generally a safe endeavor.

Scaling is not a bad thing but wall thicknesses would also increase, perhaps necessarily, but cost goes up with the cube of the scaling on a straight scale. And then there might be several ways to calculate any commissions on prints. You could have a straight commission for all scaled sizes, or you might want to scale up commission proportional to scaling factor, or another option is to make commissions proportional to material volume. A nice thing about scaling is that it allows the customer to balance size and cost according to their needs. You might offer 2 sizes of a design but maybe a customer wants something in between according to their budget contraints and other wants.

As far as selling files goes I could see a mechanism within Shapeways that allows this but intended more as a tool to help people wanting to purchase custom designs from designers. I could for example put out a notice that I would like a model of a hedgehog holding a beer stein. Designers could then post some preliminary or final designs as sealed or open bids from which the customer could choose. The drawback is designers might be doing work for which they are not contracted. It would be more like a weekend contest except that the file cannot be purchased until the designer allows it with an appropriate mark-up to cover the selected designer's asking fee. At that point the model page would transfer to the purchaser who would have the ability to print or download the file.

If you're good and fast at designing stuff you'll be successful. Maybe they could call it the Shapeways Darwinian Custom Design Framework and File Exchange (SDCDFAFE). But of course you could still simply contract with the individual of your choice, but the bottom line is that all transactions take place within the Shapeways environment and Shapeways could take their cut as well. Other legal gobley-gook might also apply but I'm not a lawyer so take it for what it's worth.

I've been getting these emails as well, (although not at Bathsheba's rate). The business model doesn't make any sense to me either.

If I want to make a file available then I want to control how it is presented. The best shot at doing that is to put it on an established non-pay site such as thingiverse.

If it were available somewhere else (even somewhere as established as thingiverse) but costing something, then I would imagine that it would be more likely to be copied around without my metadata.

One thing to keep in mind on this is, we're dealing files that will be made into tangible objects. I think this curves people away from using illegal files of this type to a degree.

The violations I've seen over the years are hackers who sell the actual files in a way that the buyers don't know that they're buying illegal data.