For reference for people that didn’t read the comments on the other post, the license on Thingiverse (which it is suspect from Thingiverse’s TOS that Makerbot or Stratasys would need to respect) is Creative Commons - Attribution - Share Alike.
My comment after reading the original comment is that I don’t think the copyright is on the STL file itself (or any of the other raw filetypes posted on thingiverse), but the design itself. However, US law has design patents (different from the utility patents we’re familiar with), which might muddy the waters on this point. I wonder if anyone at @Electronic_Frontier has an opinion?
If it were “non-commercial” license, I could see there being a problem…maybe. Except MakerBot is part of Stratasys now, and Thingiverse TOS states clearly: “3.2 License. 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.”
Which means they can screw your license any way they please. They’ve been regularly caught doing this (using fixes that the community developed for commercial purposes)
@ThantiK that first part is clearly limited to the purposes of including your User Content in the Site and Services, which an Objet ad would likely not qualify for.
The second part is key here. Even if you specify an attribution license, you can’t demand attribution (which answers the original question about the use of Emmet’s work). Now, does that only apply to MB/Stratasys or does the author generally waive his attribution and moral rights to anyone?
There has already been much debate between non-lawyers as to the meaning of the Thingiverse legalese, but I must say they have gone out of their way to be very polite about their use and attributions of anything I’ve designed. They ask me every time before they use my designs in a new way and make sure I’m happy with the attribution. They quickly noticed the error with this video and told Stratasys, who quickly contacted me and added attribution to the video. I understand it’ll take awhile to educate companies on how to work within Creative Commons licenses, but I think these companies are ahead of the curve.