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Etsy cracks down on 3D printed products — new rules exclude many 3D printed items from listings
(www.tomshardware.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2025
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Awesome. I fully approve of this. If you want to sell 3D printed stuff, sell it on an appropriate platform and for fuck's sake, sell things that you actually have the rights to print and sell.
Next, let's crack down on the hordes of losers on Etsy who just drop-ship crap from Alibaba for a 6000% markup while boldfadedly claiming it's "hand made" in the hopes that everyone is too stupid to notice. (But people must be, because apparently that's still working.)
They’re still allowing 3D printed items if the person selling is the origin of the model. At least that’s what I gathered from the article.
How do you prove you're the creator of a model without directly handing your IP over to this company?
I assume that is about hitting duplicate items. If there are 100 people selling the EXACT same dragon, hit them all and sort out the details later.
That doesn't really answer the question and also introduces issues with situations like Bambu's Creator's Program (or whatever it's called) where you can pay the model creator for the rights to sell the item. I don't see why they need to target 3D prints specifically when Etsy is absolutely chock full of similar duplicates in other mediums. They're just going to drive people away to a new site, which is fine I suppose, but seems incredibly short sighted.
Yeah, I agree with your take. I can see why people are annoyed with the eggs and dragons cluttering the shops.
But that being said— Most of the models I’ve seen are ones you can pay the creator for a license to print and sell it for a profit. It’s pretty easy to find that kind of deal and the contract is explicit in their listing. So, the original designers will be losing business too since they bank off of making cute model files and collect passive income from people who want to print and sell the item.
Considering how much crap is on Etsy, maybe I’m missing something, but I am not sure why the crack down now—and on 3D prints of all things.
I actually think 3D printers at home will end up replacing a lot of things that used to be shipped from China. I’m already seeing the edges of this but time will tell if that trend keeps going that way. But I 3D print so, I notice functional things I can make all the time.
I think you make a good point—I wonder what site they’ll jump to?
That's sensible.
I'm so relieved that there's an appropriate platform!
I need some brackets to mount a gadget I ebayed as a spare. The vendor included tapped holes for mounting, but never sold the brackets. About 3 designs out there offer a solid and reliable mounting solution.
Each one a bit that would fit in a 1990 drugstore film cylinder, only 40c to print and us$71 shipping to the V3L, it seems.
There is no library in my area still maintaining a running 3d printer. I have no contacts nerdier than me who have a working printer.
Where is this place that I can get my brackets? I can't justify a $250 printer just for 4 bracket pieces!
There are oodles of commercial 3D printing services that will run off whatever you send them for a price. Craftcloud, Shapeways, Xometry, etc.
Or printathing.com, if you'd like to get hooked up with a private(ish) person to do it for you.
Or just ask at any of the innumerable online spaces where people talk about 3D printing (like right here) and someone can probably do it for you, too.
My exception is not to people printing things for others for a specific purpose if asked to. It's against stealing other people's work and cynically trying to turn it around for a profit, without putting any effort into it and probably implicitly passing it off as if it were your own work in the process. Likewise, I don't object to someone designing their own thing and selling their own thing on Etsy. But just to put it into perspective I imagine most people would also rank it as Not Cool to go on Etsy and start trying to sell, say, just printouts random stuff you downloaded from DeviantArt.
It sounds like they do have the rights, and this policy is still causing problems for them because there's a difference between having the rights and being the original creator.
Yes, that part specifically is a bit braindead.
It's probably because they can't be arsed to figure out who has the rights and who doesn't, so they just loaded up the ban shotgun.