Smart move by the new owner, anything else would have looked out of touch
this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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I kind of expected this. The company didn't choose to be dicks about it in the first place, and it's not like Benchy was even a commercial product to begin with. It was cutesy branding that only had a no-derivatives license because the original author was concerned about preserving its utility as a benchmark. But md5 will already do that particular trick if it's really necessary.
The new owner gained nothing by keeping the more stringent license, and had more to gain in goodwill by releasing it to the public domain.
That, and the inevitable avalanche of community recreations of the basic shape that followed threatened to doom the original to irrelevance anyway.
Trying to tell 3D printing and CAD nerds you can't make [object] is a fool's errand, because enough people with time on their hands will just reverse engineer your [object], possibly improve upon it in the process, and post it everywhere to be given away.
Not being mean spirited, but I suspect NTI's lawyers looked at it and decided that the benchy wasn't worth trying to defend in court. That horse had left the barn long ago. And it will buy some good will for at least a little while.
From NTI's article:
"In January 2025, rumors surfaced that remixes of 3DBenchy were being removed from Printables due to the enforcement of the original license. However, NTI did not initiate this action. Prusa Research, the company behind Printables, later confirmed that a third-party report - not NTI - prompted the enforcement. NTI clarified it had not sought to remove downloads or derivatives of the model and had taken no legal action in this regard."
I've been doing prints for probably 10+ years now and have yet to make one of these. Cute as it is I never quite got why that became the defacto standard test.
Because it's really effective at diagnosing many issues, and it takes about 10 grams of filament to print.
And it's cute.
Link was down but this release from NTI has similar info: https://www.nti-group.com/home/information/news/3dbenchy/
Fuck yes.
Please tell me they struck a deal with Zack