There seems to be a lot of confusion as to what the facts are. Here’s my take:
- this is undoubtedly the work of David Gonzalez. He posted the design process on his site with pictures of the original pencil drawings.
- Whether or not he has an agreement with Disney is irrelevant to us. Since no one checked, we should assume he does, even when we suspect he doesn’t. And as a general rule of thumb: pointing out the hypocrisy of a situation doesn’t make our case legitimate.
- The file has been sold over Etsy and Ebay, which has already been brought up on the forum.
Link: Interesting variation on Aztec calendar - #22 by AllenMassey (not sure if this is the same guy as the OP, might well be not him)
Both have been removed, as was the thingiverse one. Link: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2452217
I think we all know that selling it is taking it one step too far. I believe in fair use, but selling someone elses design is a no-go. Even when giving credit, as long as you don’t have permission of the original creator you just don’t do it. I see people smirking at this notion, but I’d love to see their reaction if it were the other way around.
Sharing is another matter though. I was initially hesitant to share my copy, but ended up doing it since the cat was already out of the bag. I understand Inventables’ policy of not wanting those files on their servers (This has also been somewhat discussed here: https://discuss.inventables.com/t/file-sharing/41129/26). But hosting them on my personal server, I feel like I should be allowed to link to it without getting Inventables in legal grey areas.
As for the argument of David Gonzalez losing income. He got massive exposure since those files got shared on all kinds of forums, facebook and google groups, pinterest, etc. I suspect traffic to his website exploded the last few months. So I think this is one of those cases that our sharing of the files is actually making him money in the long run.
At least, that’s what I tell myself when I go to sleep at night…