[dsign]

I can't help but wonder how could, Bambulabs or the Chinese government, actually mine that data? In my mind, 3D models fail into two categories: artistic and utilitarian, though there's a continuum between those two. With the artistic side, the Chinese government could find itself in possession of tons and tons of Western miniatures. With the utilitarian side, they will find themselves in possession of lots and lots of random parts with no way to know what they are for. Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...

[microtonal]

I think you are underestimating how many companies use 3D printing for prototyping. It's not just hobbyists printing miniatures.

To give an example, I had RSI and use a high-end, expensive ergonomic keyboard. The company that makes these keyboards does not go immediately from design idea to an expensive mold. There are many design iterations and prototypes and they are all 3D prints.

The same is probably true for air humidifiers, drones, or whatever other object you can come up with.

If you have access to everyone's STLs, you basically have access to all the design prototypes and something close to the final product.

It's like industrial espionage, except companies are willingly giving you the data, because they do not want to spend the extra money for a farm of Prusa printers.

It's a brilliant play of the Chinese government. Exploiting that we prefer short-term savings over long-term strategy.

This pattern repeats over and over again, from 3D printers to people buying Chinese fitness watches because they are cheaper than EU and US counterparts.

[lnenad]

I think you're overestimate the value of these prototypes. The print itself is either a plastic render of the final product without any value, or it's a shell without any actual useful parts/machinery. If we imagine we're talking about the 1% of 1% of 1% which could end up as useful IP stuff, but which might be very hard/impossible to find/understand/do anything with it, for which cases don't use bambu.

[avianlyric]

You’re making the assumption that customer product prototypes are the only prototypes produced by 3D printers.

There’s plenty of other more valuable things that are prototyped using 3D printers, such as high end commercial machines, or components that go into those machines.

I suspect that getting hold of STLs from US defence manufacturers would be extremely valuable. Why bother trying to capture a copy of your enemies technology, when they’ll happy just send you all the prototype STLs. Even if it’s not defence, don’t you think access to prototype components from EUV machines from ASML would be crazy valuable to Chinese companies trying to close the gap between Chinese and Western chip fabrication technologies?

[baby_souffle]

> I suspect that getting hold of STLs from US defence manufacturers would be extremely valuable

It would be, yes. There’s a reason why Prussia has optional connectivity and the camera can be physically removed and unplugged.

[lnenad]

I mean, if you want to make your point, yes. But I think it would be logical to assume "US defence manufacturers" wouldn't be using Bambu from the start, regardless of what their track record is.

[firesteelrain]

Chinese have made it part of their economy to steal the IP of US and Europe. It’s not unfathomable.

[bix6]

You’re severely underestimating the value of prototypes.

[IshKebab]

Not to mention, 3D scanners exist. It's well within Chinese capabilities to simply scan parts and recreate them in CAD.

The only case where they might not be able to do that is if they literally can't buy the part (e.g. the military). But the military does not use Bambu printers.

[Renaud]

Not everything that a Chinese company does is for nefarious reason or under the hidden agenda of the Chinese government.

The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source. There isn’t anything really equivalent in China. The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.

The notion of copyright -while not inexistent- is not really a basic cultural notion. Even more so, not caring about ownership, and not enforcing the legalities of it, is partly what allowed innovation at such rapid pace in China.

After all, the Chinese government mandated for decades that all foreign companies setting up shop in China had to have a 51% majority local partner, and technology transfer was mandatory. Basically a government-mandated mandatory transfer of knowledge, to be freely used by the local recipients of it.

So the intricacies of Open Source licenses are a bit lost. Many understand the benefit of it, but not the expectations put on them for this benefit.

In the case of Bambulabs, I suspect that, in their mind, they just want to control their platform. They show their misunderstanding of Open Source rights and expectations and I’m pretty sure they are baffled by the reaction.

It not necessarily malevolent or malicious, though it looks that way from a Western perspective, but more of a cultural impedance mismatch.

They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.

This reminds me of the fights Naomi Wu used to have a few years ago, going to other 3D printer manufacturers in ShenZhen who were using GPL software but would not release their modifications for their equipment.

She had a hard time making them understand and see the duties and benefits that came with using these types of licenses.

[flaunf221]

> They are not idiots, but not everyone at that company will actually understand the duties that come with these licenses.

Copyright is not some kind of spiritual nonsense. It's law. You don't need to understand how, you just need to follow it. There can be legal questions on what exactly you can do, but those can arise for any kind of law.

Of course you could also ignore copyright law - but that's the same with any other law.

[bsimpson]

The internet is largely predicated on American law, because so much of it has been invented by Americans.

The EFF, Creative Commons, FSF - they're all based in America. The licenses they write are based on American legal concepts.

It's interesting to see a Czech CEO commenting on (and quoting) and English translation of Chinese law in the context of a license written in America. As he points out in the thread, AGPL is unenforceable against a Chinese company if China doesn't recognize the rights AGPL is predicated on.

[bnjms]

I would have guessed as much. I don’t understand why the west allows Chinese firms to act on their contracts a law when interacting with their markets. There is no reason to allow Bamboo to continue selling in North America or Europe if they’re out of compliance here. Sales can be blocked until compliance with local laws.

[kennywinker]

Companies are not moral. They will only follows laws when they are enforceable either thru the law, or thru social blowback. That’s not a chinese vs western thing, western companies are just as happy to ignore the law when they can - it’s just western IP frameworks are historically better enforced (socially and legally) in the west.

[iwontberude]

Customary law eats positive law for breakfast. It’s like trying to herd sovereign citizens.

[mitthrowaway2]

I'm not sure it's so innocent. Bambu labs is a major company that hires grads out of top US schools. I'm pretty sure they have lots of people there who understand the concept of open source, including the license requirements, and who would have been raising these questions internally.

[nik282000]

> The reality is much more mundane: many Chinese companies do not understand the expectations around open source.

Except that Bambu is not a small player in the game, and they made threats of using the DMCA which shows they are fully aware of "western" IP law and the nature of licenses, Open or otherwise.

[embedding-shape]

Aren't you saying the same thing as parent? The expectation is usually NOT to send DMCA notices, so if they do, doesn't that also allude to what parent said, that they don't understand the expectations around open source?

[nik282000]

They understood enough to know that they could not claim a license violation but invoking the DCMA, specifically the part about bypassing digital locks, they could intimidate a developer.

American lawmakers and politicians are technologically ignorant, and Americans in general see programmers as existing on a spectrum with boring nerds on one end and hackers on the other. Bambu was betting on easy support by painting the developer as a hacker who was "reverse engineering" their "safety features". What Bambu failed to understand is that the people who make and use Open software are not average Americans, they are tech savvy, interested, and loud.

[wpm]

> The closest mindset is that things that are available to use, are available to take.

Apparently until someone finds the things you make available to use and uses them to circumvent your own forced limitation on the product.

Sending cease and desists to developers using AGPL code has nothing to do with any mindset other than bold faced greed. While China has been the source of many ancient inventions, I doubt they invented greed.

[dividedbyzero]

It's just good business. They know intellectual property is only meaningfully enforced outside China against entities outside China, why wouldn't they use that competitive advantage? I don't buy they are clueless about that, BambuLabs is built for global distribution, they know what they're doing. They may play dumb about the issue (because that's good PR practice), but they'll have decided they can ignore that license and they'll be right in the long run.

[obscurette]

Sorry, but this is just horse shit. I grew up in Soviet Union and we "didn't understand" open source, IP etc either. It wasn't because of some cultural or whatever reasons, it was purely by economical and political reasons. We didn't have money to buy any software. When I got my first ZX Spectrum clone in 1990, any game would cost me my monthly salary, university I worked for ran stolen SCO because it was illegal even to have in Soviet Union etc etc. And of course everyone was used to steal anyway and it was even more acceptable to steal from them. But it took only a decade and all this stuff was left behind.

And Chinese government and companies clearly understand Open Source. They support open licenses, standardsm, software and hardware wherever it benefits them – mostly by making western competitors relying on IP and licensing weaker.

[Joel_Mckay]

There are cultural differences in attitudes toward individual ownership of IP under communism. It is a recent change for China firms to bother getting international patents and trademarks.

Naomi Wu made herself notable in media, and in China "the nail that sticks out gets hammered down". Unfortunate, as she seemed like a real entrepreneurial leader with skill. =3

[sschueller]

And who was it that put her in that situation? An American Journalist that didn't respect boundaries even after it was made clear to them that this would cause issues for her in China.

> Vice published a profile on Wu that included personal details regarding her sexual orientation, which she had explicitly asked them to keep off the record out of fear of state censorship and government retaliation in China.

[fhn]

only because China is at a point where they are producing technology and they don't want others stealing from them like they've been stealing for years

[Aurornis]

In every Bambu thread lately the assumption is that these battles are about regaining local access, but this whole battle started over trying to get Bambu Network cloud access back into OrcaSlicer.

This is the first three lines of the FULU fork of OrcaSlicer from Louis Rossmann:

> This version of OrcaSlicer restores full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers.

> You are not limited to LAN only.

> It works over the internet just like before, through BambuNetwork, with full functionality for normal use and printing.

Reading the comment sections are confusing because so many people without Bambu printers have assumed the battle is going the other way, with users fighting to not use Bambu’s cloud servers.

Your comment is close to getting to the root of why the arguments are getting weird: The Chinese government isn’t interested in scooping up all of the trinkets being printed. Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing. The users fighting for this wanted to go back to sending their prints through the cloud for convenience.

[false-mirror]

> Anyone using a Bambu printer for anything sensitive was already using LAN mode or SD card for printing

I'd like to just highlight that this may soon no longer be (legally) possible thanks to state legislation. At least in California, see: https://eff.org/3DPrintCA

I encourage folks to share this and the NY campaigns (eff.org/3DPrintNY), as this new surveillance does put people/industries relying on 3D printers at risk

[parker-3461]

I was curious about this as well. Hypothetically, if they are really trying to extract insight, they could be:

- Industrial trend pattern: even if only people accidentally leave the Cloud Feature on initially, there could be some that slip through. It could be product categories way before the public knows about it.

- Defence and aerospace: obviously less likely, but if people use Strava in odd locations, and people share classified defence info on War Thunder, then it wouldn’t surprise me if someone slipped something through.

It wouldn’t surprise me if such automated analysis is setup somewhere in China.

[Joel_Mckay]

In general, the PRC government will install local politically connected members into advisor roles in almost all large companies. It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter.

The locked ecosystem posture is simply because with a billion people a firm of any size always has irrational competitors/cloners. Sometimes the governments national policy aligns with a firm, but the support always comes at a price for every business owner. Communism is certainly different with subsidized labor pools, and worker support obligations.

Both China and the US governments engage in trade policy/intelligence shenanigans to try to position themselves for whats more than fair.

Global businesses must learn there is no difference between feigned incompetence, and real negligence. As a small firm most simply can't afford to defend themselves legally if targeted, and vastly undervalue why QA checkpoint roles are important. =3

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26184/26184-h/26184-h.htm

China is a big place, having both good and bad businesses... just like the US. =3

[le-mark]

> It is something a lot of businesses simply have no control over in that country, or in the US for that matter.

Can you expand on instances where the US government has installed overseers in large US companies? This sounds preposterous.

[Joel_Mckay]

Some agencies literally had their own room 641A at telecom companies.

People need to accept folks as they are, and not as we would like them to be. =3

[throw10920]

"Some agencies" covertly installing equipment at, what, 3 companies (at most) out of the millions in the country is categorically different than overt and widespread installation of party members into high-ranking roles in hundreds/thousands of companies.

Claiming that these are remotely comparable is either pure ignorance or blatant propaganda. Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things.

[Joel_Mckay]

>Any sane person can see that these aren't in the same universe of things.

"When McKinsey Comes to Town: The Hidden Influence of the World's Most Powerful Consulting Firm" (Walt Bogdanich, Michael Forsythe )

https://www.amazon.com/When-McKinsey-Comes-Town-Consulting/d...

ad hominem rhetoric means one has chosen to be part of the despotism problem. Best of luck =)

[hack1312]

China is not a communist country. They’re an example of state-capitalism.

[Joel_Mckay]

They control supply and demand... and the US just found out their rare earth supply chain is insecure.

Japan has been dealing with their neighbors policies for years. And developed national state mineral reserves to mitigate political weather changes. =3

[hack1312]

Communism is classless and stateless. By definition China is not that.

[Joel_Mckay]

There was probably something lost in translation, but most spheres of influence are still hierarchical in nature. Best regards =3

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China#Politics

[rasz]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/amyfeldman/2022/03/31/putting-3...

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-04-13/backyard-3d-printed-b...

https://www.voxelmatters.com/how-ukraine-and-russia-are-incr...

https://3dprintingindustry.com/news/ukraine-deploys-3d-print...

[ridgeguy]

This is an issue for me and my company.

I'm building a prototype chemical vapor deposition system in a space with strong Chinese interest and activity. I picked Prusa 3D machines over Bambu because of the potential for losing critical proprietary IP with Bambu. Can't take the chance.

[gonzalohm]

There are companies that run lots of machines in parallel and use them to print their products. They could steal these designs and use them to create copycats

[giancarlostoro]

> Of course, there's no telling if the next step of boiling the frog is to require users to attach metadata to their models before the printer prints them...

Custom firmware is always a thing for these printers.

[eqvinox]

You can still lock things in the microcontrollers with future updates, sadly. Those fuses can be burned at any time. Unburning them, not so much…

[greatgib]

At a grand minimum, they can still your wifi password and intrude your network from the street any day they want.