Can you sell 3D prints of CC BY-NC-ND designs?
Selling prints: no, not without separate permission
CC BY-NC-ND is the most restrictive Creative Commons licence: no selling prints and no shared remixes.
A plain-English summary of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0, not legal advice. Read the official licence text.
Personal, non-commercial use of the design as published, with credit. Seen on: Thingiverse, Printables, MakerWorld.
What CC BY-NC-ND lets you do, requires and forbids
Lets you
- Printing the unmodified design for yourself
- Sharing the unmodified file non-commercially, with credit
Requires
- Credit the designer: model name, designer, a link to the model, and the licence name with a link to it.
Forbids
- Selling prints
- Distributing modified versions
Remixes and changes
Not allowed to be shared.
CC BY-NC-ND designs MeshNomics is tracking
1 of the top 50 scored designs on the MeshNomics index use CC BY-NC-ND. Licence as recorded from the source; re-check the source page before you sell.
- Baby Groot by Byambaascore 66
What the licence doesn't cover
- Characters, logos and brands. A designer can only license rights they own.
- Marketplace rules. Etsy requires items made with 3D printers, lasers or CNC machines to be based on your own original design, even with a commercial licence. eBay, your own store and local markets have their own rules.
- Product safety. A licence says nothing about whether a part is food-safe, child-safe or load-bearing.
Questions
- Is there any way to sell prints of a CC BY-NC-ND model?
- Only with separate written permission from the designer.
Find designs you're allowed to sell
MeshNomics stores a normalised licence and a commercial-use flag for every indexed design, so you can filter to sellable designs and sort by demand. See plans, read the full guide to selling Thingiverse, Printables and MakerWorld prints, or browse niches.