Can you sell 3D prints of CC BY-NC-SA designs?
Selling prints: no, not without separate permission
CC BY-NC-SA does not allow selling prints, and remixes must keep the same licence.
A plain-English summary of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0, not legal advice. Read the official licence text.
Non-commercial use only, with credit; adaptations you share must also be CC BY-NC-SA. Seen on: Thingiverse, Printables, MakerWorld.
What CC BY-NC-SA lets you do, requires and forbids
Lets you
- Printing for yourself
- Non-commercial remixing, shared under the same licence
Requires
- Credit the designer: model name, designer, a link to the model, and the licence name with a link to it.
- Share adaptations under CC BY-NC-SA.
Forbids
- Selling prints
- Relicensing remixes under other terms
Remixes and changes
Allowed for non-commercial purposes, and the remix must carry CC BY-NC-SA.
CC BY-NC-SA designs MeshNomics is tracking
3 of the top 50 scored designs on the MeshNomics index use CC BY-NC-SA. Licence as recorded from the source; re-check the source page before you sell.
- Sweeping 2-line name plate (text) by makkuroscore 69
- 1-100 Tanks and Vehicles by m_bergmanscore 65
- Cute Mini Octopus by McGybeerscore 64
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
- If I remix it enough, can I sell it?
- Not under this licence. A remix of an NC-SA design stays NC-SA. Design your own from scratch, or ask 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.