An interesting legal issue here is that probably many 3-D designs are not copyrightable. Copying machine parts and similar functional designs is legal in the US, the UK, and most industrialized countries, except in the narrow cases covered by patents. Sculpture is copyrightable, but gears and bottlecaps are not. I'm not sure if there is explicit caselaw on this, but almost certainly parametric OpenSCAD designs are copyrightable, being textual works of creative expression in the same vein as Python programs or TrueType fonts; not sure about STEP/IGES parametric designs, although logically the same principles should apply.

So most Thingiverse designs that are copies of existing products are probably entirely legal, or legal except in a very few countries where they infringe Saudi laws about nudity depictions or patents or something, but by the same token, in many cases the licenses of the Thingiverse Things will not be usefully enforceable, because the STL (or perhaps a resampled version thereof) is statutorily not subject to copyright.

I see it as more a place for makers/hackers to post complete projects others can replicate. Be it a 3D printing project, or an electronics one with various components. Something like Thingiverse meets Instructables meets Github.

We’ve talked about it plenty at Hackerspaces I’ve been part of, and there’s various attempts at it but none seem to hit the spot the creators are after.

https://hackaday.io is probably the closest but the UI is a mess, there’s no previewing of the files, etc.

I’m literally picturing something like Github with file previewing and some other features added. Love the idea of having issue/bug reports, file versioning for iterations, forking, etc etc.

Of course you’d get content thieves posting stuff that’s not theirs, but you get that on all sites with UGC and it could be moderated/reported.