CGTrader is a cancerous company. They have implemented every feature they can think of to screw their creators, and increase their profit margins on the back of the hard working 3d artists :
1- After becoming one of the biggest 3d markets (I think 2nd) they have lowered creator’s share from sales from 70% to 60%
2- They have allowed 3d generated trash to be sold along side human created content taking away traffic from creators
3- They have introduced a pay to to rank for products. meaning on top of the 40% share they are taking, now they expect creators to pay to have a chance for their products to show up in a very crowded maket
4- 5 Out of 7 days of the week. CGTrader is running sales, with the lowest discount on weekends being 30 % and on weekdays being 50%. Creators who don’t opt-in to those sales shouldn’t hope to receive any views to their products. they are pressuring prices down because they can earn more on volume. while mid sized creator shops take the loss.
5- They are introducing subscriptions akin to spottily. If most customers switch into subscriptions instead of buying single product, than creator’s revenue will quickly crater
6- Now the Cherry on the top : they have introduced the option for users to directly generate AI 3d models. trained on the millions of models the platform is hosting. Despite providing the option to opt-out products from ai training, it is hard to trust such a greedy company to honor creators choice. especialy when no one has access to the training data set and no independent company has made an audit.
Since CGTrader introduced all these changes my revenue went down 65% compared to before.
If you care about human created content and creator’s agency. avoid buying from CGTrader and TurboSquid ,most creators have their products listed elsewhere. and if you buy from their own shops the creators will receive a bigger share cutting out these cancerous middlemen.
What I don’t get is are these models not copyrighted by the creator? I’m not one to defend IP law but how exactly is it legal to not have it be opt-in?
"We added it to the one we first assembled, right after rolling out the opt-out but before anyone had a chance to actually opt out. Obviously, you can’t expect us to go through all our training sets after every opt-out to check if the model is in there and remove it, so it’s not retroactive.
We won’t add it to any new training sets though. Not that we’d make any: all future files are grabbed and added to the existing one in the time between the file upload hitting our content servers and the opt-out metadata reaching our file management.
So technically, it’s all harvested while not opted out, we get to keep it and we can still pretend that you have a choice."
Maybe I should’ve studied law after all. I feel like I’d make a passable asshole.
Regulatory capture has allows AI companies to tell the courts that their AI training consuming any and all copyrighted content is not only fair use but also required for national security, so they are effectively exempt from copyright law. The courts are corrupt, the governments are corrupt, the corporations are corrupt, we’ve got nothing left to stand on in the legal system.
Copyright is almost impossible to enforce as an individual over items like 3D models and art. If you create something popular it’s going to be stolen and you have to spend all your time issuing takedown notices. And that’s assuming as the other poster mentioned that you don’t surrender rights to your creation when hosting it on one of these services like CG trader.
What I don’t get is are these models not copyrighted by the creator? I’m not one to defend IP law but how exactly is it legal to not have it be opt-in?
I don’t understand why you expected this to be different than all the copyrighted creations that AI companies have been sucking up for years without any permission (or opt-in) from their creators or rights holders? Why would 3D assets be any different?
CGTrader is a cancerous company. They have implemented every feature they can think of to screw their creators, and increase their profit margins on the back of the hard working 3d artists :
1- After becoming one of the biggest 3d markets (I think 2nd) they have lowered creator’s share from sales from 70% to 60%
2- They have allowed 3d generated trash to be sold along side human created content taking away traffic from creators
3- They have introduced a pay to to rank for products. meaning on top of the 40% share they are taking, now they expect creators to pay to have a chance for their products to show up in a very crowded maket
4- 5 Out of 7 days of the week. CGTrader is running sales, with the lowest discount on weekends being 30 % and on weekdays being 50%. Creators who don’t opt-in to those sales shouldn’t hope to receive any views to their products. they are pressuring prices down because they can earn more on volume. while mid sized creator shops take the loss.
5- They are introducing subscriptions akin to spottily. If most customers switch into subscriptions instead of buying single product, than creator’s revenue will quickly crater
6- Now the Cherry on the top : they have introduced the option for users to directly generate AI 3d models. trained on the millions of models the platform is hosting. Despite providing the option to opt-out products from ai training, it is hard to trust such a greedy company to honor creators choice. especialy when no one has access to the training data set and no independent company has made an audit.
Since CGTrader introduced all these changes my revenue went down 65% compared to before.
If you care about human created content and creator’s agency. avoid buying from CGTrader and TurboSquid ,most creators have their products listed elsewhere. and if you buy from their own shops the creators will receive a bigger share cutting out these cancerous middlemen.
1000000% they are ignoring the opt out.
What I don’t get is are these models not copyrighted by the creator? I’m not one to defend IP law but how exactly is it legal to not have it be opt-in?
"We added it to the one we first assembled, right after rolling out the opt-out but before anyone had a chance to actually opt out. Obviously, you can’t expect us to go through all our training sets after every opt-out to check if the model is in there and remove it, so it’s not retroactive.
We won’t add it to any new training sets though. Not that we’d make any: all future files are grabbed and added to the existing one in the time between the file upload hitting our content servers and the opt-out metadata reaching our file management.
So technically, it’s all harvested while not opted out, we get to keep it and we can still pretend that you have a choice."
Maybe I should’ve studied law after all. I feel like I’d make a passable asshole.
Regulatory capture has allows AI companies to tell the courts that their AI training consuming any and all copyrighted content is not only fair use but also required for national security, so they are effectively exempt from copyright law. The courts are corrupt, the governments are corrupt, the corporations are corrupt, we’ve got nothing left to stand on in the legal system.
Chances are you forfeit the right to sue them over it by signing off on their license agremeent
Copyright is almost impossible to enforce as an individual over items like 3D models and art. If you create something popular it’s going to be stolen and you have to spend all your time issuing takedown notices. And that’s assuming as the other poster mentioned that you don’t surrender rights to your creation when hosting it on one of these services like CG trader.
I don’t understand why you expected this to be different than all the copyrighted creations that AI companies have been sucking up for years without any permission (or opt-in) from their creators or rights holders? Why would 3D assets be any different?