Colorado, USA
Ben Malouf is the Creative Manager at Aleph Objects, Inc., makers of the LulzBot brand of 3D printers, the only 3D printers certified by the Free Software Foundation for respecting user freedom.
He holds an MFA in Integrated Digital Media from the University of Montana and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado with his wife and son. He has been active in the Open Source 3D printing community since 2011, and his popular 3D print design work is shared freely under Creative Commons licenses.
Authored Comments
Aleph Objects will not support a new format if it includes DRM. That said, STL is quite old and is far from a perfect format. Color, texture, and material information are absent for one thing, lack of authorship information is another. Authorship and attribution tracking don't just serve to restrict use, they can also be made to ensure that files stay Free. Major long term Free Software projects, such as Linux, Debian, and Wikipedia are all quite strict about their licensing, and that is why they work.
For better or worse, copyright law automatically restricts the use of creative works and CC licensing is among the best tools we have for releasing them. If you don't care about attribution, then you can release under CC0. But the fact is that most people aren't doing that; for myriad reasons they want to stay connected to the work they share with the world.
It's important to consider that rules and standards can either work for us or for those that would prefer a more closed and proprietary system. We (Aleph Objects, Inc.) prefer to be involved so that the standards don't result in curtailing freedoms or inhibiting the collaborative culture that has made the 3D printing community grow.