A quiet licensing shift is brewing and it could have massive implications for anyone sharing 3D models online.
Creative Commons, the nonprofit best known for its open content licenses, is developing a new system called CC Signals. The initiative aims to help creators explicitly define how their work can be reused in machine learning contexts, especially for training systems that depend on vast data sets.
The proposal isn’t final, but it’s already raising eyebrows across the 3D design community.
“CC Signals are a proposed framework to help content stewards express how they want their works used,” says Creative Commons. The framework emphasizes “reciprocity, recognition, and sustainability”, three concepts often lost in the rush to scrape data.
While CC Signals targets text, image, and video content, its impact on 3D model repositories like Thingiverse, MakerWorld or Sketchfab could be profound. Today, many 3D models are available under general open licenses, often without mentioning if or how they can be used for algorithmic training.
That gap is what CC Signals aims to close.
If adopted, platforms could offer uploaders new options to control reuse in AI-driven environments. This could mark a fundamental shift-empowering creators to decide if their work contributes to innovation or remains off-limits to commercial data-hungry systems.
The framework is still in public consultation, but one thing is clear: The way we license digital creations is about to get a lot more nuanced.
