Business & Licensing Articles

Practical guidance for print farm operators: what you can legally sell, how commercial STL licensing works, and how to run the business side in Canada.

Most people who own printers hit the same wall at the same moment. The machines work, the prints look good, and then someone asks whether it is actually legal to sell them. These articles answer that question properly — where commercial rights come from, how the main licence sources compare, what copyright covers in a Canadian context, and what the marketplaces expect from you.

The operational articles sit beside them: pricing, scaling from a few machines to a room of them, selling on Etsy or Amazon, and the tax questions a Canadian print business runs into in its first year.

The boundary, stated plainly. The 3DCentral Commercial License grants print-and-sell rights to original 3DCentral designs only — the work in our own 3DCentral design archive. Community-artist models in our catalogue, including Flexi Factory, TwistyPrints, Cinderwing3D, Arbiter Miniatures and M2Design, are not covered. For commercial rights to those designs, contact the artist directly.

New to this? Start with starting a 3D printing business in Canada, then read Monetization Strategies for the pricing side.

58 articles