Do you recreate toys or objects on your 3D printers? And if so do these sorts of situations worry you? Or do you strictly steer clear from "recreating" or "re-imagining" objects?

Clive Thompson wrote a piece on WIRED Design about this very topic and a maker who was affected by it:

Last winter, Thomas Valenty bought a MakerBot — an inexpensive 3-D printer that lets you quickly create plastic objects. His brother had some Imperial Guards from the tabletop game Warhammer, so Valenty decided to design a couple of his own Warhammer-style figurines: a two-legged war mecha and a tank.

He tweaked the designs for a week until he was happy. “I put a lot of work into them,” he says. Then he posted the files for free downloading on Thingiverse, a site that lets you share instructions for printing 3-D objects. Soon other fans were outputting their own copies.

Until the lawyers showed up.

Games Workshop, the UK-based firm that makes Warhammer, noticed Valenty’s work and sent Thingiverse a takedown notice, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Thingiverse removed the files, and Valenty suddenly became an unwilling combatant in the next digital war: the fight over copying physical objects.

“The DMCA knocked the wind out of me,” he wrote in an e-mail to me. “I haven’t uploaded many of my printable models since it happened."