It fucking sucks and will slow down the transition to electric cars.

We already have that shit in France too. The national companies sell prohibitively expensive cars with some amount of financial help. But if you buy a Chinese car (even with a demonstrably proven carbon footprint) you don’t get any help.

Basically this is about protecting our car industry and shielding from their incapacity to provide a value electric car to the masses. Nothing to do with emissions.

I thought it was obvious you wouldn’t say “hey I just took your benchy model and changed N vertices”. But just “happened” to inadvertently create a benchy lookalike.

Also there is definitely a point where it would be safe to reproduce the benchy design otherwise we could point at anything on earth and say “that’s a heavily modified benchy.”

Or are we all benchy? Am I a benchy with a thousand modified vertices?

So let’s be pragmatic there is nothing preventing me even to start a new design that vaguely ressemble the Benchy design. All it takes is for that “vaguely” to be enough so that you could argue you were not making a benchy redesign but just stumbled on something that could look Like a benchy.

I would actually suggest to make this new benchmark as close as possible to the original design as a middle finger to these idiots.

Any 3D printing lawyer interested in creating a 4D benchy? Also the same benchy but with just enough modifications to be legally safe?