Bambu Lab, Pop Mart Settle Lawsuit Over Labubu 3D Models on MakerWorld

Bambu Lab and Pop Mart reached a settlement in mid-March 2026, resolving a copyright lawsuit that had been headed for a Shanghai courtroom on April 2. Bambu Lab announced the resolution on its official Weibo account, stating that "the two sides have reached a settlement and that all related content has been fully removed from the platform."

Pop Mart's subsidiary had filed the suit in early March at the People's Court of Pudong New Area, naming three Bambu Lab entities: Shenzhen Tuozhu Technology Co., Ltd. (Bambu Lab's registered Chinese corporate name), Shenzhen Maker World Technology Co., Ltd., and Shanghai Outline Technology Co., Ltd. The complaint alleged that MakerWorld users had uploaded freely downloadable 3D-printable files of Labubu and another Pop Mart character, Twinkle Twinkle, enabling anyone to print close copies of official Pop Mart designer toys. Pop Mart's legal representatives argued Bambu Lab violated its reproduction, distribution, and information network dissemination rights over the Labubu character. Bambu Lab itself did not create or upload any of the models.

The commercial context makes the dispute hard to ignore. Labubu reportedly accounted for more than 30% of Pop Mart's total sales revenue in 2025, and Chinese customs authorities seized 1.83 million counterfeit Labubu products that same year. Meanwhile, 3D-printed Labubu figures were still listed on Taobao for around 25 yuan at the time of settlement, a fraction of what official figures command.

MakerWorld is not a small platform. Launched by Bambu Lab in 2023, it hosts over one million user-uploaded models and serves nearly 10 million monthly active users. That scale sits at the center of the legal question observers found most significant: whether a 3D model sharing platform can be held liable for copyright infringement committed by its users. Yang Weixin, a lawyer at He&Partners Law Firm in eastern Jiangsu province, told Sixth Tone that Bambu Lab could face liability "if it is found to have facilitated the spread of infringing content while benefiting from the resulting traffic."

Following the settlement, Bambu pulled what Tom's Hardware described as "every Labubu knock-off toy, keychain, fidget, and cookie cutter" from MakerWorld. The automated takedown swept up dozens of unrelated files alongside the Labubu models, prompting community pushback on Reddit, including one user questioning why an unrelated locksmithing tool had been delisted. Bambu Lab responded in that thread, though the specific content of the reply was not made public. A check by Sixth Tone confirmed MakerWorld had removed Pop Mart templates while models tied to Disney, Hello Kitty, Black Myth: Wukong, and Nezha remained available. As of the settlement, searches for Labubu on MakerWorld return no results.

Bambu Lab also issued an apology, stating the situation had caused inconvenience to both Pop Mart and its own users. The timing cut both ways for Bambu: the company had recently launched a Creator Copyright Protection Service allowing MakerWorld Exclusive Designers to report when their models are illegally reposted on other platforms, while simultaneously filing complaints against Creality Cloud, Nexprint, and MakerOnline for reposting MakerWorld exclusive models without authorization. The Pop Mart suit arrived just as Bambu was positioning itself as a defender of creator IP.

This is not Bambu Lab's only pending IP dispute. The copyright holder of the Chinese animated film "The Legend of Luo Xiaohei" also sued the company in 2025, with a hearing in that case scheduled for around the same period. Bambu Lab reported revenue exceeding 10 billion yuan in 2025, representing roughly one-third of the global consumer 3D-printer market, according to Sixth Tone. China's consumer 3D-printer market is projected to surpass 120 billion yuan by 2029, which means the platform liability questions this case raised are unlikely to stay settled for long.