PheonixRising opened this issue on Jan 24, 2003 ยท 159 posts
ryamka posted Sat, 25 January 2003 at 4:52 PM
To all those who sdo not see the DMCA as being relevant here, you are sadly mistaken. The case that we have here is a product that is ONLY available as digital content. As such, all copyright laws apply to the content (at least in the US, where I assume most of the content is created and "housed" - if I am mistaken,I apologize). Since these items have a default copyright per US law, and specifically in this case many have EULs included, all rights and privileges accorded to copyrighted materials apply. Regarding the hosting, even though Renderosity does not host the items on its own site, it does provide links to the offsite locations. As such, it is acting as and/or facilitating the "transaction", which is the downloading of the object. REGARDLESS OF ANY VERBAGE THAT RENDEROSITY MAY HAVE ON ITS SITE TO THE CONTRARY, they are acting as facilitators, even if indirectly. As such, recent court rulings specifically and absolutely apply to Renderosity, because they are acting as facilitator. These ruling include those against Napster and Verizon. There are no differences here. In the Napster case, Napster just faciliated, but did not host. In the Verizon case, the "ISP" is responsible at least partially for the actions of its users. Howver you may want to argue, the current interpretations of the law agree to this. I for one do not look to the day where we have to go through loops to provide or download content, but the fact of the matter is, all of the Rendering community may have to take this into consideration as all it takes is one person to show legal harm for this to cost all of us. - Ray, who DOES know something about digital copyright law