Forum: Complaint & Debate


Subject: objects and the "not for commercial use" statment

spiffyandstuff opened this issue on Nov 19, 2000 ยท 89 posts


duanemoody posted Tue, 21 November 2000 at 10:16 AM

This has been my point all along. Artworks have composition. .OBJ files do not: they are abstractions with no 'instances' (to crib from programmers) of their own. Spending 72 hours on a figure's mesh won't make it an artwork (not until it's rendered). Commercial artists don't have difficulty understanding that. In the final analysis, Zygote and the people who contribute to Freestuff (myself included) make stencils, not artworks. Period. You may copyright them, but you can't set terms on their usage. We can spend another twenty posts dancing between the putative legalities of readme.txt files and being considerate of makers' wishes, but we should move on. I respect the point that people who feel their products are being misused may decide not to contribute any more, but it's time we woke up and recognized what's likely to happen and what isn't. If someone uses my Nyla morph to make a render of a stereotype African-American trying to buy cigarettes with food stamps, I have every right to be offended but it stops there. Meshes and textures are the intellectual property of their makers only as meshes and textures. Renders are the intellectual property of the renderers, not the meshmakers or even the texmappers. When General Motors can demand royalties from a published photo of a street scene that includes one of their cars, get back to me.