Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


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

spiffyandstuff opened this issue on Nov 21, 2000 ยท 23 posts


Grammer posted Wed, 22 November 2000 at 2:42 PM

This seems to be quite an emotional discussion. My impression basically is that nobody knows exactly about the legal issues (they might be different for different regions of the world). So lets play a small scenario. If you post something in "freestuff" and make an explicit exclusion of commercial use you might be on the loosers side - this is because your exclusion might simply not be legally sufficient. There has to be an active acceptance of your rights (click on an acceptance button), a simple text file with an e-mail address is not enough. The user has to make an active acceptance before installing and using the items. Youre chances are even worse if the user is in another part of the world than where you are - there are many countries who have not accepted international copyright laws. The other rule, if you are a user, is that if you create a "genuine piece of art", its yours, without any exception and whatever you used for its creation, see the emphasis on "genuine". If you are in doubt as a user, you have to create a deposit of money for possible copyright infringements, because it is on the creators site to proof it. So my advice is, sell your stuff through the store. This has its own legal problems, because your terms of use can not contradict those of the store. The store then has to make an explicit notion on the pictures etc. that there are copyright restrictions which can be read before buying it under the stores licence conditions. By the way if you want to keep control over props and characters you should register them, otherwise your chances are small. In most case it will not be possible to trace the rights or to proof that the rights are actually yours - what happens if you used a Zygote mesh as the base for a morph ? I know what I am speaking of because I have tried to insist on my copyrights (not for 3d stuff ) back in a law suit. Karl