Interesting thread... I'm not a lawyier but here are some questions . 'Intelectual property' ? Is that what we speak about ? Because the first question for me is : Copyright... ok ... but what is the object (if this is an object) that is copyrighted... Some different situations : If I'm a painter and have created a oil painting. I have some rights on this object. And it's easy to understand that there is an original, the true painting. This object is fixed on a wall in my bedroom (if I'm Patrick Merminod) or maybe in a museum (if I'm VanGogh or Picasso). Copy the original painting is possible, but very difficult. A very gifted cheater may reproduce the original painting even from a photo of my painting. If I'm a musisician, I can copyright a song. But what is a song ? This is not really an 'object' like the painting. In the French or Swiss laws, I think that you have to register a score and the first 8 bars define the melody. A melody is then an abstract object. You can sell the score, and you can buy it. But you don't own the melody. Each time you play it in concert, you have to pay the author and the editor for this. So even if you gave the rights to an editor, you are stil the owner of waht we call the 'moral right' in the french law. You can transform the melody in some way : play it with a guitar or with a piano, and even transpose it, this is the same melody and the auhor is still the owner. For a numeric creation this is very different I think. What is the copyrighted. Suppose I create a scene with Vue 4. I have a .Vue file. If I import it in Vue 5 and save it, the file obtained is not the same because the format is not the same. Even worth if i could import the scene in totaly different software. For example, export the scene from Vue in Lightwave format. This is the same scene, but not the same file. So you can't copyright the source file the same way you do for a song . You can't copyright the jpeg file neither as suggested by Phantast because this is not the only format you can save the render. Impossible to give a complete description of the final picture because you can save it in BMP or Jpeg and even with different compression ratio... So the final object (a file can be seen as an object) has no unique description. Even reverse engineering is useless. So my question is : what is copyrighted ? The idea ? What is important for me is what is original in a creation. So this is not possible with a two clicks scene. All those kind of questions are disscussed in the WIPO - World Intellectual Property Organization. It's central headquarter is here in Geneva, two miles from my home... May be I'll ask these guys what's the matter with our thread :-)