Attached Link: http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=16133&sid=4a26a22c5b4453c3da457bdcb12b8493

WARNING. Long winded post.

Sometimes peoples agenda's are not always clear. Cooler's agenda is crystal clear. He has been the biggest proponent in this community to protect artist and developer rights than anyone I know (not just for DAZ). He is personally responsible for removing hundreds, if not thousands of illegal wares copies of Poser, and Poser-ready content from websites around the world. He has done this voluntarily for years. Wares kitties and copyright infringer's hate him and artists love and appreciate his efforts. Please re-consider attacking him personally and re-direct your frustrations at me in behalf of DAZ. After all that he has done for the artists in this community he surely does not deserve it.

My agenda is also clear and that is that I am a part of DAZ. I use my real name and don't post things under an alias (although admittedly I have been tempted at times). I have been involved in the content development for Poser from its very inception. I was the one (representing Zygote) who first proposed to Fractal Design the idea of creating an add-on model product for Poser. That product ended up being Parts and Props for Poser 2.0. My business partner, Chris Creek is the one who did the majority of the modeling for the Poser 3 and Poser 4 figures human figures. It was he and I who feeling that we were unable to grow our development in this community sufficiently under the Zygote umbrella who proposed spinning off DAZ. This is not a hobby for us but our very lives and livelihoods are completely intertwined within it. I believe that we have as much at stake in the community as anyone. DAZ has literally invested all of it's resources into development for this community. We may not be the owners of Poser but that doesn't mean that we are any less concerned about the growth and success of this community than anyone.

I mention the above so that you know exactly where I am coming from and what my agenda is. Victoria is DAZ's most valuable 3D model. We have invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in her development and marketing. She is our flagship and likely the key to our success or failure as a content company. So if we have a license agreement that protects her from being copied and used in competition against us is that such a bad or draconian thing? Should we not retain the right to protect against that without being publicly slammed by some of you? I believe that anyone else in our position would have done exactly the same thing.

We did not go after and try to damage Sixus1 for their mistake. We simply asked them to encode the model to Victoria 3 (which is available for free from DAZ). Our purpose for this is to let people would know the model from which their model was partly derived from. We also did this to hopefully prevent others from unknowingly making a similar mistake. We did not ask or encourage them to remove the model and in fact tried to encourage them to keep it up. They pulled it for their own reasons.

If artists and developers don't have the right to protect original works, then what incentive is there to continue developing. What is our incentive to continue to put significant resources into future developments if we will be slammed for trying to protect those developments.

We are currently developing Victoria 3 Pro (working title). We have spent thousands of dollars hiring live professional models (of different body shapes) that were scanned and photographed to provide real human shape and texture information. We have spent thousands of dollars to use the scanning facility to get that true to life human shapes (not artistic representations but actual human shapes). We have invested thousands of dollars in payroll for artists to work with those shapes to provide Realshape morph targets. This is a very demanding and tedious project and it continues to go on. Without the knowledge that we have legal (and moral) right to protect those efforts we would have no incentive to continue to innovate.

We hope that developers (whether at DAZ or elsewhere) will support this new project. As always, we will retain our current position of encouraging development for this figure. We recognize that the success of failure of this new figure lies heavily on the support of outside developers. Any developer that may have concerns as to how they can legally develop for this or any other DAZ models may contact us directly and we will gladly put in writing for them what we have put in writing on our website (and in several forum posts before now).

I hope that some of you may better understand our position. I don't expect everyone to categorically agree with it, but I do hope you will try to understand it. I am hopefully going to go to bed now but will try to check back again tomorrow. I do want to personally thank those who have supported and developed for Victoria, or any other DAZ products. We realize your contribution in the success of DAZ and our products.

Sincerely,

Dan Farr
President, DAZ Productions.

P.S. Attached is a link to a post on the DAZ forum that addresses some more related copyright issues.