As I said in a prior post, I totally understand and agree with the well-intentioned reasons for this legal appeasement and the need for Renderosity to offer a disclaimer to cover their behinds legally if nothing else. In its totality, it is in fact, a sad statement on the state of our present society.

Let there be no doubt that the legal necessity to impose this policy also imposes limitations to the artistic creative processes and invariably a step backwards for artistic freedom of expression.

Again, Renderosity proceeds to handle the real problem from a myopic point of view, which shifts the responsibility from their court and places it squarely on its membership, eliminating themselves from responsibility and imposing general limitations on free expression on their membership.

The problem is addressable by employing, either paid or volunteer, people to oversee the individual galleries and plucking questionable pieces that do not hold to the TOS, from the gallery before they make their appearance into the public eye. Pretty much like they do with the FreeStuff forum where the item is held for a period of time to verify continuity of contents and copyright but at a faster turnover rate. If in fact, as has been mentioned in an earlier post, that the Bryce Forum gets some twenty odd pieces of work in a day, then it is not such an overwhelming endeavor. This would allow for both, tasteful artistic expression and the filtering out of pornographic and lascivious pieces.

For many years other artist participation award sites such as Prism Break, Digital Artworks, Kotapress and 3D Cafto name a few, have been sifting through artists works in a selective process to insure the pieces that made it on their sites were of acceptable quality. I dont see why Renderosity, being a larger, merchant driven community couldnt do the same if not better.

Indeed, Renderosity is privately owned and do have a say as to what gets on their site or not, but burdening their membership by imposing general, catch-all restrictions solely to cover themselves legally at the expense of creative freedom and expression is not the way to go.

Message edited on: 03/22/2005 08:01