Got a question on copyright. I did a extensive re-edit of david's muscle map from daz3d's millennium muscle map for a new david character I was putting together and I was wondering on the legality of just supplying it outright with the character or using objaction mover to encode the the jpg etc. This is what I have so far I'm in the process of making dynamic hair for david's head, eyebrows, and eyelashes. I got the vein displacement map done so far.

Substantial re-edit or not, it's still based on copyrighted material which means absolutely not allowed.

How could it be proven, if its so heavily edited? Are there any easily understandable copy-right laws out there concerning the figures & their textures? Seems to me that you need a law degree to make sense of most of the copyrighted materials.

Well, this is really for the copyright forum but the DAZ EULA - and the one here, for that matter - say in so many words that you are allowed to use the textures to make renders with them and that's all, folks. Seems straightforward enough to me.

Attached Link: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode17/usc_sup_01_17.html

Note that 'license agreements' are not always upheld as legally valid. Quite a few of them are in fact, worded in ways or pushed onto the buyer in ways that void them. Which says -nothing- about this specific case, just that one should not presume it is or is not valid. The link is to the American 'federal' copyright laws. It doesn't link to what courts have done with those laws however - which is actually more important that the text of them. For that, try findlaw.com (free but limited), or westlaw.com (which is not free but has every case ruling valid in US courts). But, the more important question should be of ethics. Just ask if it would be right if someone did whatever you're thinking of doing in any given case to something that was yours...

If you want to take only the changes you made, and distribute as an overlay to place on the texture, that should be ok. But, distributing any part of the original texture is a no no

Attached Link: http://www.rtencoder.com/

If you want to encode it against the original texture, so that people need to own that to make your mods work, that should be fine. But Objaction Mover works only with OBJ files - RTE would do the job, however.

Possibly it couldn't be proven, but that doesn't stop it being technically an offense.

Firstly, since this was posed as a question, then the answer is "NO" you cannot sell any derivative texture "based" on another texture, no matter how much it is edited. Also, even if it could not be recognized as the original (and I believe in this case it would be easily recognized), no one would really want to buy such a set due to the potential copyright issues it may have. ..and finally, selling anything based on another texture is no way to build a good reputation, and if a copyright complaint comes out of it in the end, then your reputation would be completely shot anyway. So it is always better just to make your own original works. Rawn

Ah ok thanks for the info. I was going to use mover by just changing the file name extensions of the files involved. then after you decode my edited texture just change the ext back to jpg.

I'm not clear why you're determined to use Objaction. Apart from operating only on OBJ files, which requires the user to rename the result, it is Windows only; and is for non-commercial use only, should you be thinking of selling. RTE will encode any file, is available for commercial use, and there's a Java version which will work on just about any platform that has a Java installation available for it. Your choice...

oh duh earth to bert. I read the post about rte and it went
right over my head. lol I need to read more slowly instead of skimming thru stuff. I just downloaded the rte encoder/decoder from free stuff.

Message edited on: 02/22/2006 12:49