Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: Important Trademark Issue

momodot opened this issue on Mar 27, 2006 ยท 124 posts


momodot posted Mon, 27 March 2006 at 10:24 PM

Recently someone who had made a corridor that looked similar to a corridor in some television show was told very forcefully in the merchant's forum and in this forum that they would be in grave violation of the copyright of the show to sell or otherwise distribute the mesh and texture. I was not aware that the scenery in a television show was copyrighted in the same manner as are the images and dialog of a television. Was the issue that the corridor appeared in copyrighted images in the television broadcast and that this corridor mesh and texture could be used to create images "substantially similar" to the images in the broadcast? It was a science fiction show... do you think all the people who got on the case of the artist did so on account of the fact that since the show was not to be named in the mesh package it could not be defined as fan-art? How about in the case of the person making a vehicle prop out of Poser primitives? It was suggested that the primitives, boxes, balls, torus, cone, etc. which were only licensed for personal use by e-Frontiers might be extracted from the final prop by unscrupulous individuals... this made me very concerned since if people were to get a hold of several renders of mine that showed the same character they might be able to extract the texture of the character package I used, they might even be able to ascertain the combination and setting of morphs used to create the character. Very worrying indeed. This whole thing about original figures having to be en-coded to other figures, people not passing on Poser freebies from sites/authors who are long disappeared and which were originally distributed with no relevant re-distribution conditions and no indication of real world authorship... it all has me so confused. I thought there was a consistent standard, some common sense, as concerns the respecting of Intellectual Property rights. People suggest that a rigging similar to V3's can not be used on a figure without the consent of DAZ but then other, or maybe even the same, people suggest that we disregard a trademark simply because it might be expensive to or even arguable to enforce. This is going to really plague me, trying to figure it all out :(