Hi, I know everyone always talks about free batlab stuff and I downloaded a file but the read me says the above. Does that mean if someone wants to buy my render I can't sell it, or use the things in one small frame of a comic I'm making one day. I know I could just email the author but you guys have probably done that already and can tell me. Love esther

I normally don't load any freebies that have that message into my runtime in case one day I forget and use them for commercial, but I just wondered as so many people talk about batlab stuff and the freebies seem very very popular. Love esther

Just ask for permission to use in commercial renders.
The worst you can get is the answer No.

No matter what anyones else may have done, you need to ask so that you have the answer on file.

That's true but the answer might be no, and then I have my answer immediately. Also the way that sentence is worded suggests poor english so I don't want to make difficulties for the model maker. I know I could just put the non-commercial renders in their own separate runtime, but really what would be the point of using them. Can anybody honestly say that if they had a pic on their wall for 6 years and someone walks into your house and offers you money for it that you will remember that M3s socks are non-commercial? So I can't understand why people post those sort of freebies and why people download them, except in the case where the author doesn't mean for the renders which is often what I find is the case when I email them. Love esther PS I am very very grateful for all the wonderful free stuff that people make, but what I"m saying is when it says non-commercial and that applies to renders then it's not actually free for the person to use in a normal sort of artistic way. So I hope no one misunderstands my post and gets angry with me.

Bat is from Japan and yep, his free stuff is usually non commercial use only. Most of the japanese freebies are for non-commercial use. Kozaburo is the exception but that changed only recently, before his older models were non commercial too. Btw, Bat has a nice store in the RMP and that stuff is ok for commercial use.

Ask Bat, I'm sure he will understand your question.

Is this a familiar horror story? You have an outfit in mind. You scour Renderosity, Daz, PPro's, etc. Nada. Then - by chance - someone posts a link here to a site with the perfect item. Wonderful! Your fingers drum on the desk as the download crawls by. But in the readme are the dreaded words, "commercial use requires permission". Okay, you send an e-mail. Which bounces. You check the readme. "(c) MegaArtistMan 2001". You look in Renderosity, and find that MegaArtistMan, from Singapore, hasn't posted for years. His homepage is now disused. Unless you fancy hiring an international private detective, MegaArtistMan has left the planet. But you just know, in those dark late-night moments - and being Poser addicts, we have lots of late-night moments - that when your five-minute animated short is aired on Singapore TV, MegaArtistMan will be watching, sitting on the couch with his best college buddy, MegaHotshotCopyrightLawyerMan. A million to one chance, true. But as Terry Pratchett once remarked, million to one chances happen nine times out of ten. I won't knowingly use a non-commercial piece in any work I think might sell for money. Legally, you are breaking a contract, and it's not worth the risk. All the same, this means that content providers risk having their work passed over and discarded, because of its non-commercial tag. My advice is - make the work free for all uses. If you're not yet making a living off your work, it's more important that it get exposure. The chances that George Lucas will use it to make his next hundred million while you can't afford food for the cat, are pretty damn small.

"But you just know, in those dark late-night moments - and being Poser addicts, we have lots of late-night moments - that when your five-minute animated short is aired on Singapore TV, MegaArtistMan will be watching, sitting on the couch with his best college buddy, MegaHotshotCopyrightLawyerMan."

Just got an e-mail from MegaArtistMan. "Back in '75 I made this little model robot called R2D2..."

I got pissed after downloading a sites christmas givaway item that had buried in the readme "non-commercial use only" and I intend to push, next christmas giveaway, that no one be allowed to do that.

I don't agree with freebie restrictions and wont download anything with them attached. (It always amuses me to see poses with that restriction) No redistribution is a given, no one would allow that. But to restrict commercial render use is, in my opinion as a poser user and freestuff provider, ridiculous.

I have included non-commercial restrictions in my not-very-popular freebies at my own website mainly because: 1. they are only good enough for play renders, but 2. not good enough for commercial render quality. I simply do not want to be referenced and then embarassed. I prefer to err on the side of caution. Agree no redistribution. Also, if the item is a fan-art component, better to assume the worst and spell it out to the downloader that he/she cannot use that for commercial renders. Would everyone in the world be able to recognise what a fan-art item is, if it is based on an Indonesia-published commercial comic, for example ? Finally, any readmes should make clearer distinction among 1. no commercial re-sale; 2. no redistribution; and 3. no commercial renders. I find that often, the creator's intentions for 1 and 3, and 1 and 2, get muddled in the phrase "no commercial use". Just my take on the issue.

I really think if people knew there were no commercial renders to be made no one at all would even download the freebie let alone have it take space on the HD and maybe accidentally get mixed up with something else, love esther PS these things shouldn't be called freebies if not for commercial render, they should be called demo stuff or something.

Hi, esterau, most likely some people are downloading freebies at least to take a look, and see if they can use freebies, then delete them if they are not relevant / useful, so as to save hard disk space. Otherwise, it's difficult to explain the statistics for freebie downloads on so many A-list web communities around the internet (including over here). Yes, perhaps a new term could be used instead. But... what sort of label would people understand ?

i think the great majority of people download them accidentally. someone posts - hey look at this nice thingamijig and everyone downloads it, 3 weeks or months later they go to install it, check the readme, and into the trash it immediately goes. oh, except for the people who just assume it's okay to use because that's how they are used to seeing free stuff so they don't notice the readme. perhaps they could be called "no commercial render items" love esther

"No commercial render items" would at least be more clearcut. A lot of freebie posters put "no commercial use" meaning "don't sell it", while others intend for it to include renders such that they're saying "don't profit by it." When the copyright owner can be contacted, those confusions can get sorted out. A lot of the time, the creator cannot be reached--the creator has dropped out of Poser use, changed email addresses, ISP disappeared, or something else makes it impossible to ask. More frustrating are the files that don't have a readme, so it's not even possible to contact the person that created it.