Quote - The poor legal footing also applies to work put out for free.

Copyright and trademark both do not care if the work is free or commercial...

Actually, you're 100% right with copyright, but being noncommercial is a valid and common defence against trademark violation (not necessarily for free, there's a difference -- no one has to pay to watch an advert, but they are definitely commercial. that's why they're called 'commercials'). See, the trademark laws have nothing to do with any sort of inherent right of the 'creator' of the mark to use it, they are based around the idea that the mark establishes a reputation, and that other attempts to use the mark constitute a form of fraud and effectively a forgery. When there's no potential for commercial gain, it's safe from trademark prosecution. However, it should be noted that that depends on who's serving up the freebies: - If someone who has only ever done freebies does it and has nothing commercial on their site whatsoever nor included in the download, and especially if they release it as open source, it's safe. - If someone who has only ever done freebies but has google ads on the download page, it's not. - If someone who ios like me, running a website that offers subscription services or a store does it, even free, it's not noncommercial. It's seen as a giveaway traffic draw. It'd be like if, for instance, the store was giving away free drawings of Spider Man by a non-Marvel artist, just some guy from town... if this guy sat out on the street and gave them away it'd be fine (provided he didn't copy any actual Spider-Man drawings), but doing it to get people to come down to a store is another story. It's not the pricetag, it's the reason. This may be why, by the bye, Renderosity stopped allowing knockoffs in the Free Stuff list. If you think about it, the RFS listing is a deliberate tool to draw traffic to the RO website, which then hosts the RMP to make money. Get it? Thus they never had to worry about copyright, because they aren't hosting it, but it's their webspite spitting out 'Aliens' or 'Star Wars' or Star Trek' -- which is a trademarked term they're serving up, for a traffic-draw portion of a commercial site.

I'm the asshole. You wanna be a shit? You gotta go through ME.