I think it's quite clear that the new policy has been chosen primarily because the Renderosity staff is concerned that some freestuff will contain trademark/copyright infringements (perhaps even violations of Renderosity Merchants' stuff). By requiring that all submitted items be "pre-approved" by the staff before a link can be supplied, the staff is hoping that it can prevent any link to such violations. And by restricting links to a specific forum, the staff is hoping that it will be easier to police for posting of links that haven't been "pre-approved".

But as someone has rightfully point out earlier, since the freestuff is hosted upon servers not controlled by Renderosity, then there is ultimately no control over the content of the freestuff. Violations can occur at any time, even after the "pre-approval", by whomever does control the freestuff server. In other words, this is not a very secure screening policy.

But the obvious question is, why should Renderosity be policing the content of servers it doesn't even control? A trademark/copyright violation upon such a server should have no legal bearing upon Renderosity. It's not like Renderosity is going to be sued because someone else violated the law. And there is even some precedence where site operators have not been held legally accountable for the content that DOES appear on their own sites when the operators haven't generated that content themselves. (For example, there has been a case where a web site operator was sued for some libel posted on its bulletin board from an anonymous member. The judge found that the site operators were not responsible for the content of that posting. So why then would a judge find a site operator liable for content that isn't even on his own server?)

And a more dangerous question one can ask is: Could Renderosity's pre-approval of freestuff imply any sort of guarantee that there is no copyright violation? Could someone who obtains some freestuff via a link upon Renderosity, and is sued for copyright violation due to use of that freestuff, now have a legal standing to say "This freestuff was supposed to be pre-approved by Renderosity staff to be assured of copyright compliance. They exhibited negligence in evaluating this freestuff. Therefore, I'm suing them for their negligence which caused me to mistakenly believe that the material was in compliance."? You have to be careful when you start to take on responsibility, particularly if you're taking on responsibility for that which you really do not have any control over. It may be better to let the public (ie, members) police instances of trademark/copyright violations by third parties, rather than accept responsibility for policing something that one isn't in a position to effectively police.

Of course, it would be a whole different ballgame if the freestuff really was being hosted by Renderosity servers.