Quote - Many of these people do not have the time, the inclination, or understanding yet to create their own characters with their own textures, MAT Poses and INJ/REM poses. All of the processes which go into making a character and texture set to sell in the store takes a lot of time to learn.

Fair enough, if you're a user. But a Merchant is supposed to, you know... know better, no?

Quote - I, personally NEVER ever unzip directly into Poser, but this is a requirement from the store staff so I've made the zips to spec.

No worries there... the new folks can unzip what they need right into Poser's directory structure, while you, me, and lots of other folks dump the results into a dummy runtime or scratch area so as to sort things out for our own filing system.

Quote - I think rather that this discussion went astray simply because of symantics from a new comer who called their character a 'morph' rather than saying it was created from dial settings. If the original poster of this thread wants to sell his character made from dial spins, or go into Zbrush and create a new morph and sell it in the market place, more power to him.

Semantics can be nasty, but there's a reason for the precision:

IMHO, dial-spins have far, far, far less contractual protection (apparently not much, and zero copyright protection) than actual morphs, and even less than any dial-spinning that gets saved off as a specific morph.

Quote - The creation process either way to making a package for the Marketplace takes time, effort, dedication, and acquiring skills using MAT creation utilities, INJection utilities, paint programs, and last but not least rendering skills to make promo images of your product. I encourage him to the learn the process.

I agree that learning the process is a good thing. OTOH, if you're just going to whomp out something and save it off as something that anyone can (technically and legally) copy off and pass around with very little effort, then it's a setup for disaster, IMHO.

Ugly scenario: If you build a character with simple dial settings (and nothing else), and someone else (legally) copies those dial settings and sells the same thing with a different texture (off of some other merchant resource package, or even perhaps the same one you used as a base) for a lower price? Yes, that would be ultra sleazy. Yes, it would show a complete lack of scruples. But yes, it would be perfectly legal, and the worst that would happen is that someone gets banned from the store under that username (which means they simply grab the stuff from p2p and continue copying off the dial settings for other stuff and selling the results at another store)...

I want to emphasize that no, I myself would never do this. However, that wouldn't stop someone else from doing it, no? And, it would undermine both the merchants who do the original dial-spin rig-ups, as well as the store selling them.

Sooooo... why not save the potential headache and heartache and at least try to protect one's own work? It wouldn't take much to list the dial settings used for clothing (if said clothing supported it), and leave out the list of facial settings entirely. Save it as a body morph. Save it as a MOR file. Export the individual morphs (head, body) and re-import them under another name. Something - anything... so that you can credibly say that they are your creation, and have something to back that up with.

I'm not looking to pick an argument. What I am doing is to show in clear terms exactly what pitfalls are there to anyone who sells "character" items made from simple dial spins.

/P