SoulTaker opened this issue on Apr 19, 2008 · 284 posts
Penguinisto posted Sat, 26 April 2008 at 11:37 AM
Well, in all fairness, let's look at what really happens here if a copyright or EULA is violated.
First, it all depends on who got offended, doesn't it?
#1 - Say as example, I violated a README clause that says no commercial use, and the maker doesn't live anywhere near Portland, Oregon, USA (where I live). In order to redress his or her grievance, the copyright holder has these options:
The first one is a "maybe" at best, since the commercial work can easily be something not online, or may not even be provable enough to withstand a competent counter-claim for a DMCA complaint. The second one is going to cost you a lot of money to either have a lawyer local to here file it, or to fly/drive out to file it in person. The last one is limited to Poserdom, which is only a relative handful of sites, and assumes that the copyright holder can even guess my username(s) correctly (in my case they probably could, but in most other cases they would have a nearly impossible time).
...and this is assuming the copyright holder even finds out in the first place.
#2 - let's get real nasty here... like ByteMeOK nasty: Rip off a texture and make (literally) dozens of thousands of bucks over time (if not over six figures) off of doing so in various online stores.
Okay, same options as above, and now there's some real money involved to make it worth chasing. But, if like ByteMeOK, you were careful to rip off someone on another continent entirely, you're still pretty much in the clear. After all, the worst that happened was that her online persona became persona non-grata... but she's probably still peeking in once in awhile with a clone account. Her scam also got halted - umm, okay, but she could've bought a house with what she made off of it in the first place, and nothing is stopping her from doing it again, this time using a boyfriend or relative's info to receive new money. Catharina didn't have the resources or the time to launch a full-on lawsuit from the other side of the ocean... and it would still cost her more than could ever be recovered.
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Now obviously there is a big distinction here - the two examples show what happens when a scammer simply wants a piece of the dough with no regard to reputation or profession. Let's look at a big real-life example of a dumb mistake: Mehndi and Wallpaper textures.
For those not familiar, Mehndi (who founded and once ran PoserPros) decided that online pix of old wallpaper textures were fine and dandy to use as texture bases for some of her products because she (erroneously) thought that those particular textures were public domain. She even had similar textures in a book of pubic-domain patterns. Problem is, she didn't do her research hard enough, and she didn't do the grunt-work of making her own textures from scratch. She also had a habit of making enemies... one of which decided to do a lot of research, and found the violation, then contacted the copyright owners.
When all was said and done, Mehndi lost her business (and hence her and her husband's livelihood): PoserPros. That's a lot of future income and past work that was simply thrown down the toilet over a dumb mistake, no? The copyright owner was a corporation that could have very easily found the resources to sue her into oblivion (why they didn't is more of a testament to the company's integrity than to any luck on Mehndi's part). As it turned out, the company was satisfied simply to see her product pulled from further sale and an apology made. Very few companies of any real means are like that anymore... and if it's a publicly traded company (that is, it has shares on the stock market)? Heh - you're fscked.
This is why anyone considering commercial/professional work in graphics should always sit down and educate themselves on how the whole copyright thing works. The lesson is simple: As long as you're small potatoes, you probably won't really feel the effects of a mistake or a willful violation (hell, you might even make a decent pile of cash from it). But, once you start really getting somewhere? The risks are higher, and the potential for loss is greater.
/P