Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: OT - Poser Political figures

nyguy opened this issue on May 15, 2008 · 39 posts


XENOPHONZ posted Fri, 16 May 2008 at 6:41 PM

Quote - This is due to a loophole in IP laws allowing Journalistic/News works (on any media) as exempt. Celeb gossip does count as journalism, as do blogs and websites under certain conditions. They're not selling the celeb's likeness, but instead they're selling journalistic recordings (be they video or photographic) that happen to concern said celebrity.

That however is way tangent to the main point of the original post - the commercial sale/reproduction of someone's name and/or likeness. Try to do that on a celeb (and be noticed)? You'll have lawyers crawling into your rectum with summonses in their hands, and money on their minds.

While legally, you can simply change the name and be fairly safe, (yes, this is true), let's be practical about this for a minute. Joe Poserdom isn't likely to be a bazillionaire with a retained lawyer on speed-dial. The celeb who gets miffed at his or her likeness being sold OTOH about will likely have generous amounts of money and dedicated legal assistance on tap. The discovery phase of any lawsuit would likely bankrupt a typical Rendo merchie - let alone the suit itself, and letting still further alone any appeals processes.

To put it in perspective, let's do a hypothetical. I build a morph that looks dead-on like a certain female celebrity. I name it "London Motel6" and sell the crap out of it. Pervs and artists everywhere rejoice. I start to make a really big pile of dough out of it. Then a C&D shows up. Rendo would likely drop the product from RMP like it were a radioactive potato about to go critical just to steer clear of the whole thing - that absolves them under DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. The celeb is not impressed. You see, someone made a hyper-realistic render of a chick that looks just like her doing self-degrading things to a mesh that looks exactly like George W. Bush. Now she wants damages. Her lawyers want a new Jaguar apiece. Rendo is clear of any lawsuit. The artist who put that image together is anonymous, and nowhere to be credibly located on the Internet. Guess who that leaves as the target?  Right or wrong, I would now have to fund a defense against the thing. I do pretty well financially, but Lord knows I don't have that kind of bank...

Good thing that nothing like this has ever happened.  In spite of considerable forum speculation dedicated to building such imaginary scenarios for us over the years.

The law on such matters is never as cut-'n-dried as many people would like to make it out to be.  A website dedicated to the mockery of Tom Cruise as an individual gets away with it -- but a website named "EverybodyHatesBillSmith.com" would be a definite cause for legal action.....perhaps even for criminal action.

Yes, celebrities can attempt to take certain actions over the use of their name & image.  But they don't always win when they do.   The courts themselves are a roll of the dice.   Or perhaps more like a combination of a dice roll and a chessboard played out together.  Would that the laws were more straightforward & clear.  But they aren't.  Each individual situation has to be litigated individually, and even then: the final results are often inconsistent across cases.

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