Quote - > Quote - I have seen so many secondlife models that are from or based off poser models, textures, etc.

I've seen a lot of Poser models based on movies and TV shows and fashion designs. Those kinds of things are going to happen. .

a Poser merchant creating a 'Sin City' inspired outfit is not the same as a Second Life merchant ripping off a Poser merchant's copyrighted textures, converting it to a lower res, and selling it for profit under their own name.
there have been several cases of direct thefts from Poser content to Second Life content.

noone cares about Second Life merchants being 'inspired' by outfits or characters in the Poser marketplaces.... but they are stealing actual content with no regards to copyrights, and now we even have Second Life merchants criminally impersonating Poser top sellers.

what cracks me up is that when their stolen content is in turn being stolen by other Second Life merchants and/or utilities like CopyBot, all of a sudden they are up in arms and talking about copyrights :rolleyes:

Quote - If a model is similar to a Poser item, somebody in SL built it from scratch with that program's primitives. I suppose that a texture, from a Poser product, could be remapped into SL, but that would take a fair amount of effort. That's more effort than the average SL thief wants to do--or is even capable of doing. That doesn't mean it can't happen, but it'll represent a smaller percentage of copyright violations.

it is a lot easier to take someone else's texture and adapt it to new UVs than it is to texture something from scratch and blend hundreds of little snippets of photos together into an even and seamless skin texture.
despite having radically different UVs, i could take a finished Vicky 4 skin texture and adapt it to Vicky 1 much faster than i could texture Vicky 1 from scratch... and it would take far less skill. same would go for adapting a low-res version of a clothing item - depending on the clothing the brunt of the work could be the textures, and it would be quite easy to make a low-res version of an item and use the pre-made textures.

there is obviously effort saved and easy profits to be made otherwise these people would not be doing it.