Gawain opened this issue on Aug 06, 2009 · 18 posts
WandW posted Fri, 07 August 2009 at 10:57 AM
Quote -
The one problem area that does exist with digital content is the question of whether the content is legitimately owned by the person selling it. If someone is selling stolen goods, then the buyer may be unwittingly buying content that the seller cannot legally license. It would seem that the legal owner of the content ought to be willing to accept a new purchase of their product or may even graciously allow their content to be used in a cirucumstance where people purchased a product in good faith. I'm not sure what kind of policies the different stores have in that situation. It's a relatively rare occurrence and, even if a model has to be purchased again, it's probably still cheaper than building it from scratch since a person has to be paid an hourly wage to produce it for a single user.
Actually (in the US) under Section 2-403 of the Uniform Commercial Code, the purchaser does have title and the merchant bears the responsibility in the case where stolen goods are purchased in good faith. This was one of the objections to Amazon's recent deletion of the improperly licensed copies of the George Orwell books from customer's Kindles
An unresolved legal question is whether or not dowloaded 3D models are actually 'goods' under the UCC. My guess would be that they are as the licenses are not of limited duration, and are transfered by way of 'sales ' and 'purchases', but I'm neither a judge nor lawyer. Physical disks obviously would be goods, so if there were for instance improperly licensed content in a boxed computer program, the purchaser would be protected.
Edited to fix typo in UCC section number. W&W
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The Wisdom of bagginsbill:
"Oh - the manual says that? I have never read the manual - this must be why."