There is a VERY big difference between what they 'could' disallow based on IP law vs what they would likely disallow.  Everything about dawn is part of their IP.  They could choose to protect her basic shape if they wanted.  They would be within their legal rights(ok i'm no expert here so take it with a grain of salt) to use IP law to block a lot of content that is made by the standards methods....

They arent going to do that of course.  We'll be able to build for her just like any other figure.  The only sticky points will be in cross over material between Dawn and her competing figures.  ie using v4 textures on dawn etc..  And that would be a concern from daz's side, not HW3D

Take v4 WM as an example.  Daz viewed her as a competing product and expressly forbid us from using anything that they owned.  Grouping, joint centers, bones. etc..  so we had to build an entiely new rig for her, weight map it and find a way to inject that into peoples existing v4 figures because we couldn't re-distribute anything that daz had created.  Compare that to clothing creation where vendors routinely re-distribute derivations of dazs joint centers, rigging and grouping.  But it was their right to protect it and they chose to do so as the resulting free figure was competition to genesis.