Quote - This is no different than all the Star Wars or Star Trek or any other franchise-related works that comprise a large amount of Poser-related content on various sites, to include this site. 

Being free or paid makes no difference, it's still copyright violations. It would be impossible for any site to filter it all out, so it can only be dealt with on a case-by-case basis as complaints are received by admins of the various sites. But that usually requires you to be the copyright holder in order for most of those admins to even bother acknowledging the complaint. Even Renderosity has items in the MP that would be pulled if the right people saw it, from cars to character sets. DAZ does the same thing. They just released the Dragon 3 for example, and one of the sets available for it is a Godzilla clone. It's not called Godzilla, but anyone even remotely familiar with that franchise would recognize it. 

If it's original works, and not actual content being ripped from the games, then I don't see where it would be considered anything other than fan art, and most people seem fine with fan art. I guess the problem is you never actually know if it's content that was ripped or content that was built from scratch unless you can look at each model and compare both. 

 

~Shane

Pretty much this. My understanding is that the other site in question directly rips content from various games (including Mass Effect and Skyrim) and sells it, whereas the product here that bears such a close resemblance to Ms. vas Normandy is clearly original work closely inspired by a game--he has other products that are also clearly inspired by Mass Effect. As long as EA doesn't prosecute him, it's probably safe--and for all its other flaws EA does seem to be pretty tolerant of fan art (even beyond BioWare; see The Sims which makes its bread and butter off fan content [some of which, sadly, is stolen from Poser--saw one of Fabiana's sets being passed off as original Poser content recently; I notified Fabiana--hope it gets taken care of[).