EClark1894 opened this issue on Jun 29, 2015 ยท 761 posts
3D-Mobster posted Thu, 30 August 2018 at 5:29 AM
Here is the thing, the moment you create your unique item/clothing using anything like Shrink Wrap or Extract in a 3D modelling app, It is considered to be derivative. The moment you use auto- transfer tools to transfer rigging or morphs, it is considered to be derivative. The Daz 3D EULA provides conditions for distributing or selling derivative content as stated above. The licence owner can also at any time request the derivative content be removed from distribution as in the conditions stated above.
This kind of licensing isn't unusual for rigged figures lets take Project Evolution for example, these are the licence terms for Project E. Copyright (c) 2018 erogenesis. All rights reserved. Not intended for redistribution.
I can only go by what I believe to be true, and I really don't think Daz is legally able to call a piece of clothing for a derivative assuming that they for whatever reason chose to go to court, what they might do is to refuse to sell such item solely because they judge it to be one, but I think this is more like a "we can refuse to sell any item if we want", rather than having an actual legal right.
All objects PE, V4 etc. have basic copyright laws as far as I understand it so PE and Hirewire can say that they do not want anyone to share their design, but everyone have that right, regardless of what they write. The issue as I see it, is that we are talking about a human shape, rather than a complete design so if you removed the head of PE, V4 or Genesis and someone make a piece of cloth that happens to fit any of them, you would in theory have made a derivative of that character, keep in mind that cloth doesn't have to be skin tight, it could be a dress etc.
As said before, i can fully understand that you can not copy features such as morphs etc from Genesis to your own character and distribute it as your own.
The clothng won't fit V4 unless it's being worn by V4 or some character that was based on V4. The rigging in a piece of clothing has to match the rigging in the figure that it's intended to be used on. (IE, copy/paste the rigging directly). It's not just a matter of naming the various body parts and bones the same. The joint parameters have to be the same as well, and each joint parameter has its own host of values unique to that particular joint in that particular figure. Those values exist in a file that is interpreted by the software. In fact they are bits of software code themselves, and software code is vary much protected by IP laws.
Assuming that you only talk about conforming cloth, you can easily make dynamic cloth to fit several characters. And im really in doubt about the rigging, because I do agree that its data, well its as much data as the mesh of a character is. But humans as all other animals are in general very similar in shape and functionality, that you are working within very limited option compared to how many 3d humans are being created every day, which pretty much all use a somewhat similar setup. Remember that Genesis and all those characters are not new to this, they copied the basic rigging setup and technique from somewhere else.
So it would seem that Daz 3D's Eula is actually more detailed and allows more freedom to creators then many others do in their licensing agreements. So I am not sure why it specifically is being scoffed at here?
There is nothing wrong with Daz or their Eula, it just happens to be the one in question as it started with a discussion about V4 and whether SM should buy it, and since Daz owns her, it went on to whether Daz legally could claim that any character that would automatically fit any clothing items made for one of their characters would legally be able to say that it violate their IP for that character. So, at least from my point of view there are no bad feeling or anything wrong with Daz or their Eula, but its interesting to know exactly what a violation of IP involves when talking 3D characters.