I thought my ears were burning. I seem to be in the middle of a controversy.

First off thanks to Visualkinetics for thinking before acting. Thanks to every one who has voiced an opinion here. And yes, my Backdrop prop is a UV mapped plane. But it's the way it's UV mapped that makes it special. The map is distorted to reverse the distortion of the camera. That's the original idea here.

Such a simple prop. Why sell it? Well, I spent a week searching out decent background scenes. I was looking for "everyday" shots that would be useful to people. I spent a lot of time adjusting, fixing and tweaking these to work as best they could. The images were all shot with the sun as nearly straight up as possible. This creates minimal shadows, so the figure could be lit and not look misplaced because of differences in shadowing from the background. Some of the scenes were shot on overcast days and tinted to appear sunny. The real work was in the included scenes. (Even extra, because I live in Bakersfield CA. It's a bit hard to find any scenery here!) The backdrop comes with several light setups to enhance the usability of the scenes.

OK, Enough justification. The issue... I can't stop people from selling or giving away items similar to mine. If that were true, we would all be driving Mercedes.

On the other hand what if it is "Just like mine..."

Visualkinetics based his backdrop on mine, as he said. If I wrote a book called Gone with the Breeze about a southern belle with a bad attitude named Maroon who lives in a house called Earth and fell in love with a man named Red, I would, no doubt, get sued. Unless of course it was a parody. Then, it's OK. If someone makes a MIDI sequence BASED on somebody else's song they are susceptible to a copyright law suit. A MIDI is by no means a copy of the original. It is the same tune or IDEA, though. The entire purpose of copyright law is to protect ideas.

Now, I'm not suing anybody, especially not over a $10 Poser prop. There are however issues here that effect the entire Poser community. There have been people that have posted free items similar to store items just to spite somebody they didn't like. This situation is obviously different. Visualkinetics made his own because he didn't want to buy it. Now he feels that maybe he should share it. I won't stop him.

Before he hits the upload button there some things to consider. Some people will be really glad they can get a backdrop thing free. Some of these people may have purchased mine. Some people will be really mad because they feel that my intellectual property was stolen. Anybody who has been around here for any length of time knows that the bulk of the members here are very sensitive to intellectual property issues. Most of us are artists. Some of us are programmers, too. These laws help us pay our bills and feed our families. We get a bit uppity when somebody even gets close to breaking them.

Remember that the Renderosity store pays the bills to keep this forum on line. The people who buy my stuff keep nerd3d.com on line. (Which came perilously close to closing down last month.) A lot of those prized freebies are my creations. (Look at the "Top Contributors" link in the free stuff.) The freebie downloads pushed my bandwidth to over 30GB per month. Find a host that allows traffic like that. The "unlimited" bandwidth places have some extremely fine print about excessive utilization. I just got a nasty note from my provider for over utilization yesterday.
It has been argued in this thread (and I've said it myself in the vendor forum), that if somebody posts a freebie that rivals a store product then the store product needs to be improved. Now, I think mine is better. But if it is not, that's exactly what I will do. In fact, the improved version is already built, awaiting my attention to apply the polish and create a set of maps for it. When it gets released, I will probably offer a special discount for owners of the original. (Don't hold your breath! There are several projects that will come first. The fog and atmosphere tool will be in a Poser store near you shortly. It's already available directly from the nerd3d store, Sorry for the shameless plug.)

It comes down to this. I'm not going to get mad if Visualkinetics posts his version, but some people will. Mostly because it sets a bad precedent and may infringe on intellectual property rights. The idea is legally protected by copyright law. It doesn't require a patent. I can't endorse this because of the ramifications to the rest of the vendors and the community as a whole. Like it or not capitalism won over communism. If we don't make money to pay the server bills, this place goes away.