"but I suspect that this act of distributing that light set was more of a protest against the idea that a light set should be copyrightable than any regard for the quality of that light set in particular" then you dont know bebop very well, i suppose. keep in mind that this is a person whose first attack against me, besides personal attacks, was the reposting of one of my copyrighted gallery images with his little 'alterations'. when asked by myself and the admins to remove it, he refused - and laughed when i threatened legal action. then he went on to troll almost my entire gallery several times under several different nicknames, and post 'parodies' of my images in the gallery with vicious insults against myself and some of the renderosity members who commented on my images. when he was finally and permanently banned, he created several new nicknames and continued his efforts. just recently his 5th or 6th incarnation was banned. i have my suspicions that mikeknott is either his 7th or a very close friend of his, since hes taken to trolling my gallery as well for no reason that i can fathom. so if you believe that any of this is based upon some noble purpose to defend copyrights for us all, youre very wrong. this is just the culmination of a series of pathetic personal attacks made by a small-minded individual who has a complete disregard for the law, and who believes he is untouchable because he lives in great britain and knows about anonymity proxies. and all this is over the fact that i left a negative comment on one of his gallery images that i thought was inappropriate over a year ago. bebop is not sane, phantast. sane people do not act in this manner. "I am worried that someone will start claiming copyright on basic poses" with 'basic poses' i think you mean something like... ideas for poses. ideas for poses are not copyrightable - so for example noone can claim copyright for a 'smoking' pose, or a 'sitting with legs crossed' pose, or a 'genuflection' animation. but after one creates a pose, or an animation - one composed of a series of dozens of elaborate dial settings, they own the copyright on it. you dont think BVH files are copyrightable either? of course they are, and all they are is a series of poses. next youre going to say that noone can copyright an action, because any human being can perform it. true, to an extent - but it would be next to impossible to reproduce that exact BVH file without using the source. i think you are confusing something here. the IDEA of global illumination lighting in poser is not copyrightable. but the precise position of over 24 lights in 3d space in an elaborate series of HUNDREDS of dial settings per set is.