I dont understand all the details here, but I am going to study them. These issues always crop up here but this thread is the best discussion of these sorts of problems that I have seen on Renderosity, unless I have missed something. We are dealing with a microcosm of the general issue of intellectual property rights that is becoming more and more important for all people, and not simply the Poser community. Some years ago the business and financial communities decided that the future would be an information age. Wealth would be in information and the challenge would be how to control and own information. So laws would have to be written and tested in courts to allow the capitalization of information. Practically anything can be thought of as information, even the DNA code. What drove the effort back then to start to build a society in which all information could be owned as a commodity and incorporated fully into the industrial/banking system was the emergence of the internet and new possibilities for sharing and cooperation among ordinary people. It was also the prospect of biotechnology and industrial genetics. In the field of biotechnology the scientist who leads the effort to develop vitamin A-rich Golden Rice wants to give the seeds free to poor rural people whose children come down with blindness from currently vitamin A deficient diets. But he cannot do this easily without permission from over 60 patent holders and holders of license-agreements who have a legal right to make a profit off of the use of bits of DNA code that the law has allowed them to claim, and off the use of techniques that other patent holders either developed or bought. This challenge is complicated further by the fact that companies can sell patents to each other and do not necessarily have to honor previous licenses, because of course the business community has lobbied for laws that give owners maximum control over their properties. All this has gotten very, very complicated, and terms regarding specific properties can be very fluid and change on a dime. Intellectual property issues are also complicated in the publishing industry where lobbyists have gotten laws that insure prosperity for lawyers. You can write a book in the United States but cannot necessarily sell it to be translated in Sweden or Kenya along with the illustrations. Maybe you bought the rights to use the illustrations in the US edition, but then the copyright holder insist that they wont let you use them again in foreign publications, or when you try to renew your copy write, etc. etc. So basically we have been seeing a huge aggressive agenda to capitalize just about everything, even information and even water!! This has gone so far that whether or not the principle of a public domain will survive is in real question. The US Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case regarding copy right renewals. The case is regarded as a first attempt to establish whether or not in the future there will be a public domain for intellectual property, or whether the push by lobbyists for laws to privatize all information will continue unchecked. This is a huge and enormously important historical issue, for there has always been a public domain throughout history, and people have cooperated to share information, and information has been modified, and in turn built on, etc. and this has been much of how human societies have progressed. Whether society can continue to progress equally well with a privatized information market is not at all clear. Personally, I am skeptical. It is bad enough that fair use practices have gotten more restrictive, but think, as a thought experiment, how difficult it would be if one had to get permission to use iambic pentameter or free verse, or certain phrases or expressions in writing. I am not suggesting that this will happen, but the example may help to visualize the general point. Anyway, I like the discussion in this thread and I think that these are important issues to discuss and think about even beyond the particular issues that concern the Poser community. So I am going to go back and better try to understand the particulars here. I hope that such discussions continue.