Ironbear has written one of the few messages in this thread which sounds the least bit adult and professional. Copyright springs into being at the moment of creation. It is a bundle of rights. It is vested entirely in the hands of the creator. The creator AND NO ONE ELSE has the ability to split up that bundle of rights. He may give some rights away freely, and still retain 100% control over the rest of those rights. You do have the right to complain about how he splits those rights; but that is not only self-serving, it is self-defeating. If the creator says "no commercial use" or "with permission only", his decision must be respected, just as his time and the value of his labors must be respected. If you are too flipping lazy to spend 30 seconds asking permission, you don't deserve to have it. Why should you make a profit from his labor? Without even the grace of asking permission? Is that too humbling? Too much to ask for the gift of his time? We have lost many fine people who got tired of being ripped off by the misuse of their work. We almost lost Traveler and a couple of others, who later decided to give this community a second chance. The Japanese modelers are especially sensitive to this, if you use their work without permission they "lose face", with all that implies. Each such loss is a terrible loss to the community as a whole, and just because one greedy bastard couldn't bestir himself enough to ask before taking and using their work in his commercial product. Think about it. If there were no restrictions upon the free items, why would anybody buy in the various Markets? You get what you pay for, and by purchasing a product, you usually purchase more rights with it. If no one buys, the markets will collapse. And when they collapse, we might lose communal websites such as this one, as well as the higher quality items which will no longer have distribution channels. If you are going to be paid for your work, you had best create everything in that rendered image or buy the usage rights for items created by others. The more you act like a professional, the more you will be treated like one. So, folks, GROW UP! You can't just take, take, take, take everything you want, and then bitch, whine, moan, and yammer while refusing to respect the rights of the artist who is willing to share for the joy of sharing. If you don't want to respect those rights, don't bother scrounging through the Free Stuff area. Don't waste your time or their bandwidth. It is that simple. Don't even look. ::shake head:: This is really an ungrateful bunch; worse than any schoolful of kindergardeners. I hope Santa realizes how much coal he is going to need this year. Oh, and Poppi... to say that an artist would lose potential customers by limiting his freestuff is a shade this side of nonsense... if people are taking it freely, they aren't his customers, and if they are endlessly complaining about it, they aren't the customers he wants anyway. And Fyrespiryt... the 3dCommune is the friendliest of the online communities; they've only had to ban one member out of 19,000. The odds here at Renderosity are much worse. I could say more, but would rather work on something given to me by someone here who is truly generous and open-hearted. I need to think about the good people, quiet as they are, and remember why I'm part of this community. Carolly