Here's another quote on this issue (from SKondris): "Thanks for your comments and questions. I'll try to answer all your concerns. "What we are stating here is DAZ's stance on this issue. Each artist reserves the right to decide for themselves what they want to do with their own products. "CodeTwister made his decision and stated it publicly. Now we have made our decision and want to do what we can to help everyone understand. Each artist/creator will need to cross this bridge themselves and make their own decision about each of their products as well when it begins to affect their own work. "The most important issue is what I tried to focus on in my initial post: circumvention. If someone passed around all of Michael 2.0's morphs within a cr2 for Michael shoes, would we get all hot-and-bothered about it? No. And why not? Because it creates no real damage to any of our products. There are some items which we are more concerned about, the bodysuit is the best example I can think of. If you have Michael 1 and the standard bodysuit, no big deal. If someone transfers all of Michael 2.0's FBM's into the new bodysuit cr2 file, then someone with only Michael one has everything he/she needs to create their own new muscular fantasy/superhero character. This crosses the line from being a creation which enhances or adds value to a product and instead begins to directly compete with that product. "There are several items even within our own store which use this technology in a good way. For example, the Vicki's Wedding Day dress contains several of the Victoria 2.0 breast morphs in itself. This adds significant value to the dress and even to Victoria 2.0, but it does not make someone think "Hey, all I really need is the dress". John Brugioni contacted us directly when he began to work on his morphing clothing paks because he realized that his work might be seen as an infringement. We didn't just turn him away and tell him not to do it, instead we worked with him individually and came to an agreement that worked for both parties in which he sells his products exclusively through our site. There will be certain items and situations that we will be more than happy to allow, there will also be some that we will not be so keen on. Whenever anyone has a specific question, please feel more than free to contact us and find out what we think. "We are not announcing our position to be malicious in any way. We want the community to thrive as much as possible, but we also feel a need to protect our own interests. We are a business and if everyone begins distributing for free what we spend months working to produce for the community, then DAZ will not be able to produce anything at all. This new technology empowers everyone in the community tremendously, we hope that all will use it responsibly and honestly. "Scifiguy, thanks for being so open with us and willing to communicate with us and abide by our decision, please contact us directly whenever you feel you need to discuss this in specific terms with us. Hopefully this helps you understand our position better and clears up this matter, if not please let me know. "Everyone here is gone for the night, but we'll be back in tomorrow to see what else needs to be addressed. "

I really wanna hear what Daz has to say about this again and in clear language. I would buy Tailor if it could be ued be me but it can't. I did buy the morphing clothes package. I have Mike 2, Vicki 2 and jsut about every other product that Daz made but I just hate that I will neer be able to put clothes on a Mike figure that isn't the standard. That pretty much negates the reason for having Mike 2. Sure the head morphs are great but everyone under the sun isn't built the same way or living in spandex or naked. Like I said though. I really wanna hear what Daz says and ifd they do try to enforce this then include some body morphs in their clothes and port tailor over to mac to make it usable and make the M2 and V2 characters usable to their potential.

Ronknights - thanks for reposting SKondris statement. Unfortunately most of it is hyperbole and the essence is that DAZ wants to be Accuser, Victim, Prosecutor and JUDGE in all matters. They also want to stifle competition no matter what they say to the contrary. I owned Scifiguy's bodysuit, AND Doug Sturk's Bodysuit AND Michael CloPak 1 and 2 AND the Tailor, But I bought the M2 Morphing Clothing Pack ANYWAY because I thought it had merits of its own. Now I want a refund for the M2 Clothing Pak, not because it is duplicated by something else, but for 3 reasons: 1) because it is INFERIOR 2) because I was mislead into thinking it was conformiing 3) because I am tired of supporting a company that treats me like a criminal BEFORE THE FACT.

The morphing clothing pack is conforming :) Least with everything I have seen it matches perfectly. It doesn't do it automatically because if it did that there would be crosstalk with is a bad thing :) But I supposse you could make a crosstalk one if you stripped out the extra letters in the morph dials

who do we lynch tomorrow? btw... I now own the color "red". Anyone using this color or derivation of this color for any reason must now pay me royalties. Furthermore, since it was my idea to claim ownership of the color, if you attempt to claim ownership of any other color...Im gonna come after you for violation of intellectual copyright. make checks payable to "brycetech" see, you can put anything in writing...doesnt mean its worth the paper its written on tho. :P BT

Umm... A question. DAZ is against distribution of anything that could be worked back to 'create' one of their products. That is reasonable. So... If I have V2 and Tailor, and I make an item for V2, is it possible to re-create V2 from that item of clothing? It seems to me more like Tailor would 'fit' an item to a figure with morphs set at a speciphic point. Would the clothing adapt if I later changed the morph settings, or would I have to run Tailor again?

OMNedon, The Tailor generates morphs for your custom geometry to approximate the morphs in the figure. Now you could take the process backwards and apply a morph in a clothing item and approximate it on the figure, getting a similiar, but less desirable morph. Notice I did not say exact. Now The Tailor isn't the problem. DAZ's statement basically says that morphs or even clothing items without morphs, even if they are 100% original items can break thier copyright because you can put it on a figure and it will look like you have thier upgraded figure. Let's say you only have Mike1 and I make a shirt and pants set that will fit Mike2 in his muscular form. You can buy that shirt and pants and put it on Mike1 and he will look muscular. You will be seeing the clothing and not his body. DAZ wants to make this a breach of copyright even though none of thier geometry is used.

Omnedon, I noticed I didn't fully answer your question. When you push an item through tailor, it doesn't matter what you have your morph set to. Actually at this stage you don't have any morphs set as it is outside poser. What you get is a morph in the clothing item completly separate from the figure. If you set the figures morph dial to 1 you can set the clothing dial to 1 and it will closely match. If you set the figure to 0.5 you set the clothing to 0.5 and it will still closely match.

I just checked the DAZ site. The Victoria 2 Morphing Clothing Pack apparently does not require that you posses Vicky 2 for it to work. So, based on DAZ's own statements, that clothing pack would allow someone to put the Vicky 2 catsuit on Vicky 1, and give her Vicky 2's morphs! Ouch.. maybe they hadn't thought of that?! **** "Requires the previous purchase of the Victoria Clothing Pak 1"

Ahh... So it does put morphs into the clothing item... Is it possible, if I were to take V2, set the morphs as desired (for example I twiddle V2 for a character and call her 'Anne') to use (Morph Manager, Objaction Mover?) to lock the morphs. Then run Tailor and make clothes for Anne. So... I know it is possible to distribute alterations (require V2 and add my alterations to make Anne) but my alterations without V2 would be useless. And clothes for Anne would not fit V2... (Although I suppose the clothes for Anne could then be used to make V2 into Anne without actually having the alterations.) Or am I just getting more confused?

If I read things right, it started with DAZ saying or implying that someone could copy Mike 2 morphs from the bodysuit, onto Mike 1. Now DAZ is saying Mike 1 can wear a Mike 2 bodysuit and pretend he's Mike 1. In otherwords, "the clothes will make the man." The man himself still remains the same. OH, but it's ok to make such a morphing bodysuit if you have an exclusive selling arrangement with DAZ. Mike 1 can still pretend he's Mike 2, but DAZ is making money from that masquerade.

Yes, exactly. DAZ is trying to eliminate any and all competition for their products, using "copuright violations" as a smokescreen, because they know the Poser community in general supports copyright holders. This time, I'm not buying it. DAZ are trying to prevent people creating entirely original products that would be compatible with DAZ's entirely original products. (I don't care if the product in question is a bodysuit or an earring: as far as I am concerned the PRINCIPLE is the same.) That's not protecting copyright: it's bullying the competition. And it's not a legally supportable position.

It's the equivalent of saying that no one can create a texture for Victoria, because the texture map is necessarily a derivative product of their copyrighted mesh. Where would they be if that were the case?

Tagging this so I know where I stopped reading.

I do NOT want to be limited to selling my products in just DAZ's store. Once again that kills any and all competition. If I make a pant and shirt set that fits Mike2 in morphed form you can put it on Mike1 and he will look like Mike2. So freaking what! Don't make modellers out there creating original items the thieves. Make it illegal to extract morphs from a clothing item and use those morphs to apply to the character so that it circumvents the purchase of the upgrade. That should be where thier stance lies, in the hands of those actually ripping them off, not in the hands of people creating products for thier new character! If I create something new using my own mesh I should not be told where I can and can not sell it.

Yep. Well said. That is what bothers me with this policy.

If I create something new using my own mesh NOBODY can stop me, they can not like this, they can say what they wants, they can try, but they CANNOT STOP ME.

Just as a point, From what I can see of the Tailor, in use and by inference, it DOESN'T TRANSFER MORPHS. It acts like a collision detection system that maps the shape of a morph, then appriximates that shape on a differnet object or mesh. This is one of the reasons that many Tailor morphs need to be tweaked once done, they are limited by the geometry of the target object. Therefore "moving" morphs via the Tailor program is a but like JPEG compression, everytime a morph is adapted to a new object a bit of the details are lost. Not exactly the best way I can see to create a Mike 2 from a Mike 1 if you ask me. As I've said on another site, and to paraphrase. The answer is to only create clothing to fit the basic Mike and Vicki shape. Then everyone can buy the Tailor program from DAZ and add their own morphs to the basic cloths, at least until P5 adds this funtion. Of course DAZ can then claim that P5 hurts their sales of the Tailor and.... well you get the idea. mike

What a tasty melange of fact, fiction, truth, half-truth, fantasy, inuendo, speculation etc. At least, I can throw in my own "guess" and not feel that I'm lowering the standards of communication here. Two words: Reverse Engineering (as in the license agreement). There is a reason software companies create potentially competing/infringing products in so called "clean rooms," where the developers have no access to the code of the product they're targeting. They want an audit trail to prove they didn't use someone else's intellectual property in their creation I'm guessing this is Daz' position. If you (whether manually or using the Tailor) need to use their meshes to create your product then that's reverse engineering and they can bring legal action against you. Whether it would hold up in court is up to a jury. In their view, they are exercising discretion in deciding whether or not a particular item is one they should disallow, just like the cop who may ley you slide for going 5 mph over the limit. If this is the case, then yes, they could "outlaw" shrink wrapping, etc. but have chosen not to. This may seem arbitrary but they are making decisions based on their own interests, trying to balance them with maintaining good relationships with the Poser community. You may disagree or feel that they are doing a bad thing but they obviously feel they have the law on their side. They may be wrong but anyone with even a laymen's knowledge of the legal system knows that trying to say what would or wouldn't result from going to trial is foolish at best. That's why wise people usually try to settle out of court. Someone needs to use Avatar Lab so we can have an arena with "real" death matches. The verbal blood and guts is getting too tame. Now, back to your regularly scheduled programming. "He is the princes jester : a very dull fool; only his gift is in devising impossible slanders: none but libertines delight in him; and the commendation is not in his wit but in his villany; for he both pleaseth men and angers them, and then they laugh at him and beat him." Shakespeare

Maybe someone can write a program like Objaction Mover that can be used to encrypt cr2 files?

The S/NR of this tread is somewhat north of absurd! How about a little less heat and a LOT more light?

Sorry Charlie. I agree, but that's a lot to ask. Q