Good morning everyone. Or perhaps I should just say hello. Its morning now, but it will likely be afternoon or evening by the time we have this message ready to post. ;)

Just in the way of introduction, this same message is being posted in multiple locations, and of necessity may appear general or may not address every individual that has contributed to this thread thus far. So, on to the issues...

1. This whole thing is not an issue specifically with The Tailor; it is an issue of morph and mesh ownership and protection.

The Tailor is a fabulous product, and DAZ does not feel it contradictory in the least to endorse both the responsible use of this product and the protection of peoples intellectual property. There have been many other tools out there for a long time that provide ways of doing similar thingstools that also can be used in ways that can be either bad or good for everyone involved.

Morph Manager, for example. This is a cool program that is valuable to the community and which DAZ fully endorses. However, there are ways (obvious, I hope) that it can be used which are specifically prohibited by the DAZ End User License Agreement, not to mention common sense. (For example, porting Michael 2 morphs over to a new .cr2 file and distributing that.) Does this mean that DAZ is against Morph Manager, or that we would only like it if we were making money from it somehow? Does this mean that when Morph Manager came out that we needed to clarify, or even change, our EULA? No, it doesnt. Morph Manager is a valuable tool, and people have seemed to understand why and how to use it without violating anyones EULA. If we had become aware at some point that they hadnt, then we would have tried to promote awareness on what is allowed and what is not.

Other examples, more analogous to the functionality of The Tailor include modeling programs, such as LightWave, Maya and Rhino, which have the ability to create derivative meshes or morphs easily. These tools are great; we have no intention not to allow and promote their use. However, if someone creates a derivative mesh from another persons product and then uses that derivative mesh to compete with the product upon which it was based, regardless of their method, then we all have a problem. If someone creates a derivative mesh from another persons product that may or may not compete with the product upon which it was based, then the owner of the original product will need to give permission for its distribution.

On the other hand, if something is not derivative of another artists work it should, by definition, be equally easy to create without using that work in the first place. This is the real issue. Does the original creator of a morph have the right to say how it can be used and what can be done with it? Yes he does. And if this market wants to challenge that then it will create a disincentive for all creators of original morphs in this community, because it wont let them exercise their right to benefit from their work and investment.

2. Entropic, concerning the issue of morph ownership, we understand that you are trying to establish that this right cant be asserted by the creators of these products. However, we were completely unaware that the Poser EULA restricts artists from being able to copyright their works created within Poser. Would you PLEASE elaborate on that for us since this potentially is a much larger issue than the transferring of morph targets with The Tailor ever could be. (You could imagine the fuster cluck that would be created if all developers were told that they have no legal way to protect their content.)

Regardless, you can rest assured that having worked in this industry for over a decade, creating and licensing models and morphs, DAZ is operating on rights that are very solid. No matter what Curious Labs stance is on protecting products created within Poser, that position has no bearing on things created in other applications outside of Poser, such as models, morph targets, U.V. work, and texture maps. The creation of these assets is governed by the EULA of the software in which they are created. Mirai, the product in which we create our models and morph targets says nothing about us not being able to copyright our original works created in that package. The same thing goes for the other 2D and 3D tools that we work with. Even if copyright were in question, we would still have coverage and protection of our original works with our own EULA.

3. Although many people have stated that using a DAZ product as a starting point to create another product which competes with any DAZ product will be a problem for DAZ, this is incorrect. Please re-read our posts and review our policies and actions over the last few years. For example, we havent allowed people to use the Michael mesh to create a Michael competitor, and we havent allowed people to use our clothing files to create a competitor for those clothes. We have, however, regularly allowed people to use Michael to create Michael clothes, even when those clothes compete directly with similar Michael clothes for sale at DAZ.

4. Contrary to opinions that the free availability of a Michael bodysuit containing all of the Michael 2 morphs could not substantially compete with the sale of Michael 2, we have evidence that it has. In fact, this recent information, in combination with some private requests for clarification from DAZ, was actually what prompted our initial post on the matter. However, we also realize that this is a very isolated case, existing largely because of the number of people out there interested in Michael 2 primarily for the ability to create muscle-bound, spandex-clad super-heros. As far as other clothing items and figures go, we are not currently aware of losing many, if any, Michael 2 sales over them. Issues such as whether a clothing item is skin tight, or whether it covers up the whole figure are not the point, but merely some of the factors we consider in our decision of what constitutes unfair competition.

And now, having alerted many people to the basic principles and potential problems associated with this issue, we hope you understand that while we have enforceable rights here, we are going to allow matching our character morphs in clothing items as we have in the past, until such a time as we feel that it is bypassing the need for the characters themselves.

5. The DAZ EULA has NOT changed in regards to the ability to protect our intellectual property from the threat of derivative competition. For example, the user may not reverse engineer, decompile, disassemble, or create derivative works clause has been in every DAZ and Zygote EULA from well before we ever did any work for Poser. As some of you have pointed out, the EULA that comes with the specific product is the agreement that governs its usage. It is expected that a user read and agree to these EULAs in order to use the products. And if you dont like to take our word for what is legal or not, please archive these agreements for your own reference.

6. DAZ cannot be aware of and address every issue brought up online that may concern us (and we certainly cant do so in a timely manner). We simply cant know what everyone is doing all of the time. That being said, we absolutely wish that we would have addressed this matter publically, thoroughly, and long ago. We apologize for our tardiness, and will do what we can not to have this type of situation occur again in the future. Trust me, we dont like dealing with this any more than you do.

7. We also feel it is fairly obvious that a few extremely vocal people here have no sincere desire for us to address their concerns or answer their questions. When we have to expend DAZ resources trying to deal seriously and professionally with incendiary remarks from a few people who arent looking for feedback, but rather an opportunity for some cheap shots and a little intrigue, this makes the pink ponies very, very sad. So please, can we drop the sensationalism and scapegoating, ad homini and non sequiturs? Not to mention the conspiracy theories of how the timing of DAZ brokering The Tailor, making posts concerning the EULA and acquiring PoserPros is part of some evil plan. And for those of you who need to ask, yes, this was just coincidence.

8. Finally, let me restate that in our opinion the best way to run a successful business in this market is to create opportunities for others to add on to our work. We feel that a symbiotic relationship is possible and is best for everyone.

Patent, copyright, and license enforcement allow innovators to be rewarded for their work. Do we want to make this system more difficult in our community? Poser development is only viable when we, as a community, make it viable for those creating the workboth original work, and add-on work. If we reward those making add-ons at the expense of those making the original, we will chase many of the developers away from this community, because it will always be easier, less time-consuming and less expensive to create derivative work than it will be to create original work.

Ultimately we need to protect our investments in our developments. We are also publically representing and protecting the interests of all developers. (There are many other morph-based products out there, and were discussing a general principle in a specific way.) There are many people behind the scenes encouraging us to establish a stance that will help to protect their rights as well. For them and us, we need to hold strong. With this being said, in the interest in community peace, we are willing to suspend our stance on the distribution of these DAZ-made morphs on the bodysuit or other clothing items for our figures until the applications that are being developed to aid in the legal transfer of these files have been developed and distributed. (We have been informed, as has the public, that MartinC and Russell Cook are both currently working on such products.) Make note that we retain the right to protect these morphs, and have merely announced temporary permission to distribute these files until such time as an option is available for encrypted distribution. Additionally, we want to make it very clear that people are not allowed to use our proprietary figure model morph targets to transfer to other figure models and then distribute them to others. (For example transferring Michael 2 morphs onto Michael 1, or onto the Poser 4 male figure, or onto the Dina V figure.) Obviously, people will still have to contact the developers of non-DAZ-made morph targets for permission to use them in this manner.

Well, thanks for wading through this huge post, everyone. As difficult as this whole situation has been, we still feel that weve made progress here in promoting both The Tailor and PoserPros, which was our devious plot. (Just kidding.) But seriously, we hope that our concession in this matter will make things easier for the community. And we hope that our posts on this subject have created awareness and a better understanding of what the DAZ EULA means.

Sincerely,
Chad Smith
DAZ Productions