I saw someone offering "light setting" for non commercial use only (poser). But is that really valid... seeing that any light setting can be recreated in poser by anyone? If it's a valid copyright, that would mean certain light settings in poser could be restricted because someone already holds the copyright for that. The poser 5 eula stats that you cannot hold a feature available in p5 as copyrightable. What's your take? I think they should keep free stuff on one side and restricted stuff on another side.

That person's zip file should be protected by copyright just like Daz's light set should. Individual light settings are not copyrightable.

As for the restriction they place on it(non commercial), I have to laugh.

I'm laughing too. Really :) I just hope I don't get sued for using the wrong thing where or if later they happen to change to restrictions. Thanks.

I still haven't been able to get anyone to tell me how they enforce those restrictions.... But let's not rekindle that flamewar again....

I think some people must be putting stuff in "no commercial use" under the impression they're saying "you can't resell this as-is for profit" or something, which makes sense but isn't what "no commercial use" means.

Why anyone would give out a freebie and say you can't use it in commercial renders is beyond me, EXCEPT for one case, which is when there is a copyright that the freebie maker doesn't own. As when someone makes a Batman-themed freebie. He can't charge for it without risking a lawsuit from the Batman people, and he "restricts" commercial use of any render just to remind people who use the freebie that they better respect the Batman copyright too.

Lots of people do like making renders of pop icons for their private enjoyment. (More often Wonder Woman than Batman, I imagine.)

Anyway, you can certainly sell your pre-packaged light-set and make a license restriction that no one who buys it from you can simply re-sell that as-is. In theory it's legally enforceable if you can show the customer bought the product from you and has made no changes to it at all when reselling it (not that anyone in RM has enough money at stake to pay lawyer's fees; but I like to think the rest of us would respect your rights, ask that the customer's knockoff not be sold here, etc.)

But even if you sell it (much less put it out there as a freebie), you can't restrict people from using Poser lights in any conformation they wish in a render.

However, consider this. In a lawsuit-happy society, you might want to place "restrictions" on your customer's renders (no obscenity or pornography, not as part of a threat against property, blah blah blah blah) NOT because your "restriction" is actually enforceable, but just to make absolutely sure no clown who sues or prosecutes your client for some illegal use can come after you as well.

Just a thought.

This does bring up a point I've wondered about though...if light settings cannot be protected, than what's to stop anyone from just selling a free light set made by someone else and claiming that it's either a coincidence or that they have the right to use the exact same settings because lights can't be copyrighted? Maybe I'm reading it wrong though, because with all the vendors in own Marketplace here that continue to try to sell stuff that should be free to begin with, I can't imagine no one's thought of doing that yet. ;) SnowS Hoping his pictures are worth 1001 words. 1001 Words

This is simply beyond me. If my parents saw me with a playboy mag, she'd say I was into pornography. If they ever visit me while I'm surfing renderosity, they would say I'm doing pornography on the web. Most of the models don't come with clothes... so offering naked models, is that pornography? Oh well.

Don't get me wrong, d4500, I'm not saying there's any rationality behind any anti-pornography law. But precisely because such laws can be so nutty and arbitrary, one might want to take extreme precautions against being prosecuted, especially if all it costs you is a meaningless "restriction" in a text file.

I guess my question is... is this considered a porn site? As in porn magazines (playboy)? Because nude models exist here? I would rather not be depicted or be considered as a deviant, that's all.

nudity does not equal pornography. that sort of thinking belongs in the dark ages.

On the one hand, Pariah's right.
On the other, there are in fact places in the world where this would indeed be considered a porn site and legally prosecutable -- parts of the Islamic world, for instance.
And there's nothing to keep some nutball prosecutor, even in the United States, from hauling you into court for a nude Millenium Kid, even if there were no sexual context whatever. People have been prosecuted for taking snapshots of their own kids in the tub -- the sort of snapshots our granparents took all the time. People are rarely convicted in such ridiculous cases, but I'm not sure they're never convicted -- and in any case, the expense and public humiliation is ruinous.

Far as SnowSultans comment about reselling lighting sets...Didn't that already happen? Rusulting in a big giant flame war and the booting of some member... Before my time but I've heard bits and pieces of the story.

SnowSultan Neither letters or words can be copyrighted but literary works composed of these 'basic' elements most certainly can be. It's not the element themselves that are protected by copyright, its the composition of these elements into a 'creative work' (in this case the light set). Identical light settings aren't themselves the issue, they only provide admissable evidence that copying has taken place. Even if there are no identical points (or the work is translated into another application/language/alphabet or whatever) copyright law still applies if a court recognises the 'copyrightability' of the work in question, and believes that there is sufficient similarity to accept that copying has taken place. Bill

Anyway, SnowSultan --

And let me just take this opportunity to thank you for all the terrific freebies you've contributed to the community, you're the greatest --

Here's the deal as I understand it.

X puts some software out as freeware. Software reduces to code, which is text, and the courts have given it copyright protection. (Theoretically, anything could be represented as code and therefore text, but the courts won't necessarily decide that it's inherently text and covered by copyright law. Software, however, is a done deal.)

So X can distribute his program as freeware, allowing people to copy it and use it and distribute it for free so long as they include his copyright notice, but not to sell it for profit as their property, which it isn't.

Suppose somebody, Y, sells it anyway?

a. X can file an injunction to stop Y. I don't know if X can actually recover damages from Y. If Y had pirated X's commercial software, all Y's profits would be taken out of X's pocket and he would have a right to recover them. But if Y never had any intention of profiting from the program, I don't know if he can claim monetary damages.

b. Even if X never notices or does anything about Y's infringement, Y has no property rights in his commercial version. He can't restrict other people's use of the program; he doesn't own it, never did, even if he's the first person to sell it for profit.

c. A third party, Z, who bought the program from Y, could probably get his money back if he learned that Y did not own the product.

Now, do all those things apply to a mesh or prop placed in the freebies area?

Probably. Whether they fall under copyright or not, they are probably considered intellectual property of some kind under the law. Can the author of the prop make a license restriction on public renders of the prop? I guess. Again, he probably couldn't claim any monetary damages, but could probably obtain an injunction to prevent such renders from being distributed. WHY, I don't know; if you're so terrified of your prop being rendered, why make it a freebie at all -- a mystery to me. But you could in theory do it.

But when we get to something like light-settings in Poser, we're entering an area that the courts would not recognize as intellectual property. There's a lot of patent law precedent we can reasonably apply here. The customer bought the right to arrange and parent and otherwise conform his lights anyway he wants to when he first bought Poser. No third person could patent or otherwise lay claim to some subset of those capabilities.

You can sell a light-set and expect some legal protection for your zip-file itself. As I said above, in a message you may have missed because we posted about the same time, if you could show that Y bought the light-set from you and then distributed it in exactly the same form (especially if there were aspects to the package that did not come with Poser, such as a special way of naming the lights so that they would perform in a special way, etc.), then you could probably prove he'd violated the license of sale if nothing else, and with luck collect damages for whatever money he'd made that should have gone to you.

As a freebie, I doubt you could collect any damages, but could at most enjoin Y not to distribute your light set in that form.

No one could claim any rights to the settings in themselves. No one could claim that you couldn't make renders with the lights in that setting, since you bought the right to set the lights any way you pleased when you bought Poser.

Any "restrictions" placed on the use of such a light set are legally unenforceable and meaningless, though I argued above that they might be desirable as a means of clearly establishing no responsibility for someone else's misuse of the set.

Now, how does this relate to, for instance, your "Globall" freebie? The basic idea of parenting lights to a central prop to create an omnidirectional light is not anything you can claim intellectual property right to, even if you had been the first person to try something like that. But you could say, don't download this prop and these settings and then sell them as-is for profit, and you might -- if you were a zillionaire who didn't care about legal and court costs -- be able to enforce that in court. (You might not; the court might decide that naming the lights and the Globall and so forth was not a significant addition to the Poser capabilities and no one's property. But you might.)

Anyway, it's all moot, because the only reason you expressed any restriction at all when freebying the Globall was because you wanted to make sure that people could freely use and experiment with and make improvements on the basic idea. I gathered you were afraid that if someone sold a version commercially, that would freeze it and restrict others -- but fortunately, that's not the case. Only a very specific and original version could have any protection at all from infringement; everyone else would be free to do their own versions.

So I believe.

Re: the Globall, you might be very interested in this thread, if you aren't already following it:

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12413&Form.ShowMessage=983985

"Any "restrictions" placed on the use of such a light set are legally unenforceable and meaningless, though I argued above that they might be desirable as a means of clearly establishing no responsibility for someone else's misuse of the set." A good point, and something I hadn't thought of before. An analogy would be the idiotic warning labels that appear on all sorts of products from ladders to toys; the manufacturer has no way to prosecute you for standing on the top step, but if you fall off and hurt somebody else, the manufacturer is (at least in theory) protected from being a co-defendant.

Thank you very much for the explanations. I also didn't know about that thread wadams9, thanks for pointing that out too. I figured it wouldn't take too long for Marketplace versions to show up, haha. ;) As long as his has features that mine do not, then it's probably a welcome addition to the store. However, I still don't care to see anyone try and sell something that others have made for free (especially poses, I'll never quite understand that one after the millions that Schlabber has given us all), and I intend to try and improve my Globall in the near future so that vendors will have to make significant improvements to similar lighting to justify paying for them. Nothing personal towards any vendors of course. :) SnowS

what's about pose sets? let's say - s.o. had created some very sophisticated poses and offers them for free personal, but not commercial use. if this comes true, noone else could ever use these poses any longer making mony using them ... or has to tweak them a bit here and there. (i don't speak of selling the poses - i think of selling pics using the poses) the purpose ot the program itself (intended for posing) would become more and more senseless. but: who can prove, that poses are stolen, or purchased, or created, or recreated? what do you think?

I would say no because it would prevent someone else from using poser to create the pose. How would you like to buy poser and found out all the poses were already taken (copyrighted?). Something diverse would be... suppose you created a jeans texture (taking a photo of your jeans pants) and someone else took a photo of their jeans and both pics just happen to look alike because both jeans were made by the same company. As a judge I would throw out the case providing they still have the jeans in question.

There's an important difference between the terms "settings" which refer to parameter values and as has been pointed out can't be copyrighted as they constitute the basic "alphabet" or primitive elements, and "sets", which, in this case refer to the creative composition of those basic elements, and, until any court rules otherwise should be assumed to be copyrightable. Bill

suppose someone created a figure ($9.99 value) for personal use. He later fines out someone used his figure commercially, and he sues. Should he get millions of dollars or just $9.99 - the amount he would get if he was actaully selling the item? Second question: If a model is available for personal use only and you render a full scene with the model for display. Someone falls in love with it and tells you to sell it to them? Is that breaking the restrictions? What if the author was behind the sale... so he could sue you????

What if they are actually selling it-- we have another item in the marketplace that has commercial restrictions on it-- no commercial use. It's in the read me. I've gotten so I read every single read me because lots of people put stuff in different places, and lots other refine excatly what's being sold in the read me. In this case, it was a bit of a shock, I do wish Rosity would refuse to sell items like this. Most people I know go by the renderosity licence only. EMily

Your're right. Items sold should not have render restrictions - the author already has ownership of the model. What's the purpose of wasting your time if you can't get paid for it?????? I know of some companies that sell music/sound/ 3d graphics/models etc. The pitch is: spice up your projects, cards, photos etc and have fun. So you purchase the box. When you open the software, the eula states that you cannot use them for profit. That means you can't use it for a book that could be sold or even a newsletter if you charge for it or if used in public. The box is already open so you can't return it. Shouldn't they state: "Restricted Use Only" in big letters on the box? No, they wont' do it because nobody would buy it. If the product sits on the shelf too long, it is shipped back to them.

I agree -- putting out products that can't be publicly rendered is just a waste of everybody's time.

(The only exception, let me say it again: if you want to put out a freebie based on someone else's copyright. People do like to do private renders of, e.g., Star Trek characters even though they can't show them for profit without getting their pants sued off. Notice, you can't sell that Star Trek themed thing even if you restrict it to non-profit renders, because then you're making money off their copyright; but putting it out as a freebie is considered safe because you're just giving Trek free advertising without taking profits out of their pocket.)

The pose set question is just like the light set question.

If X (real name: Eric Westray) goes to the trouble of crafting 20 great pin-up poses, and I know it would take me hours and hours to do as well and that my time is worth at least minimum wage per hour -- I cheerfully pay him ten bucks for the poses.

The license of sale says I can't just re-sell this package as-is to other people as my own work. If I do so, X can legally enjoin me to stop and has a claim on any money I made doing it.

X's license does NOT prohibit commercial renders of the poses because he'd be insane to write that in -- why would anyone bother to buy the product? If he did include such a provision, I would be stupid to buy.

So I've bought it. Can I just tweak a few finger positions and rename the poses and sell it as my own work? I can try, but in the real world X will raise a fuss in Renderosity and I will get kicked out. (In an imaginary world where we all could afford lawyers, X would take me to court and probably win, because once he proved that I bought the set from him, the finger-tweaking would be revealed as the cheap dodge that it is. If X couldn't prove I had access to his product, though, he'd probably lose, because yes, it's always possible for the poses to be invented independently.)

Okay, someone Y (real name: Karl Marx), living every day with the horror of anyone making a buck off anything, posts a freebie pose set and places commercial restrictions on it. Can I sell his work as my own? No. Or again, I can try, but everyone in 'rosity will point out that they can just get it free; and in the imaginary world where we can all afford court costs, Y might be able to get a court injunction against me continuing to sell. But I don't think he could get even a dime of monetary damages, because the money I made pirating him did not come out of his pocket -- he never intended to make a dime anyway.

Can I sell similar or even identical poses if I didn't get them from Y but invented them myself. Of course! (I should be careful never to download his pose set, though, so as not to create false evidence of copying against myself.)

Finally, Y's readme included a restriction on commercial renders. (Why? Because he's a f**** communist, that's why.) This is not enforceable as a practical matter and almost certainly as a legal matter. Anyone who has paid CL for Poser has a right to pose and render the figures any way he or she chooses. If Y's freebie had been an original prop that didn't come with Poser, he could restrict renders if he chose, his copyright on his own original product is good. But he doesn't own Poser's posing capacity.

I might add that the purpose of copyright and patent laws in American law is NOT to lock invention and innovation up so that it can't be used. On the contrary, the sole purpose of those laws was to encourage invention and innovation by creating a way for inventors to get some monetary benefit for their work (originally, just for twenty years or so -- the misguided way we've extended the time limits has obscured the real purpose of the laws, which were never intended to keep ideas out of use.) It's hard enough for Y to carve out any right of intellectual property over poses, and if he isn't even looking for his recompense as an inventor but trying to keep invention and innovation locked up, the law just isn't on his side.

Really, all you need to do is apply common sense and decency. You can't use someone else's original work without their permission; you can't restrict someone else from using ideas or capabilities that they didn't derive strictly from your original work.

Very good answer. I just saw on the news that this artist is moving up the release date of his album because pirated versions are already selling on the streets. If he hasn't already released the album (I assume it's in some wharehouse guarded by the RIAA, waiting to be shipped) how can someone have pirated versions selling already? Assuming that CDs are in the stores, they won't sell it to the public until release date. So if there's a culprit, it must be those in the music business and not the public.