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