And it's certainly true that the thing isn't worth doing unless you could mark up the body into a number of zones; if there's no way to define a zone without carrying over geometry, then you'd be carrying over a lot of geometry. I guess there's still an "if" in there . . .

Thanks tremendously, Lourdes! I guess it's my baby to play with now. I'll tell if you if I learn anything.

(See also http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?ForumID=12356&Form.ShowMessage=990251)

Well, to answer my own question, a sub-divide Mat just has to refer to an already-existing body part without spelling out any faces. But is naming the faces sufficient to give away their spacial relationship?

It may well be exactly as you say, Lourdes.

Still, it's not obvious to me that a file which supplies only the information that Groupname-X-comprises-faces-such-and-such gives away the actual geometry of those faces. If subdivide mats don't give away geometry people shouldn't have, why should this?

Maybe it's only my ignorance that still sees a possibility here.

I understand what you're saying, Lourdes. It's what I would have said a month ago. But after reading this description of an "injection morph" --

http://www.renderosity.com/messages.ez?Form.ShowMessage=968818

--I'm wondering if there isn't also a way of "injecting" material zones. Maybe I should repost this in Poser Technical.

Thanks, Little Dragon!

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.

For anyone just skimming this thread (which really did turn out to be very informative), the bottom line is:

Gimbal lock is very common in 3d programs, not a CL "bug", but in Poser 5 you can use the Direct Manipulation tool to get around it.

(My personal thanks to stewer. I knew about gimbal lock, I owned Poser 5 -- and I had completely missed the value of the Direct Manipulation tool.)

What he said.

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

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.

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 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.

Oh, I certainly didn't think you could or should restrict the idea -- as you say, it's an old idea that was already out there. But if people buy the particular setup, its perfectly reasonable to say you can't simply resell that setup. You started this thread by asking what people wanted to pay, so I've responded in kind. You can of course just give it away if you want to.

I think it's also a good idea to sell it with your own housings, as you propose. That's what I was going to do with mine. I was also going to point out to people that the light source could be used in lots of ways other than the housings I supplied, that they could freely use it that way in their public or commercial renders, that I claimed no patent or right to restrict the basic idea (with acknowledgments to SnowSultan), but that of course no one could simply resell my housing or my particular light object as supplied.

Of course now I'm just waiting to buy yours!

Bill