While browsing through the store yesterday (something i rarely have time to do anymore), a product caught my eye. soccer coach's 'Danelle' character for the millennium preteen. even though she was wearing jeans, sneakers and a tank top, something about the body style immediately caught my eye in the thumbnail. even under the clothing in the promo images, i could recognise my character morph. so i purchased the character and spent the next 4-5 hours doing a comparison. i called Rio to the computer and asked her 'who does this look like', and the first thing out of her lips was 'thats Nia'. and she didnt even create the morph, only helped on the texturing. the 'Danelle' character is a direct ripoff of my Nia character, formerly at RuntimeDNA (since Dec 21, 2002), and now here at Renderosity. even though the origins were evident at a glance, ive tried my hardest to be open minded about this thing, telling myself 'maybe im wrong, maybe theres a possibility he did create this from scratch and its just a coincidental similarity'. but after examining this product for hours, there isnt a shred of doubt in my mind that my Nia custom morph and texture were used to create this product. ive spent days on this product, and when you spend days molding, shaping something by hand, it becomes instantly recogniseable even from a thumbnail. now the debate about wether or not 'morph dial settings' are copyrightable does not apply here. Nia is NOT a set of 'dial-twists', shes a complte remorph of the entire millennium preteen body and head to create something entirely new. 'Denelle' not only incorporates the nia body morph, but also my nia body texture. some attempts have been made to disguise Denelle's origins. both in photoshop (for the texture), and zbrush (most likely) for the body morph. theres a bit of smoothing and some rescaling of some parts - possibly the custom Nia morph dial has been turned down to below 1.000 on some parts of the body. but anyone with even a slight familiarity with poser texturing and custom morphing in programs such as zbrush can tell at a glance that Denelle is a derivative. i have put up an in-depth comparison page here: http://www.blackhearted.com/comparison/ youre welcome to come to your own conclusions. if anyone tries to bitch me out for publicly posting a small version of 'Denelle's texture, keep in mind that this is a ripoff of MY OWN texture, and therefore i have every right to do so. besides, both textures are thumbnail size and cropped, and it would be next to impossible to actually 'use' these on a model. i have filed a copyright infringement notice at rosity last night. i figured if hed just slink away quietly after this, id let itgo without even posting anything. but he has the GALL to issue a counterclaim, therefore im presenting this to the community to show what goes on in the marketplace. for every one of these that the community notices, how many are there that slip past the testers? im willing to bet that for every one that gets caught, ten go by unnoticed, and unpunished. i only happened upon this one by chance. as for unpunished - soccer_coach, after some minor discomfort, walks away the winner here. his item is pulled from the store, but cheques were mailed out yesterday, so hell be laughing all the way to the bank. 'Denelle' was formerly #4 on the top sellers list for this month. so hell take his $500-600 or so and walk, free to do this again or perhaps release it at another community store. and this isnt a 'copyright blunder'. im well aware that every merchant, myself included, has made small errors or copyright infringements in their newbie, or not-so-newbie merchant careers. but these are often small honest mistakes, are rectified immediately, and the product is modified and reuploaded while its in testing or before more than a couple of sales are made. this is not a 'copyright blunder', or an 'honest mistake'. the entire Nia morph and texture has been used here, with attempts to disguise them both. a little morph tweaking in zbrush, some gaussian blur, hue and saturation, noise and a few touches with the clone tool DO NOT CONSTITUTE YOUR OWN WORK. its a blatant ripoff, and now im starting to see why people like Anton get so fuming mad and verbal about issues like this. ironically i thought he was overreacting in his copyright infringement posts that i read earlier, and thought he was being a wee bit heavy-handed. now i think otherwise. i have to go now - i have a funeral to attend in an hour, and another one tomorrow, sigh. ill be back later today (hopefully). i could have done without this crap to deal with this weekend, i have so little time as it is. instead it falls upon ME to police the marketplace for ripoffs of my product, and to waste hours of my time doing comparisons to prove that they are such. cheers, -gabriel