Forum: Community Center


Subject: Concern about Standard Licence terms.

RagnarokEOTW opened this issue on Oct 23, 2021 ยท 2 posts


RagnarokEOTW posted Sat, 23 October 2021 at 12:52 PM

As part of a discussion elsewhere about content licences, several of us have been going over the licences of the various content stores we use with a fine-toothed comb, which has turned up something worrisome in Renderosity's Standard Licence, specifically Section 4 "PROHIBITED USES OF THE STANDARD LICENSE", Clause 1:

The Buyer shall not copy, modify, reverse compile, convert, reverse engineer, sell, sublicense, rent, or distribute Product, use Product for topology, create competing digital Products from Product, give (transfer) Product to anyone, or use Product in real-time rendering games (where the Product files are distributed), or make resources of the Product.

The concern here is the terms "modify" and "convert", because if being interpreted in a strict sense (as a court usually does), these prohibit users from standard practice like recoloring textures, loading a third party set of shaders, mixing morphs, even posing the models - basically anything other than using the content in a completely default state in the specific softwares listed in its description.

It would, for example, be a breach to load most Victoria 4 assets from Renderosity into newer versions of Daz Studio, because loading Poser content into DS automatically carries out a conversion process.

Daz3D's own licence is very specific that modification of assets is permitted, because by a strict interpretation, it's necessary, and by a more general one, people modifying a skin or clothing texture to customise their renders is considered fairly common practice.

Indeed, as part of the discussion, some of the participants concluded that they would in future be refraining from purchasing from Renderosity because while they feel the wording is not the actual intent of the licence, they endeavour to respect copyright rules.

As such, I would respectfully suggest that this clause needs some refinement.