gp0778 (2/11/2011)
Alright, so I have a few questions here. Just how much does a project have to change, in order to be classified as different? For example, there are tons of commonly found objects in google 3d warehouse, including vehicles, but when you import them into Iclone, they look like crap. In order to sell a product on the Reallusion website, could a person download an object from there, entirely rework the textures on their own, change the color scheme, and add animations to it, and then sell it here? Or would the entire thing have to be created from scratch?
GP
I've been talking about Fair Use, so I feel obligated "to put my money where my mouth is," and try to make a few suggestions.
Note that I think it will quite challenging for anyone to answer this question, but whatever Reallusion says about it is likely to be a better response than mine will be. In any event, even if their answer isn't better than mine, this is their Marketplace and we will all follow their rules without exception.
Now, in the first place, over at 3D Warehouse, the creators aren't expecting a penny of profit from their models. So far so good. But they still have the right to control copies of their work being used by others when it exceeds personal use on the download machine, even though these rights are very seldom explicitly addressed on 3D Warehouse pages. One of the forum members said he thought we should write to the creator and ask permission to redistribute a model, and that certainly strikes me as fundamentally sound.
The principle of Fair Use suggests that the more original work you invest into a borrowed work, the more you have a right to profit from it. In a related fashion, the smaller your "sample" of the work, the safer you are, in analogy to sampling a very few seconds of music. For instance, you could isolate the headlamp from an existing car model and insert it into a new car model and feel pretty safe, because it's a small relatively proportion of the original work.
It also seems to me that adding an entirely new functionality to an artwork allows a whole new class of users the ability to make use of the artwork. If you enable fantastic animations in iClone that aren't possible to Sketchup users, you've done something valuable. I would send the animated prop to the original modeler and encourage him to play with it in a free version of iClone.
If this strikes you as a grey answer rather than a black-and-white answer, the conclusion is that there are degrees of safety, and your job is to invest the effort to stay firmly on the bright white side of grey, not the dark black side.
...Now let's see what the real answer is! :D
General Picture - animating now to life itself(tm)
Member of Content Wizards