- Oct 26, 2020
- 314
- 996
Ohhh but that's the point of the VAR. You can refer to everything. That's what I do. Even if they are payed assets and looks you can still refer to them. You are not sharing the file just a var based on other stuff. That is not illegal or wrong. You can even use payed looks to promote your stuff. Of course is nice to ask the creator also mention the bastard. For example you can use my mocaps to make a video for your model and promote yourself as look as you credit me. The people that download your scene will need all the stuff the var points to. That's it. Easy.I'm not talking about using other people's work and redistributing their assets.
I'm talking about creating an appearance preset that happens to reference other people's work, which I am not distributing, just listing as a dependency. And I'm not interested in claiming credit for the appearance preset or monetizing it, but to have a hub where I can make it available to other users for free and I'd be able to experience other user's creations as well, provided that I own all their listed depedencies.
The question is to what degree am I allowed to distribute such an appearance preset?
Ok, we have established that I cannot redistribute clothes, hair, poses, textures, animations that someone else has put work into creating and I am completely fine with that.
The point I am trying to make is that morph numeric values should not be protected because they are accessible in the base game, anyone can come up with the same values, or they can be reverse engineered through trial and error.
If I go in the base game right now and make a model by using the base morphs, I should not be able to claim a "patent" on the appearance preset I have just created. I should add value either in the form of a custom morph or some other asset or plugin and monetize that instead.
If someone else attempts to then replicate my model by playing with the morphs and getting as close as possible to the appearance I created can I then invoke copyright claims and prevent them from sharing their preset? How do we determine what is the allowed boundary of similarity for it to not count as the same content? The morph values can be different while still having a close similarity between the two characters. How do you assess the degree of "originality" in such a scenario?
If looks are protected now, what's the next step? Json files? Will I be able to create a still scene referencing other people's .vars, add no original content to it and just monetize the json file? And then prevent anyone else from coming up with the same combination of assets in a scene because I claimed it first?