Quote:
Originally Posted by Ran Garrigus  The derivative textures might be extracted, yes, yes. The "original materials" however? What constitutes "original material"? A court might well decide that the "original materials" are not extractable from Minnu's skins, since the term is not sufficiently defined. |
Well, this is a key issue. I've been through this sort of argument many times at Renderosity and similar forums. Making renders from a Poser skin on a Poser model is fine, as you cannot extract the original skin texture from that. Making a render of the skin on a flat plane (viewed normally) would not be OK, as the original could easily be reconstructed.
Converting a Poser skin to
SL is far from straightforward; it takes significant effort. Back-engineering that would be impossible, i.e. there is no way to get back to the original Poser skin file from the
SL skin. (And the loss of resolution is huge, anyway).
So Minnu would have some defense; it's not such a clear cut case of theft as it would be if the skins were resold for the Poser market (which has happened).
I'm not saying that what Minnu did was OK - only that a case could be made in Minnu's defense.