Any ways to watermark a mesh?

[Rage Riptide]

Does anyone know of any techniques to creatively put like a watermark into a mesh?

I'm thinking, a hidden triangle or even a spare triangle with a licence baked on into the mesh. Maybe some special vertex locations. An RR  (for me) actually in the mesh.

Any ideas or insight?

[Madeliefste Oh]

I also curious if it's possible to watermark the mesh itself.

For the textures I plan to put my logo and "© Madeliefste Oh, all right reserved" on the UV map. For example:

 

[Poenald Palen]

Ah, this brings me back to the whole question of if there is a mesh IDer that measures all the verts, dimensions and so on to quickly ID stuff similar in file size and such. Then, it diges through. But this is similar to face recognition tech, which is common these days and even exists in consumer products. Surely a mesh is simpler to ID? A quick render of it's profile/silloutes from each each "side" as detected by what is in the colllada file and "front" and so on? Maybe it is easy to bypass, but anyone knowing who to do so would be doing it via automation and would also maybe be smart enought to detect a watermark OR overright it somehow..or simply currupt it?

then, LL could run this recognition stuff at the end of the day on all new uploads with a cluster of PC's, send ID'd possibilities and then verify and adjust the code till it is amazingly accurate..then sell it to online worlds, 3D asset warehouses and make a bazilion dollars from it and give us all free sims! Yeah! I should work on it myself...hhhm, where is that old copy of qbasic...

[TANAKAAKIO Inshan]

Good idea.

I  came up with same  thing a while ago.

Appending some simple letters or  logo or brand name to mesh models is brilliant.

They are absolute evidences though they may increase prim count a bit.

Removing these watermark is more difficult than alpha wartermarks of sculpt  map.

 

 

 





[StoneDwarf]

Interesting topic. And like Madeliefste says, watermarking your texture is a good idea. Copybotted meshes will be come with the texture the original mesh carried. The actual texture itself however, won't be separately extracted. This means that if somebody actually plans to copybot an item, the only thing they can do to check the texture for marks is by playing with the texture on a huge prim or looking in the small texture preview in the build menu. This also means that the smaller your watermark is, the less likely it will be seen.

Another thing I'd like to point out is the UV layout. The UV layout itself is unique in most cases. Lets say you made a mesh of a car. And somebody else copybotted your car. You can easily check if it's yours by checking out the UV layout on the copybotted car. How big is the chance somebody else created the same UV layout as you did and placed it exactly, pixel by pixel, in the same position as you did?

[Chriz Palen]

I'm not an expert on this at all, but wondered if it's worth hiding your 'watermark' (e.g.initials) in the mesh itself - something like the pic below:

 

Of course you'd have to do it in such a way that wouldn't add too many extra vertices.

[DanielRavenNest Noe]

The Collada .dae file you upload has some creator information at the top of the file, and you can add additional notes that will be ignored as far as affecting the model itself.  What I don't know is if any of that creator information gets preserved in the Second Life asset once it is uploaded.  If it is, you have built in proof of who uploaded the original and when it was first made.

[Csven Concord]

Watermarking a mesh may be of no use with regards to protecting IP. There was a court case about 5 years ago - Toyota vs some 3D design/advertising firm - in which the firm claimed, if I recall correctly, that Toyota did not have the rights to distribute the file they created for a commercial because they had retained the IP to the mesh file; a supposedly unique bit of 3D sculpture.

The firm lost and the bottom line was that the judge apparently considered a 3D database of vertices to be little different from a database of names in a telephone directory. Thus, the mesh data itself is not protected; the design itself would need to be otherwise protected (e.g. a design patent) and a deviation in the mesh might - as in pulling some verts or scaling up a portion of the file - might remove the resulting design from the IP umbrella.

If I find a link to the case I'll post it.

[Csven Concord]

Found it. Google "Toyota vs Meshwerks". From one hit, the Intellectual Property Law Blog (Link):

 

"In Meshworks, Inc. v. Toyota Motor Sales U.S.A., the Court found uncopyrightable and, hence, not protected against an alleged copyright infringement, the "unadorned, digital wire-frames of Toyota's vehicles" which had been commissioned by the car manufacturer's ad agency, Saatchi & Saatchi, which was also a defendant. The motivating factor for the suit was, of course, Meshworks' failure to receive payment for anything more than the first use of the digital wire-frames so that such additional, unbargained for uses would have constituted infringement. In this case, the Court acknowledged the presumption of validity flowing from the copyright registration awarded by the Copyright Office to Meshworks but proceeded to conduct its own de novo review on copyrightability. Under the Supreme Court's decision in the Feist case (Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Serv. Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991)), a work must be original to qualify for copyright protection. By original, the work must be both 1) independently created by the author and 2) possess at least a minimal degree of creativity. Mere technical skill, no matter how great, is sufficient to justify virtually exact replication of a preexisting form.

Meshworks had clearly contributed substantially to the wire frames, which resulted from a two-step process of digitizing (collecting physical data points from the portrayed object) and modeling (generating an image from these data points). About 90 percent of the data points contained in each final Toyota model were the results of the skill and efforts of manually sculpting at the second, modeling step, which took nearly 80 to 100 hours for each modeled vehicle. Nevertheless, the Court found that Meshworks contributed nothing incrementally original to the preexisting Toyota designs or, in the words of the Court, "But the models, reflect, that is, 'express,' no more than the depiction of the vehicles as vehicles." (Emphasis in original.)"

 

Here's a link the court papers (in PDF format), but it doesn't always open so you may need to google it - http://www.ca10.uscourts.gov/opinions/06/06-4222.pdf

[Drongle McMahon]

Ah. That makes more sense. The decision was not that a mesh cannot be copyright, but rather that this particular mesh could nor be copyright because it was an exact "copy" of the original vehicle design and therfore not an original work. Moral of the story: don't expect protection if you create mesh that are strictly representative of real objects. Hmmm. 

[Csven Concord]

Actually, the way I read the court ruling (and this was my original reading), was that a mesh is, in fact, not protected. What is potentially protected is the design which can be reflected in the data of a mesh and otherwise represented by some other means.

It's a subtle distinction, but one which has some important ramifications. For example, as I understand it, if someone were to copybot a mesh, that would not of itself constitute infringement. It only becomes infringement if the unmodified and IP protected design reflected in the mesh is used in some non-approved manner, like a 2D rendering or in a machinima. The mesh itself is merely a collection of data points, the rendering to visual is where the design becomes clear and infringement is possible.

As I said, it's been a long while since I read the court documents, so I could easily be mistaken. I'd welcome hearing someone else's take on the original document.

[Rage Riptide]

Thanks for the responses.

Don't get this thread caught up in an IP fiasco. Really just some simple ways to try to casually protect ones "ORIGINAL" works. My Zombie Apocolypse Attack Vehicle could only be a one off.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

I think that would be equivalwnt to saying that sheet music is not copyrightable because it is merely a set parametric instructions for producing a stream of sound. Like a mesh, the same tune can be represented in different annotations. Like a mesh rendered with different textures, it can be rendered on different intruments. It can be the basis for various arrangements that add new creative components. I am sure the courts have a much longer history of decisions about sheet music. Is it copyrightable? Does its copyright apply only to the printed representation? Or does it apply to alternative renditions of the same melody and to printed versions using different annotations? My expectation would be that a mesh is a copyright work, that the essential copyrighted entity is the rendered object (2 or 3D) and that alternative representations (re-topo etc) of the same essential object would be covered.  In the specific case, there was no essential creative work in the mesh because it was merely an alternative representation an existing work in a new format, exactly analagous to copying a recorded tune from vinyl to mp3. However, I have no authoritative knowledge of such matters.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

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DanielRavenNest Noe wrote:

The Collada .dae file you upload has some creator information at the top of the file, and you can add additional notes that will be ignored as far as affecting the model itself.  What I don't know is if any of that creator information gets preserved in the Second Life asset once it is uploaded.  If it is, you have built in proof of who uploaded the original and when it was first made.

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This made me curious, so I asked about it in today's mesh meeting. The devs stated that the header information, including author name, is not included in the mesh asset after upload. But, they do record who uploaded the asset and when he uploaded it.

[Rage Riptide]

That's a start. If that info is kept permanently then that is the prior art token an original could use later maybe. I'm gonna use 9 verts/3 tris in a special spacial arrangment as well. So hopefully, a quick look in wireframe mode will show a small detail embedded in the mesh.

[Super String]

To watermark a mesh is actually too simple. There could be many "secrets"  hidden in a mesh that probably only its creator could know well. From its geometry to the uv/texturing process and composition layers and rendering/lighting environment...a mesh theft has no way to rebuild your lighting/rendering physical environment, he can only get what you've already done--the mesh model and baked textures, but he cannot copy the GI, the lights/sun, the materials and reflections that you created and simulated to produce this mesh's texture, and moreover, the process of this geometry's birth can also be stored  in some 3d programs like 3ds max and maya. All of those are evidence that you're the creator of that mesh. Futhermore, as for the mesh (geometry) itself, some deliberate build or design or snare in the geometry can neither be detected by 3d software nor huaman eyes, only when you point it out, it'll then be discovered. Unless that theft tries to deconstruct it, but it's impossible to know where to start deconstructing because a mesh contains thousands of vetrtex and faces. And if he wants to deconstruct the mesh, he needs to construct it back, and nothing can be more stupid than this. Not to say that reconstruction will break origial geometry data, and the work itself could be even much more difficult than building a whole new mesh by himself.

There're just too many scientific strategies that you can do in every stages and in multiple ways to torture a mesh theft.