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.

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

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.

If we just had teleport hubs again, all our problems would be solved.