Masami Kuramoto

Clarissa Lowell wrote: Masami, you can claim that this or that is not eligible for copyright but I don't know why anyone should weigh your opinion above any other resident's opinion. What you have said just sounds like opinion to me. From Wikipedia: When does derivative-work copyright exist? For copyright protection to attach to a later, allegedly derivative work, it must display some originality of its own. It cannot be a rote, uncreative variation on the earlier, underlying work. The latter work must contain sufficient new expression, over and above that embodied in the earlier work for the latter work to satisfy copyright law’s requirement of originality. Although serious emphasis on originality, at least so designated, began with the Supreme Court’s 1991 decision in Feist v. Rural, some pre-Feist lower court decisions addressed this requirement in relation to derivative works. In Durham Industries, Inc. v. Tomy Corp. and earlier in L. Batlin & Son, Inc. v. Snyder. the Second Circuit held that a derivative work must be original relative to the underlying work on which it is based. Otherwise, it cannot enjoy copyright protection and copying it will not be copyright infringement. In the Batlin case, one maker of "Uncle Sam" toy banks sued another for copying its coin-operated bank, which was based on toy banks sold in the United States since at least the 1880s. (These toys have Uncle Sam's extended arm and outstretched hand adapted to receive a coin; when the user presses a lever, Uncle Sam appears to put the coin into a carpet bag.) The plaintiff's bank was so similar to the 19th Century toys, differing from them only in the changes needed to permit a plastic molding to be made, that it lacked any original expression. Therefore, even though the defendant's bank was very similar to the plaintiff's, the plaintiff's was not entitled to any copyright protection. "To extend copyrightability to minuscule variations would simply put a weapon for harassment in the hands of mischievous copiers intent on appropriating and monopolizing public domain work." In the subsequent Durham case, the court applied the same principle in a suit between two different Disney toy licensees in which one licensee claimed that the other had pirated his Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck and Pluto. Durham conceded that in making these toys it used Tomy's Disney figures as models. That was not determinative. The court said that "the only aspects of Tomy's Disney figures entitled to copyright protection are the non-trivial, original features, if any, contributed by the author or creator of these derivative works." But Tomy's toys reflected "no independent creation, no distinguishable variation from preexisting works, nothing recognizably the author's own contribution that sets Tomy's figures apart from the prototypical Mickey, Donald, and Pluto, authored by Disney and subsequently represented by Disney or its licensees in a seemingly limitless variety of forms and media." Because the court considered that "it is clear that the originality requirement imposed by the Constitution and the Copyright Act has particular significance in the case of derivative works based on copyrighted preexisting works," it denied relief and dismissed the claim. Thus the law is clear that a derivative work is protectable only to the extent that it embodies original expression. Its non-original aspects are not copyright-protectable (what is loosely called "uncopyrightable"). In both of these cases, the defendants were held not to be liable for copyright infringement, even though they presumably copied a considerable amount from the plaintiff's work. They were not liable because the plaintiff did not enjoy copyright protection. The plaintiffs' works lacked enough originality to acquire copyright protection of their own. They were too close to the original works on which they were based. Emphasis added.

Clarissa Lowell wrote: Here's an experiment you can try with your SL friends: Put that shape you designed next to an IMVU avatar, a WoW avatar, a There.com avatar, a Sims Online avatar, a SW:TOR avatar, a DAZ "Victoria" model, a MakeHuman model and whatever else you can find. Then ask your friends this question: "Which of these avatars is from Second Life?" Even if you remove all the attachments and textures and make them all stand in the same T-pose, people will always recognize the Second Life avatar, no matter how you tweak the appearance sliders. And this, dear Clarissa, is all the evidence a court would need to conclude that shapes are derivative works of insufficient originality and not copyrightable. But hey, don't take my word for it. Sue and see for yourself.

Bouttime Whybrow wrote: policing for a private company is a civic duty? and so if some regular joe comes across a mickymouse avatar and doesn't notify disney they are neglecting their civic duty? hardly IMO. It becomes a "civic duty" if the guy with the Mickey Mouse avatar happens to be competing with you in the SL mesh marketplace. And that is also the reason why the DMCA seems so ineffective: Normal people don't have an incentive to bust someone else's mesh business, so they won't report any possible infringement. They just don't care enough. Only competitors do. Envy is a strong motivator. The rights holders of course want us to believe that neighborhood watch is a civic duty because they are too cheap to offer rewards. Why pay a bounty if you can have your hit squad for free? As a libertarian, I find the concept of intellectual property highly questionable. First, it's a monopoly granted by the government that limits everyone's free speech and property rights. If someone has the talent to model a Mickey Mouse avatar from scratch, who are we to deny him the right to do so? Why is it OK to model someone else's furniture, clothing etc. but not someone else's cartoon character? If copyright is so essential, why don't we copyright everything man-made? At least that would be somewhat fair. Second, copyright is a form of socialist welfare for a class that considers itself privileged. Normally, if your job doesn't earn you enough money, you'll look for a different one. You'll learn something new. Not so if you are an artist. These days if your art doesn't pay well, you'll point at copyright and say: "I'm creative, so I'm entitled to make a decent living from the things I like to do. I deserve to profit from today's work for the rest of my life, plus 95 years. I deserve to have everyone work for me and provide me with $2000 worth of stuff every day because of that song I wrote twenty years ago. If I can't do that, then copyright is flawed and needs to be expanded, at the expense of civil liberties if necessary. God beware if I had to spend my time on a day job like the next guy!" We have to face the reality that an economy based on physical needs cannot function if everyone creates art instead of doing something useful. So the phenomenon of the "starving artist" will never go away, no matter how far we expand the reach of copyright. There will be no free lunch for all, sorry. If you are not already making a fortune under the copyright regime we have now, you never will, even in a police state where all electronic communication is monitored for "piracy" 24/7 and every book, every song, every movie is DRM-encumbered for eternity. In a free society you can't force people to work and pay for the things you enjoy doing. You can only make them want to pay, and that takes skill.

Pamela Galli wrote: This FAQ from Turbosquid is one of the most comprehensive I have seen. Have you got the permission to copy & paste it here?

Eata Kitty wrote: In the last week half a dozen stores have listed a good two dozen Skyrim rips. Did you report them to Bethesda Softworks? What was their response?

Coby Foden wrote: If I make a cube, let's say in Blender, make some simple tiny modifications to its shape, import it to SL, sell it no-transfer. What then: •1. Is everyone else allowed to make indentical simple Blender cubes, import them to SL, and use them in any way they please? •2. Is the simple cube's shape made in Blender somehow different from the cube's shape made inworld in respect to the rights? Was the treshold of originality magically passed because the cube was not made with SL build tools? •3. Or is the cube's shape, I made in Blender with tiny modification, my intellectual property even though I did not invent the cube's shape? 1. Yes. 2. No. 3. No. The tools only matter in so far as some of them provide more artistic freedom than others. The more freedom you have, the greater is your chance to pass the threshold of originality. It doesn't mean you do it automatically. Simple geometric primitives are not copyrightable, no matter where you make them. However, if you use dozens of them to build something complex the way people do in SL, the result is very likely to pass the threshold of originality. The whole is more than the sum of its parts. The problem with the appearance editor is that it offers no more freedom than the prim shape editor. Both are just a set of sliders/dials to enter numbers. If we agree that individual prim shapes are not copyrightable, why would avatar shapes be?

Uncontrolled system restarts usually point at very serious driver bugs or even hardware malfunction. There is just no other way for a non-root process on Linux to trigger a full restart by accident. In your case it is most certainly a driver bug, because you say it worked perfectly on Ubuntu 11.10. What are your hardware specs? I guess you are not using Nvidia, are you?

I said this before, but apparently it got lost in the noise: Second Life's permissions system is not a manifestation of copyright. Linden Lab cannot grant IP rights or take away existing ones. Their TOS cannot override applicable law. Provision 7.1 basically says that you don't give up copyright on your stuff by uploading it to SL. If you already hold the copyright, you retain it on Linden Lab's grid. However, if you don't hold the copyright, the act of uploading won't establish one for you. This means several things: If I make an original mesh and give it away full-perm with a license attached to it, then the license may override the permissions. For example, if the license says "do not make copies", then you cannot legally make duplicates of the mesh although the permissions would enable you to do so. On the other hand, if I rez a plywood cube, make some modifications to its shape, and then sell it no-transfer, everyone else would be allowed to make identical cubes and use them in any way they please, because the cube's shape is not my intellectual property. I may have created it first and it may have taken me a lot of time and effort, but it does not pass the threshold of originality that is required for copyright to apply. Creators can use the permissions system to express an item's terms of use, but if the item is not eligible for copyright in the first place, then there is no legal way to enforce the permissions and keep people from copying or modifying the item.

I guess it is due time to give some explanations as to why there are two different Duplicate functions in Blender and what the differences are between them. The difference between Shift-D ("Duplicate Object") and Alt-D ("Duplicate Linked") is that the former performs a "deep" copy while the latter performs a "shallow" one. This is related to a technique called "instancing". So what does this all mean in particular? Typically, a Blender project consists of one or more "scenes". Each scene is a separate 3D space which can be populated by "objects". An object is a link to a datablock. There are many different types of datablocks in Blender: meshes, armatures, lamps, cameras etc. A mesh datablock is where Blender stores the geometry of a mesh, i.e. the vertices and polygons. However, the location, rotation and scale of the mesh are stored at the object level. Since multiple objects can link to the same mesh datablock, it is possible to make the same mesh appear at multiple places in the scene, in different sizes and orientations. This is how you can model an entire forest convincingly with only a handful of trees and plants. And that is what instancing is all about. It reduces memory usage, and it can also speed up rendering. If you edit the geometry of such a mesh instance, your changes will propagate to all the other instances as well, since they all share the same mesh datablock. This may or may not be what you want, so you have to be careful here. Blender gives you complete control over instance management, but unfortunately that means you have to know what you are doing. Which brings us back to the two Duplicate functions: Alt-D is what you use if you want to create a shared instance. Shift-D is what you use if you want an independent copy. Alt-D will just insert a new object pointing at the same datablock. Shift-D will copy the datablock as well. Things get a little more complicated if the datablock itself contains references to other datablocks. For example, materials can be shared by multiple meshes, textures can be shared by multiple materials, and images can be shared by multiple textures. By default, Shift-D will only copy the top-level datablock. Any materials attached to it will then be shared between the copies. But this behaviour can be changed in the user preferences, and it seems that Pamela has configured Shift-D to copy the materials as well. This is how she unexpectedly ended up with too many materials in the scene. If a datablock is shared, you will see the number of instances on a button to the right of its name. Clicking that button creates an independent copy. Here's an experiment you can try for yourself to see how it all works: Start with an empty scene and add a new mesh cube. Then add a new material to that cube. Then add a new texture to that material. Finally, press Alt-D to create a linked duplicate of the cube. Now if you look at the Object Data panel in the Properties window, you will see a button reading "2" to the right of the mesh name. This is because there are now two objects sharing that mesh datablock. However, the material and texture name fields won't show such a button, because there is only one mesh datablock using the material, and only one material using the texture. If you click the "2" button next to the mesh name, it will disappear because you just created an unshared copy. However, the material will now have such a button because it is suddenly shared by two meshes. If you click the "2" button next to the material name to make a single-user copy of the material as well, the button will appear next to the texture name, because the texture is now shared by two materials. And so on. So be careful whenever you see such a number button next to a datablock name, because it means that editing the datablock may affect multiple objects using it. Unless that is exactly what you want, click the button to create a single-user instance before you make any changes. Since objects and datablocks are separate entities, you can link any object to any datablock at any time as long as their types match. This also works across scenes. If you click the button to the left of a datablock name, you will see a dropdown list with all the other datablocks of the same type. This is helpful if you want to recover a mesh that you deleted earlier. However, keep in mind that unlinked datablocks will not be saved with the .blend file. If you want to make sure that meshes, materials, textures etc. remain in the project even if they are unused, click the "F" button to the right of their name before you delete or unlink them.

I've been using Blender since 2006, but I still remember only a handfull of hotkeys. Without the menus and buttons I would be lost. But then again, there is no gain from learning the hotkey of a function that you use only once or twice during an entire session. Only the hotkeys you need all the time, like moving, rotating, scaling, extruding etc. are worth memorizing in my opinion.

Pamela Galli wrote: Okay Nacy figured it out -- I made one thing with 2 materials but when I copied it, it made new materials. So yes I did have more than 8. She said I should have used alt D instead of shift D to copy. I never even heard of alt D. By default, Shift-D does not duplicate materials. So the problem here is that you reconfigured Shift-D in the user preferences -- and then forgot about it. It's also funny that you hadn't heard of Alt-D before, because it is right next to Shift-D in the menu. By the way, this is why I recommend learning to use Blender by menus first. New users often complain about Blender's endless list of hotkeys, not knowing that all of them actually map to menu entries which are nicely grouped and therefore much easier to memorize. Once you know what's in those menus, learning the hotkeys will be a snap because you don't have to learn them all at once to get something done in the program. Oh, and you don't need to download that horrible hotkey chart either. If you forget a hotkey, you can always look it up in the menu again.

Coby Foden wrote: You retain any and all Intellectual Property Rights you already hold under applicable law The show stops right there. Check out "threshold of originality" for derivative works in copyright law.

Oz Linden wrote: What we need is deformable mesh garments, based on either the unaltered "new shape" (female), or that shape changed to male; Are these unaltered shapes identical to those in the official avatar_mesh.zip download? If not, where to obtain these reference shapes? Linden Lab's viewer cannot export them, can it?

Gaia Clary wrote: I have a blender 32 bit build running on a 64 bit windows 7 and i can use the GPU acceleration (when i use Cycles). Thanks. I had my info from the Blender wiki, which is probably out of date.

Ossian wrote: For people like you, the word "easy" means "someone else does it." I didn't say it's easy. I said it lacks originality, which is a key requirement for copyright. The whole easy vs. hard argument is a distraction that you and Clarissa brought up. You think if something is just difficult and time-consuming enough, it automatically qualifies for copyright protection. You are wrong. What you guys are doing in the appearance editor is basically solving a puzzle. You push sliders back and forth to find a configuration that doesn't suck from your point of view. That is a challenge, no doubt, but it is not artistic, because you are moving on rails and your choices are finite. Your artistic freedom in the appearance editor is zero. You will never escape Linden Lab's predefined morph targets, which are copyrighted just like the base mesh. No matter how long and hard you push the sliders around, the avatar's shape will never be your intellectual property. And since the shape can't be your property, you can't call it "stealing" if others re-use it.

Marie Laurent wrote: Why is it transparent??? This question gets asked here about twice per week. Yes, Second Life renders only the "front" side of each face, determined by the direction of the surface normal. If you need a face to be visible from both sides, you have to duplicate it in place and flip the normal on the copy. Yes, in the worst case this will double the number of polygons in your mesh.

Dilbert Dilweg wrote: You pretty much answered your question by saying other programs run better on 64 bit... Of course your rendering and operations will be faster than in 32 bit Whether 32-bit programs are slower than their 64-bit counterparts depends on whether the 32-bit version uses the same SSE instruction set or not. All 64-bit CPUs support at least SSE2, so this is usually taken for granted by the compiler. If the 32-bit version is compiled for pre-SSE2 CPU compatibility, it will be slower. So it is perfectly possible to make the 32-bit version as fast as the 64-bit version, but then it won't run on very old computers with Pentium 2 or 3 and similar CPUs. The speed difference is not a matter of 32-bit vs. 64-bit. However, with Blender there is something else to consider: If you run Windows 64-bit, you'll need a 64-bit Blender to take advantage of GPU-accelerated rendering (which can easily speed up rendering by factor 20x if you have a powerful GPU). Bottom line: If you run a 64-bit OS, there is no reason not to use a 64-bit Blender. In the worst case you will notice no difference; in the best case you will be able to handle larger projects and render them much faster, too.

Clarissa Lowell wrote: I do not know why the mods are letting them get away with calling people no talent, nervous breakdown having, egomaniac, fraudsters. If they had not let you get away first with calling people thieves, we would not be having this discussion. Consider yourself lucky. So you made a mesh in Blender, Masami. Did you invent Blender? My meshes exist independently of Blender. They are not tied to anyone else's work. They look the same in Maya, 3ds Max and Second Life, because they describe a surface in a three-dimensional coordinate system. Your shapes on the other hand exist only as a modification of someone else's work. Without the SL avatar mesh as a reference, which is © Linden Lab, those shapes are nothing but meaningless numbers. My meshes are original expressions protected by copyright law. Your shapes are derivative works protected by nothing but Second Life's permissions system. Even if you don't respect spatial ability how about time and effort spent on something. Why don't you respect people's freedoms? Why do you deny them the right to modify your work, considering that your work is nothing more than a modification in the first place? BUT THE BOTTOM LINE IS THE TOS SAYS IT IS AGAINST TOS TO STEAL SOMEONE ELSE's WORK. THE TOS ALSO GIVES US PERMISSION TO USE THE SECOND LIFE AVATAR MESH and other things like that...Stop trolling, you know that you are wrong. People like you tend to believe that SL's permissions system is a direct manifestation of copyright, but that is a misconception. You can make everything no-copy here, but that doesn't mean everything is copyrightable, including plywood cubes. Try filing a DMCA takedown notice against someone reselling modified versions of your shapes and see what happens. All the other person needs to do is file a counter notice, and that will be the end of the story, because your "intellectual property" has a snowball's chance in hell of being recognized by a court.

Spinell wrote: How did you do the highlights? Was it manually? I desaturated and normalized the texture, then manipulated the RGB curves. No manual painting involved. This was made in GIMP, by the way. I don't have Photoshop. When you make something like a red cloth texture, never use only shades of red, otherwise it will look artificial. In the real world, very few things are monochromatic, even single-color materials always reflect multiple hues.

Ossian wrote: I notice that there's no avatar photo for Masami. Why is that? It's easy to SAY that making shapes is easy. But there is a big distance between saying and doing. So show us, Masami. Show us the wonderful shape you made for yourself. Better still, push those sliders around and amaze us. If you can make a better face than the one in my profile picture (which, incidentally, I bought), I'll admit you're right. But I'm quite sure from the way you talk, that you can't. You must be new here, Ossian Resident. Indeed, I don't push sliders in the appearance editor. I used to model human bodies from scratch, in Blender, and I happen to be quite good at that. Those who have been around longer than you may be able to tell you about it, because I did occasionally post examples here and elsewhere. So excuse me if I refrain from proving my skills yet again just to make an impression on a newbie.

You could start by adding some highlights...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verse_protocol http://www.letworyinteractive.com/b/2010/08/verse-integration-for-naali/ Adding mesh modeling tools to the Second Life viewer is not feasible. Remember that people can't even agree on what is the proper UI for a viewer, and Blender's UI is frequently considered cryptic. It would also make the viewer much bigger, introduce new bugs etc. Verse integration may be a better idea because it would keep the tools separate from the viewer, but then again, the last Verse-enabled version of Blender is several years old and horribly outdated. There were some suggestions to revive Verse in Blender 2.5+, but I don't expect it to happen any time soon. It seems that demand for collaborative mesh modeling is rather low.

Braydon Randt wrote: I create clothes .... if i had something like that in an outfit .. it would animate no better than a suit of armour. so ultimately ... pentagon, 1 quad and 1 tri. dependending on where i want the edge flow to be. You are right about the benefits of proper edge flow in organic meshes, especially animated ones, such as clothing. However, throwing a triangle at the problem is no better than throwing an N-gon. If you are serious about good topology, you will keep your mesh all-quads, without any triangles or N-gons. For solid models like the above, the all-quads rule is irrelevant because it offers no benefit. You can make any model all-quads by applying subdivision, but you'll end up with a lot of useless geometry. The all-quads rule has its place, but it should not be handled like dogma. I have seen a few posts in the forum about the fact that if you use Bmesh , its best practice to triangulate your mesh before you export so you can edit your edge flows etc Triangulating before export has nothing to do with edge flow. It's not about fixing topology but about fixing the shape, especially in low-poly models. There are always two ways to split a quad, and if the quad is non-planar (i.e. not flat), one way is usually preferable over the other. Auto-triangulation may choose the wrong way, so it's recommended to triangulate at least the most critical parts manually, rotating the direction of the split where necessary, before exporting. However, this problem has nothing to do with BMesh or N-gons at all. It applies to any mesh that contains large non-planar polygons. so I am confused how using an ngon , only to triangulate and correct would give bennefit over getting how you want it in the first place. I do understand your point , and agree that it is fast to fill those pesky holes, but i still like to know how something is going to animate in SL , and I cant see how an ngon is an answer, N-gons are useful in two ways: First, they help keep solid models like the above clean. Subdividing those pentagons into pairs of quads and triangles would make no sense. If you ever do architectural modeling, you will love how N-gons help you manage large multi-edged planar surfaces as one object. Blender had something similar before, called "F-gon" (fake N-gon), but as the name implies, it was just a rendering trick and offered none of the features of real N-gons. Second, even in models that are supposed to end up all-quads, inserting N-gons temporarily can be a huge timesaver. They allow you to locally remove and re-insert topology without destroying existing UV-maps or leaving holes or triangles behind that require cleanup. However, N-gons are really just one of many new features that BMesh just introduced to Blender. There are many others: a proper knife tool, a working bevel tool, an inset tool, a dissolve tool, the ability to remove multiple edge loops at once even if they cross each other, etc. I've been playing with BMesh since February when it was merged into Blender's main development branch, and all I can say is: You're going to love it.

Braydon Randt wrote: if i have 5 vertices , i want to fix the topology , not just thow an ngon at it and hope for the best. I just had a minor problem involving 5 vertices. How would you fix this topology? BMesh still lets me model all-quads if I want to. Only faster.

Kwakkelde Kwak wrote: Again, it's impossible for DAZ to see if someone traced their model if the topology is different, so it's an academic question regarding that. Actually that is a very central question to determine whether the shape of a model is sufficiently original for copyright to apply. For example, if you trace a model of Mickey Mouse this way, it will be very easy for Disney to prove that you did. So if DAZ has trouble proving that you traced Victoria, it's because there is nothing original about Victoria's shape that persists in your own mesh. And that means your mesh is not infringing.