(I know nobody here is a lawyer (I assume), just looking for your perspective as computer programmers)
I use a lot of models from Turbosquid (3d model marketplace essentially) when doing renders in blender. I use those with the “Royalty Free License”.
I am nowhere near a finished game but I was looking at some of the characters on Turbosquid recently and 1 or 2 took my fancy. With renders I never had to worry about license restrictions when it comes to redistribution of the model regardless of what I do, but there is a line in the license that made me wonder if I could ever use models from there in a game:
The 3D model is contained in proprietary format that cannot be opened in a publicly available software application and from which the TurboSquid Stock Media Product cannot be extracted or decompiled without reverse
engineering.
Just wondering what you guys think about how one would deal with this? I usually use ogre to export with animations, this seems to be a killer for me. Would I have to make my own format for the models (Yeah very unlikely )?
Pff… I found this a bit abusive… Anything can be reverse engeneered…
Anyway… you could have your own extension for your files, have a program that adds some headers, padding or whatever to the j3o file.
Then make your own Loader that would extend the BinaryImporter (the one responsible of loading J3o) and would fist ditch out he header and the padding.
This way your models couldn’t be opened in the sdk, but would load in your game.
That said, someone could reverse engeneer it…because at some point… your software has to read the model…
Umm… IANAL, but the ‘jar’ tool is part of oracle’s JDK, which can be downloaded for free by anyone with an internet connection, so I would assume that it counts as “publicly available.” YMMV.
Also, there is a publicly available spec for the .jar format, so similar issue. Since .jar is just a ZIP with some defined contents and a different extension, it would seem to conflict with this:
You may NOT publish or distribute Stock Media Products in any open format, or format encrypted with decryptable open standards (such as WebGL or an encrypted compression archive).
The whole idea is that someone should need access to your source, (which in this case should not be published) or would have to do the work of reverse-engineering your format/loader themselves.
Interesting thought: how would a lawyer view a situation where one distributed a game with very popular content, stored in a proprietary format. Then some enterprising person reverse-engineers your format and posts a converter somewhere. Are you now technically in violation of the license?
People always drop out the “reverse engineering” thing… but you don’t need code and you don’t need reverse engineering. You only need a debugger and a tiny bit of specific knowledge.
Anything loaded into memory can be accessed with ‘publicly available tools’. The question isn’t “how can we satisfy the constraint” because that’s actually impossible. The question is “how can we do the minimum that they will accept as satisfying the constraint” … and that’s impossible to determine without asking them. Perhaps a zip file with an extra byte appending on the end of it is enough (makes it unreadable by zip tools). Who knows?