Hey Denny, I thought that you might find this on E. N. World interesting... I wonder if he is the same yahoo that you had problems with.

The Auld Grump

Let me state for the record. A good portion of my job is chasing down and stopping file sharing upon our network and it prevents me from doing my primary job of improving our network.

But,

This is United States specific, check your local country for applicable laws.

There have been a number of legal cases where software license agreements have been shot down, especially a resale restriction. The courts have upheld the belief that the software company is selling me something, especially since there is no ongoing agreement after the sale. No transactions are happening, no maintenance contract is in place. Basically, I do not pay a ongoing licensing fee to Denny, or any software vendor I buy from, therefore it is not a license but an actual sale of something and the software vendors wanted to call it something different. Once I own something I have the right to resell it as long as I am not infringing upon other laws that provide sales restrictions. In this case copyright laws do provide some ability to restrict this. I can not make a copy of item X and sell it because of copyright law. I can make a copy of item X and keep it as backup IE fair use. I can still sell it as long as I provide it and all copies I made to the purchaser. I can even make a profit off it as long as I declare the extra income on my income tax forms. Additionally, I can sell my consulting services building Denny's models as long as my customer owns the original set or I sell it to them with my services, IE Denny gets his money for one user.

Sorry for the long ramble. Trying to enforce some sort of license agreement that has resale restriction would be costly and probably a losing venture. Also, what would it actually do? Keep the honest people honest? I am not sure it would actually help solve the pirate problem. I am not sure what would work.

--Chris

I understand what you are saying with regards to consulting and building models as that has been covered before in these threads by Denny himself, but in the case of internet sales, I believe that a whole new set of laws are needed for IP protection. If I sell a physical object, such as a car, the law and parties involved realizes that I no longer will be in possession of the object.

Electronic IP's are too easily assimilated between parties. There are no assurances that full copies are being transferred from the seller to the buyer. The destruction or transference of copies is assumed and that is the folly of current IP and copyright laws.

Current laws were never meant to handle the electronic IP commerce, as it is, it is merely ad hoc, despite several rulings on the matter. I wish I could offer an alternative, but the problem isn't just the court agreeing with IP's owners agreements of sale, but enforcing those agreements. The internet is truly a seller/buyer beware environment dwelling within the honor system. Oh, you can say that about anything, but for some reason, law enforcement is more readily to go after someone stealing a car over stealing pdf's. Even if the sales were as high as a car.

In this particular case not all of the PDFs the person was selling were available commercially as PDFs. So he was scanning and selling, which is a no-no. I hope they nail him to the church door.

The Auld Grump

Mind you, I have been involved in folk music too long to be a fan of RIAA.

One of the quirks of the copyright system - if you find a song that has been performed for hundreds of years, known by thousands, and register it as the first copyright for that work it is yours.

Some songfinders entered what they found into the public domain (including Burl Ives, of Holly Jolly Christmas fame) while others sit on the copyright and charge royalties. Which would not bother me at all for a work that they created, but does for copyrighting an existing work.

The Auld Grump

Yes if the models aren't yours (not bought by you...made by you..not WW stuff) or No if you "give" the original pdf and you destroy yours...
Let my try to xplain...
You buy 1-Maide made X of them and sell them - - > piracy
You buy 1-Maide build something and sell the pdf (so you can't do more) and the model build...then is more or less legal

I remember a lot of discussion about that subject in other posts...so maybe my answer is not 100% good (what is for sure is that you can't buy one Maiden/CWU or wathever and begin to print and sell the ones that you build while you still have the copy to continue producing them...) but again if I buy the pdf and pay to a friend to build me one because I'm a lazy person... ¿¿?? or two for my ship vs ship ¿¿?? not know for sure of it will be...You pay for the "work" - You know I buy an IKEA bed and pay to other to buy it...but there is the complication that you could buy Several...not only one...Well my 2 cents on the subject...

Okay... is it possible to purchase a license (possibly in the form of a regular monthly fee) from WorldWorks that would legally allow such distribution in fully assembled form only? If not, that's fine... I just want to know.

As I'm going to be opening my own game store soon, this holds of quite a bit of interest for me.

I'd love to be able to sell WWG's model sets (on CD or built) through my store. Right now, though, there's no established guidelines on how to go about it.

So, for now, I have to stick with just not doing it at all. Once there's a process, I'd love to participate.

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Maybe re-selling should be limited to brick & mortar stores who can track sales through a POS system? That would allow the WWG store to sell content directly to the store owner, who would be able to give a weekly/monthly statement of WWG sales to Denny.

There's still the possibility of piracy, but it's greatly lessened by the fact that only retail stores with reseller's licences could participate, and they would have to submit proof of sales.

The other option is for Denny to make CDs available at a retail level, through distributors like ACD or Alliance (in the US). It would cost more for Denny in the long run (burning CDs, printing lables, shipping to the distributors), but it would be a little more pirate-proof, because customers would know to expect a certain packaging.

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Just some ideas. I hope something can be worked out for retail stores. It could be very valuable to have that many salespeople pushing WWG product.