Studio Gallery IP policy changes

[cehnot]

I received an email announcing Bricklink is changing their Intellectual Property policy on their Studio program.

Quote

Dear Designer,

We love the creativity that the Studio Gallery fosters amongst all of our designers. There have been over 17,000 creations uploaded by all of you! Many of these designs are incredible original creations; however, we have noticed a number of submissions  in the Studio Gallery that are Intellectual Property (IP) related subjects.

In order to allow you to continue to show off all of your creations in the Studio Gallery, we will be setting designs that are IP infringing to Display Only. This means that all of your images and description will be visible, but the Studio file cannot be downloaded, and the parts list will not be available.

If any of your designs in the Studio Gallery are related to IP subjects, we ask that you please go ahead and switch them to Display Only.
 

I do not sell instructions and all my designs are IP, but I do allow people to download the file. How will this affect the community? With almost 20,000 creations on Studio gallery does this mean that it will reverberate harsh legal suits to those on other platforms like Rebrickable? I do not understand the issue with giving away free files on their platform since it has now become a quite easy place to post and get a parts list. 

[SylvainLS]

Rebrickable, BrickShelf and others don’t have and don’t need agreements with IP holders like TLG does.

TLG has to have these agreements to make IP sets, and can’t distribute or condone the distribution of IP sets they don’t have agreements for.

Fans and AFOL sites don’t have the same obligations (or have more leeway / tolerance).

That BrickLink tightens their policies in the view of their being bought by TLG seems logical.

And free/gratis or not, that doesn’t change the IP issues much.  Especially as BL is a place where you can easily buy bricks: the MOC author might not get paid but BrickLink profits from their MOCs.  So they would be profiting from IP without paying the IP holders and without agreements.

[cehnot]

Thanks for clearing things up. 

[Bartybum]

So yeah, TLC buying Bricklink is very negatively affecting the community from this

[cehnot]

Logged into Bricklink and they have an updated terms and conditions to sign. Please read section 8 carefully. They changed the whole designer section rules for designs and uploading files. I am not sure if they refer to instructions as the PDF, digital steps or actual just the digital file.

 

[cehnot]

Both chrome dealers inventory were taken down today. 

[Toastie]

I am so happy that MLCad is running as seewing machine ...

For me, Studio is a cool LDraw model rendering engine. That's it. Seeing how TLG is cutting through the BrickLink garden, it will certainly remain like that. I appreciate when the software improves rendering wise.

Best
Thorsten

 

[Lasse D]

1 hour ago, Toastie said:

For me, Studio is a cool LDraw model rendering engine. That's it. Seeing how TLG is cutting through the BrickLink garden, it will certainly remain like that. I appreciate when the software improves rendering wise.

We are some who are working on real time renders that are open source, but it will take a massive amount of effort to make something that looks as good as those ray tracing algorithms from Blender et. al. that studio uses.

[roland]

20 hours ago, Lasse D said:

We are some who are working on real time renders that are open source, but it will take a massive amount of effort to make something that looks as good as those ray tracing algorithms from Blender et. al. that studio uses.

Why don't you use the same blender stuff?  Studio is build on top of a whole lot of open source too.

[Lasse D]

Just now, roland said:

Why don't you use the same blender stuff?  Studio is build on top of a whole lot of open source too.

Ray tracing is as far as I know not efficient enough to de done real-time. I am looking into shaders that can show transparent elements realistically. Right now I have not found anything from Blender that can help with this - the nearest I can come is volumetric rendering, but that requires pre-computation of textures for volumes, which is not something I have by hand.

Once (if ever) I have found a good solution, I can publish the results, but right now I am hitting a wall with this.

[Scrubs]

There is no miracle. It is not possible to get the same result with rasterization as with ray tracing. Even more when it comes to refractive materials.

RTX cards from NVidia can only shoot a handful of rays per pixels compared to hundreds or thousands for offline renderers.

Stud.io is using Unity for the real time engine if I remember properly and Cycles (from the blender foundation) for the ray tracing engine.