I thought I'd share this piece of news with you all. The 3DMagix saga is nothing new but for a while I've been under the impression it had been dealt with but it seems I was wrong. I was quite sad to read that those sites are still running and making profit on the artistic genius of other artists and re-selling software that is essentially free (as in free speech and free beer).Ton Roosendaal wrote:The companies IllusionMage and 3Dmagix resell via their websites Blender under their own name. Both websites are probably managed by the same person or company.
On their web pages they intentionally hide that the products are distributions of GNU GPL licensed software, and that the software is freely downloadable as well. More-over, even after contacting them several times, they don't remove copyrighted content from their websites. A lot of text and images have been copied from blender.org and random images - not even from blender - were copied from various CG websites.
Rebranding and re-distributing GNU GPL software is a key right. This doesn't give the right to then also rebrand the credits, claims and artwork as created with Blender.
The sad thing is especially that people are being lured in with the suggestion that this is a cracked version Autodesk 3D Max. Their customers probably feel too ashamed after purchasing this product to complain really...
But what can we do? Not much really... lawyers will be a waste of money on this. Best is as usual to just publicize this well. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" as a U.S. Supreme Court judge once said.
Ton Roosendaal
Chairman Blender Foundation
If you ever have a bit of free time, please help spread the word.
