CompuServe Messages

>>I'm no lawyer, but I wonder where the line >> is drawn. If David simply stopped calling >> his models "Star Wars", and used different >>names instead of "X-Wing", I don't think that's enough. I've been following this discussion, and decided that it's time to speak up. I know a fair amount about copyright law. With meshes, the principle is fairly simple. You cannot copyright a style of a common thing – a car, a font, a plane. You can create a car design that looks just like a '57 chevy, and as long as you don't use the word 'Chevy', you're legally ok. That's why we have 44 different names for fonts that look the same right now, the names can be copyrighted but the styles cannot. So you can get full page blowups of a font and digitize them (manually) and create a font that you can legally sell. A spaceship mesh would be treated the same way. If you call your mesh a 'space fighter ship', even if it looks just like an X-wing fighter, you'd never lose a court case. The Lucasfilm attorneys might bankrupt you by keeping you in court for 50 years, but that's another issue. Their attorneys might try to argue that a spaceship is more art than design and try to get that kind of copyright infringement… but because of the arguments you yourself brought up, I don't think that would fly.