CompuServe Messages

Welcome to the wild wooly world of the Internet. Think of all the data at all these ftp sites… all supposedly freely distributable, except no one really knows if it is, and I've never seen a site that asks if you have the rights to redistribute something. Some companies have grown quite large (InfoMagic, Walnut Creek, etc.) operating on the premise that they can press CDs of these sites and sell them on a regular basis. I once read an article in Morph's Outpost (a great multimedia developer magazine) that talked of the "trap of the public domain." If you need to be absolutely, 100% certain of the parentage of your data, and do not want to risk your success with a product that incorporates any supposedly public domain data, then you shouldn't use public domain data. Create the content yourself. As for why I decided to press an Avalon disc, I considered the risk and found it insignificant in this situation. When I considered the risk of publishing an updated Avalon disc (against the wishes of Viewpoint) I decided that the risk of endangering my business relationship with Viewpoint was not worth any small risk, and in a more fundamental sense, they can sustain a much greater financial risk or loss than I can. They're well-known for *giving* away their Datashop (locked) disc of models at Siggraph. If I decided that I had the right to publish an Avalon disc based on the data as of the day before they took over the site, and sell it at Siggraph, and Viewpoint made their own Avalon CD for Siggraph based on the data as of the day they took over the site, well, they could give away thousands of those discs and ruin my investment.