CompuServe Thread

David, There's a few points here that I'm rather suprised haven't been brought up. One of which is that our government is in the red to the tune of a trillion plus dollars… which is the real crux of the problem. So in an attempt to reduce some of that overhead there has been alot of base closures and a variety of other cutbacks on services. None of this stuff is in fact free. The internet is not free, the Avalon site in not free, all Americans pay for it in taxes… Those of us who work as independents seem to understand this much better than people who work for a regular company. They don't see the money that's coming out of their paycheck so they don't realise how much is going to feed government insatiable appetite. And its been well proven quite succinctly that Government does not operate efficiently when it comes to how money is allocated. Once one starts to realise that things aren't free, then the picture changes dramatically. Chances are that if Viewpoint did not take over acquisition of the site, nobody else would have the resources to maintain it either, and quite possibly it would have just been shut down and that would have been the end of it. John's Avalon CD is just a small fraction of what is at the site. I'm kinda suprised its an issue but I can see the reasoning… and don't wish to get into it as to whether its valid or not. I will say however that all the points John made regarding thier rights, certainly are well within the pervue of standard practice… As far as sites go, most private sites charge a fee for allowing you to down load meshes etc. No one complains about that, as it is expected. I would expect that Viewpoint would work out a similiar arrangement. And it seems quite fair when one considers that in fact nothing is free. Which brings me to another point, and that is that the "Free Zone" was a misnomer to begin with. In fact it never was "free" as people would have to pay connect charges to download those meshes etc. in the first place. I did not want to get into it at the time… but it was this realisation that I was perpetuating such a practice that made me want to stop it. One thing you never realised and never acknowledged was that, I started the free zone, so I had the right to stop it. You seem to feel that Viewpoint doesn't have any rights either, that they are supposed to distribute these meshes and carry on as before. Frankly I expect with Viewpoint handling it, the real cost will be far less than what is was costing the government to maintain it. If an accounting could be made of the actual cost to the tax payer of these "free meshes" there would be such a massive outcry that any of the noise on the internet would pale by comparison. I applaud the government for privitizing the Avalon site and I applaud Viewpoint for taking on the responsibility of maintaining it. I'm not sure what to make of the situation with John and his Avalon CD. If there hadn't been a rather derogatory history with John, Viewpoint might have seen fit to work out some kind of accomedation. I suppose it is still a possibility provided that John shown and interest and both parties could be fairly compensated. This could actually be the best thing to happen for John but that depends on how he handles it. Regardless, this is all beyond the scope of this thread… So David the long and the short of it is, the meshes never were free, and will now be charged directly to the people who need them. Viewpoint is a high profile company and I expect will do an outstanding job of maintaining the site's meshes. And for a nominal fee everyone will have access to them. I really don't see the problem with this, I think its fair all around, albiet John' circumstance and I think if he was willing to make the effort some accomedation could be made… and he be that much better off… FWIW John

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.