I didnt want to invade the discussion here (is this legal) but in wonder what exactly is treated as theft or not.
Like mentioned here its completely normal in the music business that artists take small samples of others for creating new stuff. You hear them everywhere and its an old tradition since the early 80/90ies. Of corse this is tolerated only to a certain extend but was pursued in not many cases IIRC
I wonder how this goes for the 3D business. Selling other peoples work is a no go, but when does infringing copyrights start ? By using a color picker on someones face or part of a texture ? A screenshot as base for a nice sweater in blender ? A headmesh with CC from a sceenshot from TV ? Or from within a PC game ? I think noone from the small devs would at the end sue someone who has stolen their work simply because of the costs. A company like RL may of corse do so. But like said above, who will decide when does theft start and where does it end ? What can be tolerated, what will be sued ? First of all how would you prove it ? Arent “Copyrights” not just something existing on paper ? Note: in the 90ies i had a lot to do with such questions and noone really had a clear answer to it.
Especially when looking at CC, you could easily start a PC game and take 100 screenshots from around a characters head, then go through meshroom and make a mesh in Headshot 2. Would it be theft and who wants to judge about it ? Where would be the difference beetween the method above or taking the mesh from the game data and use that in Headshot instead, or simply take a screenshot and make a whole new character from it incl. clothing with blender. I mean things must come from somehwere.
I havent read all through the RL papers, but what is CC for example for ? It litterally requires base stuff taken from somewhere else to create new things. So i wonder when using things from the store or even the inbuild assets, if they are not explicitely provided for the purpose of maken new chars and items that will be sold at the end. I cant imagine that CC is only for a few gamedevs who want to create a new char for thier game every once in a while.
I would love to hear your opinions.