As they say in IT, "The great thing about standards is there are so many to choose from."

They may be installed simultaneously, but have no effect on each other.

Hrm.  That implies there's a large installed base with the existing mapping-- doesn't sound worth wrestling with.  I'll just make a personal note that the mirroring has a quirk and... well... flood fill the relevant areas.  But now I know exactly WHERE to flood fill, and WHY.  

Are the Jan 2 2008 tmBottomNaked and tfBottomNaked uvmaps supposed to be that asymmetric?  It looks like the right front foot bits are displaced about five pixels up-down and nine pixels left-right relative to the (mirrored) left front foot bits over in the other corner...

Works like a charm.  Thanks!

amar_el7ob: in re what "stackable" means: ordinarily, one can wear only one pair of glasses at a time.  The original niqab inherited enough of this nature that a Sim donning it would have their "other pair of glasses" removed.  The newer "stackable" versions are in their own bin, and so may be worn with glasses (including in particular the Maxis defaults) without any trouble.

Stackable would be nice.  The one Egyptian doctor I know wears glasses...

I don't know from accessories (or much about anything, to tell the truth.)  I tried editing the alpha to get a sheering effect, but in play it seemed as though each pixel was rounded to either all on or all off-- nothing in between.  Is that the nature of the accessory itself, or is it a glitch on my end somewhere?

It's not always clear what the law is, particularly when EULAs come in, and organizations such as the RIAA have been deliberately spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt as to what is likely to happen should one inadvertently slip up.  There's an argument to be made for erring on the side of caution-- and more importantly, all's well that ends well.



There's no such thing.  An image of your feet can be copyrighted, but it's the photographer or painter who owns it.  The numeric representation of your feet expressed in polygon vertexes can be copyrighted, but the data then belongs to the digitizer.  Just because you walk around on the things gives you no particular rights...  Incidentally, in the USA and places with similar laws, the same thing applies to your face-- at least when you're in public.  If a photographer happens to shoot me bumbling down the street with my usual moronic expression and then sells a print to a silly-picture collector for a hundred dollars, I have no particular claim against either of them.  (The rules change when advertising or other forms of deliberate mass broadcast become involved, though.)

It's also worth renoting that EFrontier not only hasn't threatened to sue anybody, there's no reason to believe they want to.

Why?  And to what policy, exactly, are you referring to?

Nothing there but an earnest of good faith and a request for clarification on what they think they're trying to allow and disallow with the EULA.  For their part, they've forwarded it off to the right people to generate an answer eventually, and did not include a request that you keep them down until they get back to you.  I see little reason why the meshes couldn't go back up while they're trying to reach a decision; if the issue is important to them, an answer will come back quickly, and if the issue isn't important to them and/or it's item #7365 on Legal's list of Things That Have To Be Addressed Someday, Eventually, If We Have Time (as is almost certainly the case), might as well leave them up in the interim.  (Noting, of course, that I am not a lawyer and it isn't my name on the things... On the other hand, I already have copies, so I'm not putting the idea out there for my benefit, either.)

EFrontier's intellectual property people are FAR more concerned about full blown outright theft-- there are people out there duplicating the entire Poser 7 distribution and selling it.  You're not one of those people, and could not be mistaken for one.  A clear case of fair use, a small number of people making use of the stuff from a site that can only be considered "obscure" in the greater scheme of things, and the guy doing it is in a different country-- arguing it down to the wire would be a big headache for no real gain, and that they do not need.

Eh.  Experience is a long list of things you'll never do again.  

Did you promise to keep the meshes down unless they explicitly said it was okay to put them back up?

EFrontier didn't ask; they did not come looking for this problem.  But things change when a specific person asks THEM, "Is it okay if I do this specific thing with your stuff?"  Inevitably, they have to wonder, "Wait... is this fellow planning to do something with our stuff that ISN'T fair use?  After all, he doesn't HAVE to ask to ask our permission for fair use-- indeed, we coudn't stop him even if we wanted to.  What's actually going on, here?"  Of course they're going to get nervous, and flag it as, "Better not say yes unless the lawyers say it's okay; something fishy may be going on."  (A cheaper alternative is to say, "We can't say yes unless Legal blesses it, and they're a bit backlogged; we'll get back to you soon," and then pigeonhole it.  A sneakier alternative is to silently pigeonhole it.)

Bear in mind that it was a gravely flawed misreading of the EULA that led to the concern in the first place.  EFrontier almost certainly didn't know BlooM or his meshes from a crate of tinned stoat giblet soup before he initiated contact with them-- and had some random third party just mailed them the URL, they almost certainly would have said, "So what?  He's not reselling Poser 7, he's giving away an add-on useful only for a specific game."

At the risk of becoming a bit preachy, this is one reason why artists really should be familiar with copyright law.  Very few things are truly de novo-- but there are real reasons why (for instance) Warhol could not only produce but also sell prints of Campbell's soup cans perfectly legally, totally without regard for whether the Campbell's people happened to approve or not.

How they respond will not change the fact that it remains fair use.  Note too that EFrontier has little or nothing to gain by saying "yes", and at least potentially has something to lose,  At a minimum, answering "yes" constitutes amending their agreement between Bloom and EFrontier, which has legal implications.  This would have to be formally vetted by their lawyers to make sure they don't accidentally weaken their own copyright claims-- and lawyers are not free.  Ergo, I know which way I'm betting their response will go...  (I'd also give it a 50% chance they suggest that people who want to use the feet in their own games may of course do so-- as long as they've bought a full copy of Poser 7.)



There are problems, yes-- particularly after the passage of the The Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998-- but what organizations like the RIAA claim the law implies are, at best, self-serving.  They tend not to stand up in court.

EFrontier has no grounds to object to Bloom's meshes, or even any reason to want to try.  Heck, they're even polite enough to acknowledge the primacy of copyright law in their EULA:

   D. You cannot sell, resell, distribute, cause to be distributed, or allow any portion of the Restricted Content to be distributed under any circumstances, via any public or private medium, except where expressly permitted by this EULA and US copyright law. . .

Might look a bit scary, but the key phrase is actually "expressly permitted by . . . US copyright law".  Copyright law exists to prevent commercial sale of somebody else's commercial work.  Its goal is to forbid large scale, outright, and blatant theft that profits the thief.  Hence, just because something is under copyright does not mean no part of it may be used under any circumstances.

There is a four part test for whether or not something is considered "fair use":

1. Purpose and character of use. Bloom is not selling anything; he's giving his work away for people's own private use.  Putting up a mesh is a clear example of a thing whose purpose is to "stimulate creativity for the enrichment of the general public"; he's providing a tool.  Having Bloom's meshes does not "supersede the objects" of Poser 7-- which is to say, having Bloom's meshes is in no significant way a substitute for having Poser 7.

2. Nature of the copied work.  Irrelevant here; nobody is arguing that Poser 7's feet by its nature have to be in the public domain-- they have no great educational value, are not historic documents, etcetera.

3. Amount and substantiality.  Only a miniscule fraction of the data from the Poser 7 distribution appears in Bloom's meshes.  Nor are the feet the most important part of Poser 7; nobody could argue that there are hordes of people wanting to buy Poser 7 because they really, really want the feet.

4. Effect upon work's value.  No sane lawyer would try to convince a judge that Bloom's meshes being available measurably decrease the value of Poser 7.  Indeed, one could argue that this whole thing increases Poser 7's value-- on public relations grounds alone.


Wikipedia's article on "fair use" is readable, but of course it was witten by a nebulous cloud of people.  Fortunately, one Terry Carroll-- who teaches intellectual property law-- maintains a FAQ that's still quite understandable by laymen:
http://www.tjc.com/copyright/FAQ/
Of particular relevance:
http://www.tjc.com/copyright/FAQ/CFAQ02.html#2.8
http://www.tjc.com/copyright/FAQ/CFAQ02.html#2.9

Found it.  If anyone needs a whole-body swimwear/nude mesh that keeps the block-style feet even with Blooms_sexyfeetDefaultbottomoverride_Mesh.package installed , there's one  at http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?p=1302014#post1302014
in the file
http://files.modthesims2.com/getfile.php?file=341499 .   As it happens, it's an alpha mesh skirt with flats for feet-- but leave the skirt alpha black, and it's a perfectly servicable nude mesh unaffected by changing the feet defaults.

I've updated http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=210687
appropriately.  Anyone who needs the version of the 34" hips blocky-feet-Warlokk-Hi-Res-detailed mesh Bloom just put together, or needs to point other people to it: there it is.



Feel like making another mesh?    

(Actually, an existing flats alpha-skirt whole-body mesh would probably suffice-- but the only example of such a thing I have handy is of dubious provenance.  It's a flats variation of
http://www.modthesims2.com/showthread.php?t=127591 , built for the old SimStones project.  I have it, and it's doing the right thing-- but I don't see it on modTheSims2.com anywhere any more and inSIMenator.com is a twisty maze of passages, all alike.  This makes providing a pointer to it problematic, as I don't so much as know what the original redistribution terms were...)