Potential extensions copyright issues

[josephhansen]

@nickberckley

Is this gonna be problem for Blender? Because add-ons now can do that as well, they might be shipping copyrighted, non-GPL python code, they also include images, matcaps, node groups, base meshes and etc. Basically everyone who wants to ship assets now wraps it as add-on, because there is no other way (one more thing I feer will be common in the future: people will bypass asset extensions just to use features of add-on extensions) and we don’t check for those, we can’t realistically. My assumption was that if copyright infringement is found it’s up to developer to respond and only thing we should do is take it down.

We have add-ons now that come with quite a lot of assets, like… A LOT. We should be concerned about those too then, or make rule for future to only accept code. What we do now for moderation is just to point out that it’s their responsibility to make sure copyright is not infringed.

This is a “shutting the barn after the horse is out” worry. If you have a platform where people can share things on your hosting, you will eventually have copyright issues. There are things right now on the extension platform that have copyright issues, and Blender, by choosing to host them, is responsible. Large content platforms like YouTube don’t take copyrighted stuff down for fun- they do it because they have to.

The Foundation really, really, really needed to think this through before launching the Extensions site. BlenderMarket has paid employees dedicated to resolving legal issues. So does BlenderKit and all the others.

Blender Extensions has… one unpaid volunteer who is not a lawyer. Y’all are going to end up in serious hot water eventually

[brecht]

@josephhansen

This is a “shutting the barn after the horse is out” worry. If you have a platform where people can share things on your hosting, you will eventually have copyright issues. There are things right now on the extension platform that have copyright issues, and Blender, by choosing to host them, is responsible. Large content platforms like YouTube don’t take copyrighted stuff down for fun- they do it because they have to.

If you are aware of any copyright issues, please report them and they will be looked at. These kinds of things have been handled for as long as Blender has had forums, bug trackers, pull requests, and any other place where users can upload files, and it is taken seriously.

@josephhansen

Blender Extensions has… one unpaid volunteer who is not a lawyer. Y’all are going to end up in serious hot water eventually

If there is a legal question, it’s always possible to escalate that and if needed get legal advice. And I guess you don’t really think that app stores in general only hire reviewers with a law degree, instead of reviewers escalating to someone else and just generally being in contact with other people in the company. Unpaid volunteer I also doubt is accurate. You’re just making too many assumptions.

[thorn-neverwake]

@brecht

If you are aware of any copyright issues, please report them and they will be looked at.

League of Legends SKN, SKL Importer

Plus, there are extensions that are using various company’s logos such as Unreal, adobe flash, apple… though perhaps the restrictions on “logo use not allowed in icons” only applies to the Blender logo.

[brecht]

That image and logos are all fair use I would say, but we may still have a more strict policy just to be sure. @nickberckley can check.

Blender logo guidelines are not rules about copyright.

[nickberckley]

I’ve brought up topic of 3rd-party logos and names in titles when platform was launching, and Dalai checked (at some point we didn’t accept them), but then I was told it should be fine. Now we have this in terms of service, which is approved by Francesco:

• (2.4) Logo or other trademarked images of third-party software/companies should only be used if guidelines of that software/company allow it and extension authors can provide evidence of that.

If I notice usage of 3rd-party logo I usually ask if they’re sure they have permission to use it. Most of the ones now are directly uploaded by those softwares themselves, and for larger apps, like Unreal and etc. they don’t seem to mind, at least I’m not aware of any copyright issues on our platform or any other.

[thorn-neverwake]

So someone at Ikea signed off on this?

IKEA Browser

[dfelinto]

So someone at Ikea signed off on this? [IKEA extension]

This was a bit of a corner-case. What made it more acceptable was that the IKEA logo is not used,the add-on is browsing the IKEA sites for data which is already available there, and all-in-all this helps more not IKEA’s business.

That said, we also had no policy in place back then, so I took on me to check with IKEA.

At the time (August 2024) I was in direct contact with someone from IKEA marketing & communication team I met at a conference. I mentioned the extension via email and asked to be informed if there was any violation of their IP. Since I didn’t hear back on that in particular, I then made a judgement call to approve the extension, and retreat it from the store if we receive any remarks from them.

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On a side note, the ideal scenario is for IKEA itself to host an online asset library with their assets. But for this we need to first finish the online assets project.