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Originally Posted by leed
My thoughts at the moment are completely the revers of this.
I see it as 'The architect has rights to the model as it is a complete copy of their designed work.'
You are right about the textures and lighting, they are seen to be creative elements, but the geometry is not.....In essence you can not copyright a computer model of a building if it is drawn to a degree of accuracy from cad information... what you can copyright is an image created from the geometry...
Lee
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You're not required to give the 3D model to the architect; in US copyright law, just because a person may legally use something does not mean another person is required to hand over a copy. In the Meshwerks case they were under contract to provide the model files.
What's not clear is why they didn't pursue a breach of contract case, because if what they said about having a licensing agreement that allowed only for use for one round of ads was true, the breach of contract would be a far less gray area than a breach of copyright; especially given that the case the court cited of the liquor bottle photo did not support their argument and that they had already failed once. They could have just tossed on breach of contract for good measure, it wouldn't have required tthem to do much more work to make the case. The only thing I can think of is that the contract was weak; maybe it was worded in such a way that it assumed Meshwerks owned copyright, and therefore was granting license to use its copyright only in this instance. If that were case, breach of contract could have already been dismissed by the lower court with Meshwerks deciding not to pursue it on appeal (gray areas a a good thing there) or Meshwerks might have never filed it in the first place.