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Trying To Lure Suckers, Company Resells Open Source Blender

Posted by timothy on from the born-every-minute dept.

sylphsama writes "A company named 'IllusionMage" deceptively resells a 3D open source animation package (Blender) and claims it as their own. The software, dubbed IllusionMage, portrays flagrant similarities with Blender, although outdated compared to the original. The website itself is a patchwork of sorts, using renders from different users and numerous other packages as a way to impress its visitors. Not only is that a breach of copyright, but they intentionally hide that the software is distributed under the GNU GPL license, rendering it free to use. The Blender Foundation itself has spoken out through its chairman Ton Roosendaal." I love that they promise "Free Updates For Life. All From the Thriving Open Source Community, This Software is Forever Improving."

10 of 294 comments (clear)

  1. Legit by RobDollar · · Score: 2, Informative

    What he's doing is completely legal. Quite how much money he makes would be interesting to see, anyone buying a 3d package would surely do a small amount of research. Law of averages will prevail I suppose.

    He's been doing this for ages, and does it with various other software packages.

    1. Re:Legit by LetterRip · · Score: 4, Informative

      His customers appear happy, and given that he's marketing to die-hard Windows & Mac users (no Linux version mentioned), the fee probably makes them feel more comfortable. It's a feature...

      " Wow this software is incredible. I have owned Maya, 3DMax and PoserPro. I can tell you, this is by FAR, the easiest software to use."

      Isaac Oneil - Marion, NC

      He creates false testimonials (I reported him to one of the corporations he was using in a false testimonial - he had fabricated the individual and testimony.)

    2. Re:Legit by LetterRip · · Score: 5, Informative

      Seriously though, they did add notes to all of the images naming the source. Maybe they asked permission, and that was all the creators asked of them? I'd advise we hold off on the lynching until one of the artists comes out and complains.

      No they did not ask permission. We specifically denied them to use of some of the images and of our videos (some are CC licensed and thus we have no control over, but many are not). However he has ignored most of the requests from the Blender Foundation.

    3. Re:Legit by t2t10 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Always hard to always stay up to date on the current common wisdom of Slashdot.

      The GPL is an attempt to use copyright against itself. So, GPL license holders are going to insist on having their copyrights enforced, even though they disapprove of the current copyright system. There is nothing new about this strategy, it's been the same for more than 20 years; I'm sorry you haven't been paying attention.

  2. Hide what? by DaHat · · Score: 5, Informative

    At the bottom of the page it clearly says:

    Released Under GNU GPL. Source code available for download

    --
    Help Brendan pay off his student loans
  3. Also been done with OpenOffice by tomhudson · · Score: 3, Informative
    Anyone else remember, a few years ago, how there were web sites that offered, for something like $50, a copy of OpenOffice?

    Now this isn't to say that it's wrong to sell GPL software - even RMS and the GPL v3 licenses say that you can sell it for whatever you can get for it - but that anyone else is free to do the same with the copy you sell them, so the price quickly drops to zero.

    You may charge any price or no price for each copy that you convey, and you may offer support or warranty protection for a fee.

    They're doing the "sucker born every minute" thing.

    1. Re:Also been done with OpenOffice by Darkness404 · · Score: 3, Informative

      The problem isn't that they are reselling it, that is perfectly legal. But they are using the Blender Foundation's copyrighted images and other people's copyrighted images to do so.

      --
      Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
    2. Re:Also been done with OpenOffice by Alex+Belits · · Score: 3, Informative

      Plagiarism is independent from copyright infringement -- it is a form of both libel and fraud. The fact that existing (massively fucked up) law conflates the two and makes copyright the only protection against plagiarism, does not make it dependent on the justification for current copyright laws. GPL openly uses copyright to achieve goals that are the opposite to the goals of people who created current copyright-related laws, and even shitheads like yourself stopped screaming about it being some kind of hypocrisy, so I recommend shutting up and writing something about Gimp not supporting CMYK.

      --
      Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
  4. Re:Typo in summary by SpazmodeusG · · Score: 5, Informative

    Ugh. No. The trailing dot is perfectly correct and it should be there. It's actually a hack that the trailing dot is implicitly assumed in domain names.

    "It's a little-known fact, but fully-qualified (unambiguous) DNS domain names have a dot at the end."

    http://www.dns-sd.org/TrailingDotsInDomainNames.html

  5. Re:Typo in summary by bk2204 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Any browser (or other DNS-using software) that does not accept a terminal period on a domain name is broken. The root of the DNS is ., and this domain could just as well be written as "news.slashdot.org.". In fact, using a terminal . may speed up access if anything because it prevents the use of any "search" statements in /etc/resolv.conf.