Blenderkits' position on CC0 models uploaded by non-original authors 🔗
We are here primarily for Blender 3D authors and users.
That might suffice as an explanation, but I'd like to be clear about how we've decided to separate people who are trying to contribute to the community from people who are looking for a quick way to make money.
The first thing to explain is that this is not (sometimes) about piracy. Creative commons licenses are often very permissive and essentially allow people to not only re-mix and redistribute the work of authors, but also in the most radical sense allow the original content to be resold. This often causes us headaches, because on the one hand we're trying to be there for authors, but it's also part of our mission to promote open-source. How can it be logical to prevent someone from doing something that is part of the license that the original author assigned? We believe that the author should be the one to profit from their work, and possibly others if they have improved their work a lot.
Up until now, if we've found that someone uploading content to us is not the author, we've always intervened, but there have been several motives we've encountered. We have decided to сomit this text to clarify how we will handle these cases in the future.
The good guys and the bad guys.
Let's start with the bad ones. With these uploads, we often see that the primary motivation is to make money. Such a user usually doesn't mention the source from where he downloaded the 3D models, but is able to write us several emails a week about why we haven't validated his great models yet. No improvements have been made to the uploaded assets, often quite the opposite.
- Such assets will not be accepted, as they have not been until now. Accounts that try to upload more assets in this way will be blocked.
The good ones
- Some people will take CC0 assets from other sites, but improve them very substantially before uploading them to us - making new UVs and materials, or fixing errors in the model.
- We accept such assets, this is true open-source behaviour.
- Some people have tried to upload assets from other sources in the past, arguing that BlenderKit is a convenient way to get models into Blender and render scenes really fast. They have emailed us that they are not interested in making money, but purely interested in doing this work for the community.
- We will accept such assets, but we will introduce a new option for them, which is to exclude them from redistribution. This will allow our users to expand our database without jeopardizing the earnings of our authors or unfairly profiting from someone else's work. This feature is on our TODO list, that's why we kindly ask you not to upload CC0 models, even if your intent is pure.
