add room to track and maintain "license declarations" on assets
It is time for us to have an "open source 3d asset sharing movement" similar to the open-source software movement.
However, one impediment to this is the fact that 3d tools like Blender lack a suitable facilities for tracking, displaying, and maintaining copyright notices and license declarations for individual assets.
This is not about enforcement of these declarations, which is much more complicated. This is about creating a simple mechanism that is as effective as "source code license declerations at the top of text files".
I’ll start by creating a list of the data I think needs to support copyright and license declerations…
- scene object layout (aka instances of objects and their transform data)
- object shape data (mesh, curves, grease pencil strokes, uvmap)
- images (textures) -> in XMP/EXIF data
- node programs (shaders, compositing programs, animation nodes, sverchok)
- scripts (but these are already accounted for with text comments)
- custom armature UIs (not the bone geometry, but a custom rig UI)
- animation curve data
- VSE/NLE scene
Remember that this isn’t about enforcement. It’s about having something “as good as manually edited text file source code comments”, but for visual assets.
When a user joins two assets (such as joining two meshes), the copyright/license comments for those assets should be merged… though of course they could be manually edited afterwords.
When a user copy/pastes data with copyright/license data, such as duplicating objects, Blender should duplicate the copyright and license data as well. However, when a user copy/pastes some subset of data without license info (such as a subset of nodes in a node program) blender doesn’t need to do anything automatically. it will be up to the user to update the copyright appropriately, just like if you copy lines of source code from a text file to another file.
That said, it is important for Blender to make copyright/license declerations visible within the UI, in such a way that users can’t easily miss their existence… Again, a parallel is the way license declarations at the top of a source file are always in an obvious place.
For example, when looking at a node program, you can’t see the entire node program, so the copyright can’t just be hidden on a node at a random location on the graph. Perhaps a copyright summary could be displayed as a faint watermark on a node-editor or 3d-view background, with a gizmo to open full details.
blenderartists.org/t/need-feedback-on-adding-copyright-to-data-within-blender/1158554
2 Comments
What is this property bound to? Object data? Mesh data? Texture data?
What happens when a user joins two assets; which licensing information gets attached to the derivative object?
In general, I like the idea of supporting metadata like this in objects, but your proposal seems to raise more questions that need answering before anyone attempts to implement it.
* @Jason van Gumster *
I certainly don't have all the questions answered. but I think we need to answer these questions. I'll post a discussion on blender artists as well, to get some feedback and ideas.
You raise a very good point, that suggests custom properties is not the right place for this information, because it doesn't attach in the places we want, and it doesn't make it very easy to see the license information attached to several things in a practical way. We may need a new Metadata/comments/license UI that gives us access to more license info at a glance.
As just one example, we'd like a copyright declaration on a texture image to be put in XMP and EXIF data inside the image data itself -- which is not custom properties. As far as I can see, Blender currently can't read or edit XMP/EXIF information inside images (though it can put EXIF data on render output).
Which I guess opens the top-level question of what types of things we need copyright declarations on... (i've edited my top post to include a list)
When a user joins two assets (such as joining two meshes), the copyrights for both meshes should be on the resulting mesh. Of course the user could then edit them however he saw fit, because this isn't about enforcement.. it's about trying to be "as good as source code copyright comments".