Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Who owns what?

Was surfing today, looking for useful apps and came across a new site...
Apparently a new way to search through the gazillions of free 3D models on the Net. So I did a search for a few obvious things and there were spaceships and chimpanzees and bridges etc.. A lot of the stuff is serious commercial models costing anythign up to £1000's because the work which goes into them.
Then like all good Bloggers everywhere, I typed in my name, and got THIS
This is a list of all the FREE models I placed on Google Sketchup Warehouse. Now that is fine, I put them online knowing they would be free to everyone to download from 'warehouse', but I did not expect them to appear on a third party site like this, freely searchable alongside paid content. Maybe I should, information we upload often includes 'ownership' clauses that essentially gives it away. this applies to the images in this blog as much as those 3d models.
So when you develop work with your students, and place it on a showcase online, be aware that it may pop up somewhere unexpected! But that's the net for you...