Legal Matters of importing from Blend Files

Hello,

I may be in the wrong area, but I’m trying to find some clarification about writing my own imported for the .blend file format. From what I’ve read .blend is “output” from the program and so it isn’t “under the GPL”. I just wanted to make sure if I’m writing a commercial program that is able to import models, armatures, etc. from a .blend file if I’m obligated to release my code or not, and if so, how much of it. Any advice would be appreciated, even if it’s just to point me in the right direction elsewhere. Thanks!

“I’m Not A Lawyer,” But …

Consider this analogy: the license-agreement covering Microsoft Word has no influence upon the copyright status of any book, newsletter, or other publication that might have been made by an author who happened to be using it. Copyright covers work products, not the tools used by creators to create them.

For competent answers to legal IP matters, hire a competent attorney. (Suck-it-up and pay the fee.) You’ll be very glad :eek: that you did.

Fair enough, thanks for the advice!

I’ve never heard of a legal issue from reading a file format, the issue has always been a) writing the format & b) writing the code to read the format.

If you don’t have access to code/SDK of some kind normally figuring out how to read/write a file requires reverse engineering, which in some cases is illegal. Same with writing the format. An example of this is the id software MD5 format. It’s straight text. id didn’t patent the file format, it’s been used in other games, id doesn’t care. However, the Valve model format isn’t something that’s public, it’s compiled, you need Valve tools to compile the model & you can’t use their tools outside their software & the EULA says you can’t reverse engineer their stuff.

The only reason you’d need to release your code is if you use code with a license requiring you to release your code (or if you wanted to). IE you copy/pasted blender code in to you importer. If you wrote it from scratch it’s a non-issue.