Quote from the EULA of Autodesk 360 (cloud service):
You hereby grant Autodesk (or warrant that the licensor of such rights has expressly granted) a perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, royalty-free, paid-up, worldwide, sublicensable (through multiple tiers) license to store, display, reproduce, modify, use and transmit Your Content, and further waive “moral” rights or other rights with respect to attribution of authorship or integrity of Your Content that You may have under any applicable law and under any legal theory.
It seems a bit sneaky OF YOU to quote a portion of the EULA, implying that it means that they own all your works for any purpose whatsoever.
The part you quoted is INSIDE a section that starts with “Autodesk (or its sublicensees) may exercise the license set forth in this Section only”… and then goes on to say what those purposes are, THEN tells you that you must grant them a license for those uses only.
Again, it could be a bad thing, but you have to read the entire PARAGRAPH not just a couple of lines in that paragraph.
Clauses like this are absolutely common on services that deal with user-generated data. It sounds a bit like you are “losing” your rights, but that is not the case. You are losing control.
But if you think about it, they require pretty much each of these rights:
If you are editing data on their servers, of course they need to be able to store it.
If it is being processed on their servers, they need to be able to display it (at least to you).
Doing these things requires copying (reproduction/transmission) and which also may imply modification (e.g. compression).
Also, being a large company, they may at some point require to be able to transfer these rights to subsidiaries or partners.
Of course they could qualify all these rights with use-cases (“for the purpose of…”) but that would increase complexity and introduce all kinds of legal liabilities, so they just take the “easy way out”.
EDIT: I overread what Harley pointed out. It is indeed quite dishonest to cut out this very relevant part that precedes your quote:
So there, nothing to write home about. If they didn’t ask for these rights, they couldn’t run the service at all.
My understanding is cloud services is the one way to combat piracy.
The reasoning seems to be that if you physically possess a digital copy of the program then nothing can stop you from dissambling it.
Autodesk already provides their software for free for students and “unemployed” people for learning purposes. The big benefits for them is in software maintenance: Less need for testing and certifying, simple updates/patches, live recording of bugs during user interaction. Also: billing. For a while now they have shown the desire to build their service as a subscription. A cloud-based solution lets them be really creative about flexible billing.
Autodesk seems to be very optimistic about this, with claims that within a few years, the only way to use Autodesk software will be online. I doubt that will be the case. The users will not adopt to their idea of the cloud unless they can show clear, significant benefits to the user (not themselves) and I haven’t seen them produce anything compelling in that regard.
Yeah, a bit dishonest in that selective quoting. I have come across some majorly offensive EULA’s in my time, but I see the requirement for these rights to legally provide the services they are without litigation. It’s pretty standard for Cloud based services.
With that out of the road, I don’t see Autodesk being able to pull off a complete shift to cloud-based software licensing. At least, not without providing some sort of server for larger clients that do not want to be tied to someone else’s servers. There are some big studios out there and if enough of them decide that Autodesk can shove it - they’ll have to.
Assuming AD actually does push hard along these lines, Blender and other native, non-cloud software is going to eat their lunch. Not necessarily because they are better, but quite simply because they won’t crash when the Internet connection of AD servers go down. Anyone who tried playing Diablo 3 in the first night knows how bad it is for the servers to go down whilst trying to simply use the software by one’s self. Anyone who has tried to play Diablo 3 lately in Australia knows what kind of hassle there is in a bad connection to the servers. Software as a service that doesn’t NEED to be such and PREVIOUSLY WASN’T just doesn’t go down well with users.
Oh, give it a f-ing rest, already. This is the same bullsh-t as whenever FB or Google changes their license. Bunch of f-ktwats suddenly become “legal experts” and claim their personal integrity has been violated or something - nag, nag, nag. Have a tinfoil hat, you morons…
Agree - that this is the kind of blah blah you would expect from a cloud application - realistically hardly anyone will care and just press “I agree”.
I am curious however - if this will impact on military/government/medical use of 3D software, that have their own rigid policies. - If Autodesk looses those customers - or maybe they end up cutting special deals (so companies can have their own clouds, probably very expensive server licensing for the privileged of running it in house)
We already knew autodesk is that kind of business…The problem is they have good products. You can hate the owner but love the software.
It is also why its important the competition keeps on innovating but not to the extremes of being too different from the main AD products, hopefully they never sell out either.
Many like myself would love nothing more than to find good alternatives to AD apps… few are doing as good enough job as some would like.
mostly they are to protect the artist,and cannot be dropped or taken from him/her
While the United States became a signatory to the convention in 1989,[6] it still does not completely recognize moral rights as part of copyright law, but rather as part of other bodies of law, such as defamation or unfair competition.[7] Some jurisdictions allow for the waiver of moral rights.[8] In the United States, the Visual Artists Rights Act of 1990 (VARA) recognizes moral rights, but applies only to a narrow subset of works of visual art.[9]
Seriously now. this thread has something common with another one.
What maya has that blender has not, or something…
Maya has autodesk. Might be the right answer.
I’m guessing there was a bit of sarcasm in your original post, but I can’t help but agree with JuicyVitamin that it could have been worded less…“aggressively”, for lack of a better word. If you’ll notice, other users are discussing the issue and the problem with the OP’s quote and are trying to help everyone by clearing it up.
Now, about the licensing and Cloud services, I can’t help but think that Cloud-ing won’t be great for resource-intensive apps like Autodesk’s products, or even (theoretically) Blender with it’s 80MB file size. Our own internet is flaky enough as it is, and to be limited by it even more than I already am (at times) would be insane, really
Now, if these new cloud-based Maya&Max versions come with a free, direct-to-server strengthened cable/fiber optic line with mind-blowing upload and download speeds, courtesy of Autodesk, then it might be an interesting idea…
P.S. Just to be clear, my last paragraph was meant only as a joke
EDIT - Of course, that’s not to say that cloud services aren’t the next big thing and that they couldn’t work, but I don’t think that heavier applications (for sound, film, graphics, and so on) could work very well with those services. Not to mention that internet providers and servers everywhere are struggling to catch up to the bandwidth demands of today. The tech just isn’t ready yet, IMO
