My reply to Lawrence D’Oliveiro

1) The "SA" stands for "Share-Alike" and that part of the CC-BY-SA license states: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original.

The issue doesn't lie there. The real issue lies in the terms of the license:

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format

Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material

for any purpose, even commercially.

Authors of content that's classified as "fan art" need to choose the better CC BY-NC-SA (Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike). I think what happens, though, is that people may properly submit their work that deals with a commercial brand as "Fan Art" but misunderstand the licences.

2) BlendSwap makes some money from the site from some people paying for a premium membership to allow for greater downloads. That's not at all making money off of the Fan Art models themselves. No one's paying for the models. People pay for a larger size limit for downloading free 3D models. This does nothing to disrespect their licenses.

Selling someone a premium for downloading more free downloads is not selling them 3D models, nor is it making money from the 3D models. You're trying to claim that they make money from models that other people make money from, and that's false in two ways: not every model is available for commercial use, and BlendSwap is not selling anything but greater bandwidth and a few account bells and whistles.


By the way, the number of people who actually pay for the premium service are, comparatively, very little. But even the relatively little money they may make is needed to help keep the free users' accounts free, as well as help make up-keeping the site worth the precious time for the guys who manage and maintain it. But I bet they barely even make enough to break even.