I'm wondering if there is a VRML language solution that could guarantee (in
legitimate commercial software applications that fully support the spec)
that copyright information stored in models is carried through whenever the
model or any of its nodes is saved in VRML. (It would be nice to extend
this to other formats as well, but this seems outside the scope of the
list).
For example, VRML comment lines might be used to include copyright
information for the model and for any/all nodes.
However, I understand that, VRML comments are now stripped when browsers
and modelers convert VRML to their internal scene representations. If so,
this would mean that comments are always lost when saving downloaded (or
opened) VRML models or parts of models to disk.
Is this true?
Is this also the case for Info nodes, which could also be used to contain
such information?
If it is agreed that there must be some way to ensure basic copyright
information is passed through during Save and Save As operations, is it
unreasonable to ask that comments or info nodes (or perhaps a new
"copyright" node) be retained in the scene graph or in some other manner
(again, for commercial applications which fully support the VRML spec)?
I wonder if there are others on this list who would be interested in a
language-based solution to this problem.
Note that I am not assuming this would protect models from hackers,
stripping routines, etc. Rather, this approach would help identify casual
theft of copyrighted material in the event the author chooses to perform
such a check. No such scheme can hope to prevent theft, only to detect it
once it has taken place.