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I work on projects that animate a 3D model in the Google Earth plug-in; for example: http://www.hazelhurst.net/Cook

I want to use a 3D model supplied by TurboSquid, but their End-User License Agreement puts on the purchaser a requirement to protect the model from being copied.

The approach I use currently is to hold the animation (gx:Tour) and the <Model> in a KML file which is fetched in javascript using the fetchKml function. Anybody who views the page source can find the URL of the KML and using that they can find and download the model.

Are there any options that will protect a model from unauthorized copying?

user
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user1597584
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1 Answers1

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No, if people have access to the kml then they can access the model data. The best you can do is to add something like a copyright statement as an overlay in your kml file explaining that unauthorised copying is not allowed.

You can make it more difficult, but not impossible, for people to download the data. For example you could only serve your kml and dae files to GoogleEarth user-agents so that only the Google Earth desktop and Google Earth Plugin can access the urls, the data they download is encrypted in their application cache directories.

This would stop at lot of people, but it would be as trivial as spoofing the user-agent to access the files via other means.

In any case, what ever you do, the data still has to go through the GPU on any machine displaying it - so nothing you can do can stop someone who can see it from accessing it by other means.

In short, if people can see it you can't protect it.

Fraser
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  • Thank you @Fraser for your answer. I'll check with TurboSquid whether a copyright statement would be sufficient, but I'm not hopeful. – user1597584 Aug 15 '12 at 09:14