(12-19-2020, 06:22 PM)CommodoreShawn Wrote: I wasn't trying to advertise selling these. I'm not even sure how practical or legal that would be...
Depends on your country laws really, and of course Microsoft won't be too happy about it but if it's small scale replicas and a map and not a full-blown game with Freelancer branding all over it, you should be free from harm under what version of fair use and transformative work. That's how all those anime figurines are built btw, not by the copyright owners themselves but by licensed or small time assemblies protected by fair use is in effect in your territory.
In United States copyright law, transformation is a possible justification that use of a copyrighted work may qualify as fair use, i.e., that a certain use of a work does not infringe its holder's copyright due to the public interest in the usage. Transformation is an important issue in deciding whether a use meets the first factor of the fair-use test, and is generally critical for determining whether a use is in fact fair, although no one factor is dispositive. Transformativeness is a characteristic of such derivative works that makes them transcend, or place in a new light, the underlying works on which they are based. In computer- and Internet-related works, the transformative characteristic of the later work is often that it provides the public with a benefit not previously available to it, which would otherwise remain unavailable. Such transformativeness weighs heavily in a fair use analysis and may excuse what seems a clear copyright infringement from liability.
In United States patent law the term also refers to the test set in In re Bilski: that a patent-eligible invention must "transform a particular article into a different state or thing".
Microsoft is based on the US and if you are too you are bound to the same laws as they are. And they never assembled any physical model about Freelancer. To make FL2 would be one thing, a total breach of their IP, but a Storta Model for instance is something so derivative and such transformed from the original source material that the 3D models might aswell be an IP on it's own (someone tell that to devs and modelers pelase).
So printing and selling some of them, specially new ones, shouldn't be much of a problem. Of course, I'm not an american lawyer so you might want to check the fine details with one.
Well money wise, if you only asked for what it costs to make and send it, that would technically be like giving them away still. There may be no precedent set, you'd have to ask yourself if anyone would do anything that bad over such a thing. Typically though, if you make sure you don't do it for profit, that would be a good argument to make. That much likely has been ruled on already, that you could give them away as gifts, just not try to sell for profit.
So say it costs 37.00 to make and ship an item, its probably been decided that if you ask for that, or within a small margin, its reasonable. Asking for 40.00 is probably accepted margin. Meaning its not likely you'd ever be sued, they'd be guaranteed to lose money doing do. And all of this is again only because they don't actively make anything for Freelancer anymore. None of that would apply though if Microsoft was still selling models like this currently, or marketing Freelancer at all. I'm no lawyer, but it might be worth a look. At the very least you could probably give the patterns away for game credits to those who can print it themselves.