#7
28th Jul 2010 at 3:22 AM
Last edited by tjstreak : 28th Jul 2010 at
3:35 AM.
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You might look for the compressorizer to decrapify the files. However, the mesh files do not have morphs so they will not work with a lot of the standard tools if you want to edit meshes. About all you can do with ease is edit textures and some the categories.
As for the legality: modifying the files for your own almost certainly constitutes fair use. However, using the compressorizer to defeat the copy protection probably is a violation of the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. Fair use may or may not be a defense to the anti-circumvention provisions of the DMCA. see, eg, Storage Tech. Corp. v. Custom Hardware Eng'g & Consulting, Inc., 421 F.3d 1307, 1318-19 (Fed. Cir. 2005)
As a practical matter, if you do not distribute the files, no one will know that you messed with them, or much care. Of course, if you distribute them, you have other problems (like copyright infringement.)
I have also noticed that the items made by the favored artiists at a certain pay site cannot be opened with the tool developed by that pay site. So you have the paysite developing a tool to edit packages, but which will not open the files appearing on that paysite. It sort of reminds me of a city I lived in where they widened the streets to speed up traffic, then installed a bunch of lights to slow it down again!