I have been skinning [and publicly distributing] works on the Internet since the 90's.  It's certainly not new to me.

However, over the pst 2 or 3 years I've been 'playing' with Microsoft's Flight Sim 10 [FSX], mostly because you can create 'skins' [textures] for the aircraft [in particular] and just about anything else....

There's a large community/communities and several sites all devoted to the craft ...and MANY commercial entities too.

So, I've been 'skinning' aircraft models for ages [years now] but all for my own 'entertainment' as a pass-time while monitoring Stardock's sites/forums, but had never submitted anything to any of them.

Then one day I saw one person's skin for a plane I had....which inspired me to 'toy' with it.  For some clever [not] reason just about every plane released has a different method of texture-mapping to its model ....which makes skinning for FSX 'interesting'.

This particular plane was released by the model's creator in a comparatively [these days] low-resolution 1024x1024 pixel bmp format [extended with trans channel, of course],

Modern systems can handle 4096x4096 res wich gives 16 times the amount of detail....just the thing when the aircraft is about to crash out of your monitor...you can see the colour of the pilot's eyes....

Anyway... I grabbed this guy's model....some of its graphics....and then the repaint from this other artist....and reworked it [literally at per-pixel level....and that's 16 million plus pixels]...and the result wasn't all bad.

I posted a screenshot of it on their site...in the same thread as the original skin.....and that's where  THE RULES KICKED IN

A reader commented asking when would I release [upload] my skin.

I said "I can't, because my skin as a rework of another's design.... and to upload it I would ALSO be distributing the model creator's graphics [IP] as well...and  I HAD NO CONSENT FOR EITHER."

BUT THERE WAS A SOLUTION:-

I emailed the plane's author and asked if I could....and he said yes.

Likewise with the guy whose skin I started with.

Easy as pie.

A condition [of course] is that I include references to such consent with whatever I distributed.

Needless to say, there are MANY people doing skins....and including 'default bits that don't change'  already...and I have no idea of consentual arrangements yay or nay, and I guess these guys may even have thought MY request 'odd', but then maybe NOT when I added what I do here at Wincustomize.com.

Bottom line...?

GET CONSENT ...