Did you notice this sentence on the title page?
Quote:Brick geometry data are the property of the LEGO Group of companies and are subject to copyright. POV-Ray™ include files contain enhanced versions of brick geometries used by LDD. Since include files are plain text files LDD to POV-Ray™ Converter uses Callback File System, virtual file system SDK for Windows provided by the EldoS Corporation to enable POV-Ray™ access binary includes without disclosing the brick geometry content.
This frightens me a lot. The installer of that application will install some system driver which will be able to access a specially crafted hidden file system. Plus an application that can read it but will not show it to the user. In that file system,
anything can be hidden. My second question is: if POVRay can access those include files, for which such a big effort is done to hide them, why can't I simply pause POVRay and then copy them? Hmmmm.
Sounds like basic drm wining to me, It also sounds like it's not very portable (povray script wise). So I don't think the LDraw system has much to fear from this
What's up with them using LDraw's pyramid.dat as their logo? I know this converter doesn't come from LEGO, but it seems really strange for whoever created it to use pyramid.dat.
Yup. DRM = Bad and not in the spirit of the Lego community. Additionally, with LDD, you are limited to what is currently available from LEGO whereas LDraw strives to include are parts available or not.
I could be wrong, but I don't think this has anything to do with DRM. If the program was being distributed by LEGO, then one might make that argument, but it seems that the author was just being properly paranoid, and unwilling to distribute a program that actually extracts the geometry data from LDD, so used this as a solution to the problem.
yeah, that had confused me as well.