Excellent point and I agree entirely and thank you for compounding my point.
In the case you cite Onyx produce a product capable of a near infinite amount of permutations. Onyx wants to stop people using their product to make (in their case, trees, bushes, palms etc) that they could then sell on (or give away) thus depriving Onyx of a revenue stream. Fair enough.
NWDA on the other-hand are more akin to the gentlemen who is selling on Onyx derived trees and bushes. They have no more "created" their products than the trees and bushes were "created" by the chap selling Onyx trees. The only difference between the two scenarios is that Onyx has stated that you may not sell or distribute their output or tree files at all. Planetside makes no such stipulation.
In both cases, Onyx and Terragen, both products offer the user a near infinite variety of possibilities, these possibilities are already inherent in the program itself and are NOT created from outside the program (this will change when the SDK is released). No matter how hard you try you can not make a car in Onyx or a Julia set fractal in Terragen for example. If some one comes along after the SDK is released and makes a plugin that can introduce new math then they will have complete rights to define their own limitations and restrictions on usage and distribution.
I have no objection to NWDA selling presets and clip files, or anything else in fact My issue is with their claim that they in some way own them, that they "created" them.
They do not and did not.
They, through hard work, diligence and deep understanding discovered them.
After one has discovered something one is free to decide what to do with that knowledge, to keep it secret, to give or sell it to others or to publish it. A free choice with no preference one way of the other.
Its a little like the DNA argument. Once the human genome was laid bare various medical companies started to say that they had rights to certain parts of the DNA. Most people believe this to be fundamentally wrong and although they may have a legal case they have no case from "natural philosophy" viewpoint.
Happy rendering
Richard