Copyright Infringement?

[Golden Fish Entertainment]

Far be it for us to come across as "whistle-blowers" or "troublemakers", but one of our employees brought it to our attention that some of the battlers we recently got from the forums (which are listed as personal works, free to use in commercial projects) are actually pretty blatant copies of copywritten materials from other sources, in this particular case a popular webcomic. What exactly is the protocol for this? (There were others from the same person that we saw which were borderline, but this specific example is OBVIOUSLY from said webcomic.

Should we just "not use them"? Or do we need to report this person? The other problem being, of course, that we don't want to lose access to that person's ORIGINAL works. :/

 

[djDarkX]

Report the thread and the poster will either be asked to remove the ripped resources or the thread will be locked and all linked resources will be removed.

 

[cabfe]

It would be interesting to know, once this is settled, which battlers are involved (maybe via a thumbnail with a big red cross or something).

So that people who downloaded them here, believing they're free, can update their projects accordingly.

 

[Andar]

Basically copyright infringements and software piracy are not tolerated on this board and all such resources will be removed with either warning points or a ban depending on what exactly was done.

One of the biggest question in cases like those described above is whether the pictures are directly copied out of the said source or if the artist used the source as guidelines, but made his/her own pictures based on those web-characters. If the battlers were copied or traced from the original, it's definately no-go.

If they are "only" heavily influenced, it depends on how much changes are in the artwork, and if the artist credited the original source - fandom-type artwork has a chance of being tolerated (but I'm not a mod for anything artwork related, so I can't tell you what would be tolerated and what not).

If said resources don't give credit to the originals and claim to be free for commercial use despite being fandom-type artwork, then they are violating forum terms (which require correct credits) and need to be (as minimum) modified or removed, so report them in this case with links to the original source and let the mods/admins of the artwork sections decide.

 

[Kurisu]

Now the question is what "if" in the worst case scenario, somebody used those commercial-free resources that were later found to be somebody else's works, and the original author goes through the trouble to file a lawsuit against the game creator?

I doubt "but this person said it's free!" will be a good line of defense.

When you think about it, that makes ALL free, public resources not 100% safe...

 

[Andar]

When you think about it, that makes ALL free, public resources not 100% safe...

Not entirely - but it requires you to check the source of the pictures.

There are more than enough artists who place their pictures free to use, requiring only credits - but those artists usually have their website including terms-of-use and more than a handfull of pictures in the same style. The problem usually comes from resources reposted by people without knowledge of what they're doing, and those posts usually don't have correct or good terms-of-use, and mix up resources of different styles because they're not their own work.

If you find an artwork you're considering to use, just make a picture search on the web to find it's original source and read the original terms of use. If you don't find them anywhere else, then check if the poster is really an artist based on comments - if both searches come clean, you can usually be comforted about the T-O-S. And if you keep a record of those searches, you can defend yourself in a lawsuit to the point that you only have to take down the game until you've replaced the artwork, no need to fear fines.

However, I would suggest commissioning artist for artwork if you go commercial anyway - there have been several discussions here that concluded that a game using only free resources has a disadvantage commercially.

 

[gRaViJa]

I had the same thing happening to me a while ago and it really wasn't a good situation. Luckily i was able to prove that the fault wasn't on my part at all.

 

[Tuomo L]

Should we just "not use them"? Or do we need to report this person? The other problem being, of course, that we don't want to lose access to that person's ORIGINAL works. :/

In case like this, I wouldn't even trust the original works being original. How can you be sure they're not stolen as well?