Hi!
After reading this article, I have a few questions regarding it. It says that when modifying copyrighted material to make it “yours”, you may still violate copyright law. Does this have any exceptions? For instance, I have seen countless games using detailed copyrighted car brands, and some of these games have removed the badge logos. They do also name these cars different from their real life names, while still using the original 3D model. I assume this isn’t allowed?
Devforum members can’t give good legal advice or function as lawyers even though people who reply to this will definitely think their advice counts for something. I highly recommend you read ToS / ToU as literally as possible and if you have questions, consult a legal professional because neither developers nor the platform have all the answers. Most of us are not in law school and even if we were, you would need to specialize in IP / copyright law to know anything.
This seems like a pretty blatant violation. Look at the Pokemon games from several years ago that got taken down via Nintendo’s request. Roblox games do sometimes get away with things like this because lack of exposure to older demographics and corporate actors/parties who actually care about these things…
Also, even without a lot of knowledge in this subject matter, there are so many types of copyrighted material it would be a case-by-case basis to determine whether a modification was enough to make ownership “yours.” Once again, we would need a legal professional.
Yeah, I suppose the safest method is to create all content from scratch myself.
Also, the article I am referring to points out:
Protecting your work — On the Roblox platform, game developers who are working on their own projects (versus other paid projects) own their original works of creation (subject to the licenses granted to Roblox), so it’s important to protect that right.
If the original creators of ROBLOX content such as models have protected their work, they can report other developers usage of their work. Now the question that comes to my mind is - will developers risk being moderated because they used assets from Free Models? Do we have to create everything from scratch? Since there are loads of copied assets in the Free Model section of the Library, we have no clue who the original creator of these is.