I would like to take some image textures from a paid asset, which contains no normal maps, with these textures I’d like to generate normal maps and publish them in my own package, for which I’d potentially charge a monetary fee.
Do I need permission to publish these normal maps, am I free to do so and would the generated normal maps break any copyright regulations if I were to publish them as my own?
Thank you.
I’ll preface this post with … I AM NOT A LAWYER and this is not a legal forum. This is all from the point of a layman understanding of this situation.
Resale of modified content that is not original your own is a legal quagmire. There are two main aspects to content modification. Fair use and personal copyright. Your own work you do to something that you don’t own can be considered copyrighted by you, but only those specific modifications, not the original work. This matters because under fair use some of the factors in determining if you’re reusing someone else’s content is is how transformative your modiications are, and how much of the original content remains.
I’ve heard some less that scrupulous lawyers argue that simple color correction (ie: taking someone else’s photo and making it b&w) means none of the original content remains as the entire image has been changed. But AFAIK this kind of defense has been challenged in court and easily failed. Why? Because for something like running a filter on it in a computer you yourself did almost no “work” to do so. If someone took a color photo and made a hand painted black and white version of it from site, this would likely be considered transformative.
So in your case, if you’re just running a filter or photo-to-normal tool on it, then no, this would likely easily fail in any court room. If the original author wanted to they could probably sue you and win, though more likely it’ll result in a formal complaint and/or DMCA than real legal intervention … it still means bad things for you as an asset store author.
If you used those textures as reference for building normal maps by hand (ie: modelling them out in ZBrush / Blender to render) then that’s probably okay. However even then it’s a grey area that’s up to interpretation. There’s a lot of wiggle room here that can be argued for or against. You are still directly profiting from someone else’s work, so while you may entirely own the normal maps you created, it could still be determined that you owe the original creator some amount of money in return. Ironically, just by posting this question here you’ve actually opened yourself up for further legal damages where it can be argued you willfully and knowingly abused their copyright, which means instead of just having to pay them for some partial % of the profit you made, you end up paying some multiple of the total sale.
Possibly one of the most famous examples of Fair Use would be Weird Al music, most of which is parody. However even he gets legal permissions from the song’s owner before releasing anything! Outside parody of of public figures and explicit commentary and criticism, Fair Use laws in the US aren’t as cut and dry as most people make them out to be.
TLDR: No, it’s probably not okay.
Ok, thank you kindly for the info. I have an email from the author confirming that I can use them,so I hope that this is sufficient.
Yep. If you have permission, you should be okay.