Hey Guys!
As I’m gaining experiencing and improving my modelling skills as well programming skills.
I’m thinking of creating a series of demo tutorials to demonstrate things that have not been done in unity before or shown. One of the ideas that came to my mind is developing a 3D Pokemon demo tutorial or example in Unity. It will include what you would expect a Pokemon game to include (eg// Pokemon , items etc). My concern is that i’m wondering if this will be considered copyright. I plan on doing all the modelling myself and even mention that the brand Pokemon was not created by me and whatever that needs to be included.
Would this still be considered copyright after all that i’ve mentioned and how would it fair or change if i tried to put it on the asset store aswell
Under sandard U.S. copyright law, that is not copyright infringement. Copyrights are given to the creator of a specific work for the creation, and the creation only. The only way you could infringe on their copyrights is if you duplicated something they created and released it, publicly. That is, of course, assuming that there are no complications with the Japanese copyright laws.
However, copyright infringement isn’t the real issue here. The real legal nastiness comes from the trademark infringement. Trademarks are a lot stronger than copyrights, and will get you into a lot more trouble, if you overstep them.
To give you an example, there was a group of people who were making a Lord of the Rings mod for Skyrim, and were forced by Warner Brothers (who own the trademark rights to all renditions of LOTR, in video game form, or at least they did at the time) to stop, with threat of pursuit of legal action.
Whether or not you “win” the case, the fact is that you don’t want to get into a legal battle with a large corporation. Warner Brothers isn’t the only company to make these threats, either. Many may remember the whole legal battle between Mojang (makers of Minecraft) and Bethesda over the use of the word “Scrolls,” or the legal battle between Valve and Blizzard over DOTA 2, since the original DOTA was created using Warcraft 3.
Disney even threatened legal action for 5’ likenesses of some of their characters in several day-care centers in Hallandale Florida, and demanded (and got) the drawings removed.
Corporate-owned intellectual property is not something to be taken lightly. Use those images at your own risk.
I think you should ask that in the forum. Anyway if you use something like PoRkemon, write on the bottom “inspired from pokemon. all of the copyright is from nintendo and gamefreak.inc” and you use names like prodichu / berlusomon (you understand the joke only if you are italian), it should be ok
As soon as you ask for money (asset store) on copyright protected material, you’ll get your fingers burned.
If you made free tutorials, with white-blue “Bokkeballs” and a pink mew remix with 3 tails and no head, you should be on the save side.
Everything inbetween on your own risc!
Edit: ninja’d