Hi!
Yesterday I found out that my pixel-art card design and elements related to it were stolen and published as pack available to purchase in Unity Store. https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/2d/pixelartcardtcg-215983 <-link to the product that is based on cards I originally created for my personal game project called “Wild Seas”. Here are links to my original works: https://www.instagram.com/340_art/ and x.com
I already contacted the author of this pack with request of deleting this product but he seems not to feel any guilt and responsibility to do so. He also informed me that he already sold copies of it so I would really like to reach somehow to the people who bought this pack not knowing they might be working with stolen/unoriginal assets. Maybe there’s a way for them to get a refund or at least get some explanation?
I already reported this issue to Unity using infringement notice form, but maybe there is something else I can do to take that product down or ban that seller?
First thing you do is you protect yourself. There’ll come a time where someone demands proof from you, especially Unity.
One way to collect proof is to put it on an independent site, a web archive. There are several ones, eg archive.ph. And you collect everything. I noticed Unity taking down proven stolen assets of a publisher while the publisher is still allowed to sell other assets. And those were assets that were stolen from right here on the asset store and re-sold.
This is what I got back from the Asset Store Support:
Yes, that is correct, the asset was removed, thank you for bringing this to our attention. Allow me to explain that this situation is handled by our Asset store team, they are the ones in charge of investigating these reports. As I mentioned before they will take the necessary actions, the most urgent action was removing the asset, the process was completed. They will further investigate to see if other actions are needed based on their guidelines
As you can see nothing happened afterwards. They took the asset from Hypecom Studio down and didn’t do anything else.
But back to your problem. You create web archives like so:
The artstation is especially important since clearly nobody who creates that kind of art has such a lousy artstation page. So the odds are that you speak the truth rather to make a false claim. I mean after all you could as well want to cause the publisher harm. In the end it’s up to Unity to decide.
This can all be done without the publisher knowing anything from you. However if you make a public post like this, be prepared to get email spam like I got recently after my claim that a publisher stole something. Among others:
But then again, I don’t care much about stuff like that, there’s an email spam filter you can set up.
