Hello, I’ve finally got to the point where I have some things I want to submit to the asset store however I’m just wondering something.
I’ve used some textures from elsewhere and I’ve been reading through page after page of terms and conditions, so far everything looks good but I’m worried I might get sued or something if I’ve misunderstood something so is this something I should be worried about?
I appreciate this might just be me being stupid but I thought it was wiser to ask.
When you say you’ve used textures from elsewhere, it basically sounds like a bit of a red flag. However, it really depends where you got them and what kind of images they are. If some website has a license agreement or terms of use that prohibits certain things etc then probably best to avoid it. If it’s an image you found on like images.google.com or some search and you thought you liked it and want to use it, be careful about it… gotta do a bit of investigating first to see if it seems like it’d be risky or if someone is claiming ownership over it. Some sites also host images like wallpaper sites but then say they scraped the image from the internet and that if the original owners want it taken down they should say so… but then you have no idea if the image has legalities attached. Ideally it’s best to buy the image from a stock image site or find something that, as far as you can tell, seems to be truly public domain. I’d also avoid images that it looks like some person created, like artistic images and designs and modified photos and generated images etc because most likely someone somewhere has a claim of ownership on it. Sometimes I think it may be okay to use an image that you see plastered all over the internet, but only in the sense of safety in numbers and that if a lot of people have used it then it’s probably likely that the original author isn’t pursuing ownership issues. And if all else fails, get your camera out
Thank you for the quick response, the images are from sites which have images which are for commercial use, I was just worried that I may misunderstand their terms/license due to me having little knowledge of such things and whether I should pay for someone to read over the terms/license for me.
The problem with a license like that is that it may give you rights to distribute the images, but it may not give the people who use your asset the rights to do so. This is true of almost every stock photo site.
Yeah I ran into that too. Some sites, even most of those clipart cd's that you can buy, have the kind of license where you can use the image for publishing or a website or whatever but you can’t use them in a product in such a way as someone else could then take the image and use it for what they want.
If you paid for it, you do not have permission to resell it (unless you are paying royalty free/re-distribution prices - which is usually exponentially higher)
What I dont know, is if you can contract out of responsibility… again, usually this is a no-go
The music is from NewGrounds and free to use for personal use. In the web-demo you have the demo with with music but its not in the package on the assetstore.
What I did was that I provided the link to the music below the player so users can still download and use it if they want.
Hello again, so I sent one of them an email and they responded with this,
“Thanks for asking. We are simply concerned about people using our textures on their own projects without purchasing them. If you purchase our textures and use them on a 3d model that you sell for others to use commercially that is fine. You are not supplying the textures as we originally supplied them to you and that is the thing that matters to us. Whatever you do with your creations in selling them to others for personal or profession use is fine, as long as you aren’t distributing our textures in their original form.”
(I had previously mentioned that I baked the textures into a texture map.)
So it looks like using their textures is fine? I’ll have to contact the other site though and see what they say.
