Daz Assets triggerring (in a good way) gaming and movie nostalgia
vijayasimhabr
Posts: 204
Since the few weeks I have been actively spending time with Daz (and buying up a bunch of assets), I have started noticing a pattern.
For instance, last week, I bought this - https://www.daz3d.com/sci-fi-outpost . I immediatly recognized that, this is the house from the okayish Tom Cruise movie, Oblivion. Thats probably why I bought it. I liked that movie, and I thought, the house looked super cool, in that movie.
This morning, I have added this - https://www.daz3d.com/venice - to my wishlist. The scene looks like an almost exact replica (like that Oblivion home) of the Venice level in Tomb Raider 2, including the exact position of the underground chamber, the boat spot, and even the windows.
I think, I remember, a sci fi house location, which looks like a direct clone of V's home in Cyberpunk 2077.
I am not complaining, but just putting it out here to see if other Daz folks have made this connection. I think every body has already made the connection, and I am only now making it, as I am new :) Ultmately, I like it. Getting to play around in these familiar set pieces is very pleasant when staging a scene.
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https://www.daz3d.com/mountain-valley
I'm going to offer the cynical reverse viewpoint and say I wish vendors didn't do this.
While I'm sure there's good money in the people who go "Wow! It's the thing from the other thing! I want to buy that thing!", Daz sells us licences that are supposed to include full rights to use the content for commercial renders, and this kind of stuff can be a real problem from a copyright point of view. As no-one has watched every film, read every comic and played every game, it's easily possible for a customer to be unaware that a vendor's design is a "homage" (being somewhat generous with the use of that word), which can cause trouble down the line.
It's one thing for a vendor to be inspired by media, but I personally feel that some of the products out there borrow too much from the originals for there to be any doubt about what the source of that inspiration was. (At least if/once you're familiar with the original media).
I tend to avoid products too closely inspired by existing IPs. Unless I need them for fanarts and fanarts only. If the interior vignette is very close to the Star Trek TOS interiors then it's only going to be use for ST fanart unless it can be modified into something more original.
Took me about 3 seconds. Just to confirm, Back to the Future?
Note : I just wishlisted it. I love these nostalgia reminding scenes.
@Matt_Castle and @PixelSploiting
Agree with both of you.
I would avoid these assets for any 'commercial' oriented renders. I also agree that this does create a conflict with the Daz purchase license. I remember reading this article about Lego Photography and take down requests. You own your toys, but you dont own the characters that come on those toys (star wars, again) and sell them in your photos without an endless stream of take down requests.
My interests so far, are purely fan art/non-commercial, so, I continue to be okay/happy with the blatant cloning of these 'inspired' creations. I do wish they made some changes though. I mean, that tomb raider venice thing, the designer could at least change the windows or the location of the underground chamber. Same with the vendor who has cloned V's apartment from Cyberpunk 2077. At least move the location fo the bathroom to the other side, you know, he he :)
The problem is, there's absolutely no indication for buyers. Unless you already know, you don't know.
I have the Sci Fi Outpost (I forget when I acquired it, but I've a feeling it was very cheap as part of some kind of PC+ bundle offer), but until you mentioned it, I had *no* idea that it was anything to do with Oblivion, because I've never seen the film. But now I go and look the film up, it's blindingly obvious. Supported on an angled set of stairs, a landing pad with a narrow walkway - I think the transparent pool has been moved around the other side, but that's not enough to add any doubt as to the inspiration. It would've been extremely easy for me to use it in a serious project without knowing about its inspiration, and that could've theoretically ruined the project when, down the line, someone inevitably points at it and says "Hey, it's the thing from the thing!"
Fortunately, I think Daz have got tougher on vendors proving they've done original design work.
It's the Universal Studios backlot, but yes it was used in Back to the Future.
I am with matt and pixelploiting since I do commercial work as well. I am perfectly fine with free fan art and creating like items for free, but not with people selling items that fringe on copyright and IP violation. Case in point there is a big market on backdoor selling sites using a certain Russian software to create almost exact likenesses of copyrighted figures from movies and games based on the latest genesis figures and unfortunately users are buying them supporting this practice and then creating the fanart which drives other users to these sites. I am fine with the fanart part, just not the selling of the IP part.
@Matt_Castle
Oblivion was a forgettable movie for the most part. I am not surprised many dont remember it. The 'inspiration' in this case is too close for comfort indeed :)
@margrave
Ah, nice. Now I know :)
@FSMCDesigns
I doubt if these things will ever dissapear. In my country (India), only an hour drive away from my modern city life, one can find all kind of knock off products hanging off the shelves and being passed for the real thing. I am talking physical products which can be tracked to a supplier, manufacturer and all that. With software, where deception is easy, geographical limitations creating invisible walls, these things will proliferate constantly.
Hopefully, the folks who are doing commercial stuff are used to all these things and ensure they are not accidentally getting into problems later.
I agree with a lot of what's been said above.
I nearly published a render that would've gotten my entire Fiverr account shut down. I didn't realize Aureska is supposed to be a Togruta from Star Wars, which is owned by Disney--and Disney is known for being extremely aggressive about IP infringement to the point of going after things that are only loosely "inspired" by their IP. If I'd uploaded it to my stock portfolio at Shutterstock or DepositPhotos, I could've lost those, too. These are my main sources of income. Really a bummer because the model is magnificent.
I've also noticed a few models are based entirely off real people, especially celebrities. This is also infringement, as celebrities are able to take you to court if you're selling something with their "likeness." There are a few models in the Daz store that are indiscernible from celebrities and were most likely created from photographs. There's even a thread in The Commons about models that look like celebs.
If Daz is being more cautious about this now, that's good news, but some of these assets are staff picks. They're great for fanart, but it should really come with warnings if it's going to be in the store. Maybe an "Inspired" tag? I don't know.
How, though? It's not possible for anyone to have consumed so much media that they can always tell if something is IP infringement.
As LongRedDog says, it's really not possible to ensure that.
You can do certain things like backlisting vendors you recognise have done it previously, but as the descriptions never openly admit the likeness, you cannot be certain that some outfit doesn't happen to be a near exact copy of some character's iconic look in one of the thousands of anime productions out there that you've never seen, but which someone will probably quickly point out to you after you publish...
No one can possibly know all media ever published. It's a minefield.
There are also flyer models very strongly inspired by the Oblivion movie. The Colo. And I think this movie aicraft was ripped off at least two times in the Poser models on Rendo. It's really popular.
Although I must say the Colo is the highest quality of them all.
I'm soo not going to re-render all the comic pages I used this model for, but this flyer is going to be retconned away and never again used. Good to know I lost money on unusable model because it was purchased long time ago. Too late for a refund.
Except now I have to replace it all with AppleJack Mosquito from that other store. Quite a few scenes to rebuild.
Anyway, I'm using Cybertenko's sci-fi villa for this kind of sf building the Outpost is.
Edit:
Mely3D Speedcraft is a good example how to make things only inspired without going into straight copy territory.
Wow! All I can say is, making money off art is truly a minefield. Especially with digital assets :)
the only safe thing to do is model everything yourself using your own imagination.
This is one of the reasons my Youtube channel is not monetised, the main one being it was too much hastle even using my own created and performed music constantly getting falsely content matched and having to dispute it.
Even stuff that ticked all those boxes was being demonitised for apparently being too adult in spite of no nudity or swearing whatsoever.
I never made more than a pittance anyway and was not worth the stress.
DAZ content constantly got queries about what game footage I was using and they didn't seem to grasp what royalty free assets were at all.
Anecdotally, an artist I know who does commercial 3D renders and is fairly prominent lost his Fiverr account for IP infringement, and he only used Daz assets, which is why I mentioned Fiverr specifically. It's true that a lawsuit is unlikely, but a DMCA notice is not unlikely at all, and many websites have a no tolerance policy for that sort of thing even if it was completely accidental. It's not usually a human taking the time to search, it's AI looking for similar images on websites where people put up listings and there isn't a strict review process (Fiverr, Etsy, etc.) because those are hotbeds for IP infringement. DMCA notices come in waves. Some people don't get caught. Some do. Some are legitimately infringing. Others aren't. The net that's cast is wide.
Etsy cracked down on me last year for having an art print that looked similar to a Disney character. There was nothing I could do about it because the way these things work is, if you counter a takedown notice, you need to be prepared to go to court over it, and I wasn't risking getting taken to court even though I strongly felt I was not infringing on their copyright. Would Disney have won? Probably not. Can they still file all the notices they want and get your account shut down on websites that have a no tolerance policy? Absolutely. There are even people who fraudulently file DMCA notices against their competition and get them shut down because the other artist doesn't want to fight it.
Whether specific assets look too much like the characters they're based on is subjective, so I won't argue about that, but as far as celebrity assets go, there are quite a few that are indistinguishable from the real people they're based on with no attempts to make them different at all. Artists have been shut down for making silhouettes based on a celeb's likeness, let alone a borderline photorealistic render that looks exactly like the person.
I think an "Inspired" tag would be helpful; those of us who are uncomfortable toeing the line could avoid those assets and those of us who don't care could still access them.
LongRedDog has already addressed that it's not necessarily about lawsuits, but there's something else I'd like to add:
I don't think Daz's experience with copyright law is necessarily the be-all-and-end-all here, because their experience (for something of a different meaning of "experience") is inherently different to an end-user's. They're a company - a tiny one compared to Disney, but they're still a company who have access to legal advice and funds. Their response if they get an accusation of copyright infringement doesn't automatically have to be grovelling compliance, which can influence whether an accusation is even made in the first place. That's different to what many end-users experience, where IP holders are fully aware that even the most barely substantiated accusation will usually force the accused to fold, lacking the means to contest the claim.
What's safe for Daz is quite different to what's safe for most end-users.
Very good points. Large companies don't tend to go after each other because it's expensive. Small artists, though, are easy and fair game.
The thing is, if they don't defend their IP, they lose their rights. They don't really make financial gains from filing notices against a small artist who's making Star Wars renders at $5 a pop on Fiverr, but that's the main reason they aggressively pursue easy targets, even if the images they're filing notices over are similar but not identical. They have to pursue someone, so why go after other large companies when it's significantly easier and cheaper to go for artists who have to immediately fold? They don't have much of a choice.
You guys should be aware by now just how much Daz actively avoids any potential liabilities. They even moderate the forums a good bit more strictly than most forums in spite of rules like Section 230 which generally grant them immunity from what nutjobs like me say. Daz is extremely sensitive to anything that can go wrong, do not think for an instant that they would pull a product if they felt it was a threat. No company wants to go to court if it can be avoided. And Daz is indeed a small company. If Disney had a beef with Daz, they would swat them like a fly. And I don't get where this idea that companies don't go after other companies came from. We see these massive multi million doller lawsuits all the time over often very trivial things. Remember Apple suing other companies for just using the word "App Store"? Or over the shape of a smart phone?
Also, IPs are NOT so required to defend every single thing. This gets grossly exaggerated. It is true this can happen, but it requires a lot of neglect by the copyright holder. It is not as if allowing a few instances, or even numerous instances would harm their IP ownership. Basically, the IP holder has to practically abandon their IP before it officially can be declared as such.
You can see examples of this, well, everywhere. You can find extreme IP theft at just about any Con like event. You will find vendors at these very public events selling all kinds of clearly unofficial works, prints, and art. But nobody has lost their IP from these events that have been going on for many years. There are also fan made video games using major IP that have even received the blessing of the IP holders.
And again, copyright is not quite what many of you make it out to be. The best example I can offer is music. You cannot copyright the sound a guitar makes. You cannot copyright the basic beats of a drum. You cannot copyright a couple of notes or words.
What you copyright is the work that combines all of these thing into a singular expression. So yes, you can play a guitar and sing, but you cannot sing the same song that somebody else copyrighted.
This applies to 3D as well. All of the assets in this thread are not violations. The assets in the store are comparible to the notes and words of a song. They need to be used in a manner that replicates the original work to be genuine. Yes, that ship looks kind of like the ship in Oblivion. But it is not identical. The ship in Oblivion is not even that original...what exactly is being claimed here? A bladeless helicoptor? That is not new. Hovercraft are not new. It looks pretty generically scifi in my opinion. I can point out similar craft in various video games that predate Obivion by many years. They might have different colors, but they are bladeless flying machines.
By itself, that product is not infringing anything. You would need to place that prop into a story that replicates Oblivion to actually infringe on it.
A word you will hear a lot in copyright cases is 'transformative'. You ARE allowed to create works that pay homage to others, but you must have a case for this being a transformative work, not just a copy. Parody also has protection. Without this protection, many comedies could not exist. For example, Weird Al does not have to ask permission to create his music parodies.
Leonard French is a copyright lawyer who now runs a youtube channel. His videos are very in depth and cover cases point by point. If you watch a few of his videos, I think you will start to understand. His breakdown of the PUBG versus Fortnite case was very good. I believe this case would be quite relavent to this discussion. PUBG is a battle royal game. Fortnite is also a battle royal game. In both games you sky dive into the field of play, and run around to find weapons and defeat others. The map also gets smaller over time. So they have lots of similarities, but ultimately this case was dropped. He is also open to discussion, he has a Discord chat room. If you have questions about the legality of these items, by all means ask him.
A bladeless helicopter that is composed of spherical shapes put in same way as the move airship, has tripod landing gear in the same place as the movie ship on top of being white as the movie ship and having the same fuselage shape as the movie ship.
There was a DAZ store character very similar to the new Baldurs Gate game character. She's now completely changed to not look like a DnD race. There was a gun model, a very close replica of Star Trek type 2 phaser, that was removed.
Ultimately it doesn't matter if the trademark is always defended. It matters that it might be. Because it won't end in litigaton. More likely in deletion of an account on the social or image hosting site - from a simple Daz user perspective it's enough to avoid certain models.
...good points.
I'm not saying lawsuits are likely, and I think that's where the misunderstanding is coming from.
What I am saying is that websites like Fiverr and Etsy will ban you in a flash if you get DMCA takedown notices filed against you. Companies like Disney and Warner Bros. have AI that trawls websites where artists put up public listings because they're hotbeds for IP infringement. They do not send AI to cons to screen vendors. They're looking for simple, easy, straightforward targets. There are countless posts all over the Fiverr, Etsy, and company forums and subreddits from panicking artists who've been kicked off the platforms because something they were selling was caught up in the IP infringement net and they were banned. There are several every day.
If the general silhouette of a guy in a cloak with a wand that kind of looks like a Harry Potter character can get someone banned from Fiverr or Etsy, you can bet your bottom dollar a photorealistic render of a celebrity or an alien that looks a heck of a lot like a Star Wars character is going to get them banned too. And it does, because they don't have the ability to fight it. They have no choice but to accept the strike/ban or file a counter (which is when a simple notice can become a complicated court case, however unlikely it technically is).
Would it hold up in court if the inspiration is loose? No, you're right, it probably wouldn't. If it's parody, definitely not. They will still be removed from the platform because they don't have the resources to risk a court case, and that's an issue when someone's livelihood depends on their art.
^This.
No one is going to end in court. The worst case scenario someone is banned from the platform they're using. For small time artists it's enough. It's also heavily dependent on the AI algorith. One time it slips, the other day it doesn't.
My feeling is that reform of a lot of this stuff is going to come, sooner or later. One of the things that has been proposed over the years, and would help fix these easy-takedown and frivilous-DMCA-takedown-requests things is a type of tort-reform called "loser pays," which boils down to: If you have a little guy who theoretically doesn't have the money to pay for an expensive court battle... but the law is on his side, then when the big, heavyhanded corporation loses their case, they have to pay ALL OF the legal expenses of the little guy. This would put the little guy on much more of an even footing with the big, litigous corporations, and would also force ALL OF the big, litigous corporations to change their ways across the board, because collectively they'd be losing billions of dollars in lost cases if they continued doing what they were doing against the little guys.
Another reform, which has been proposed again and again in various countries and states, is that if a big outfit like Etsy or for that matter Youtube or Twitter takes down someone's account for something that is not illegal, they'd pay a huge fine (say,$200,000 a pop), and be required to reinstate the account and the material they took down.