How to Protect your Work

[Vamediah]

Most of you are probably familiar with copyright. copyright basically makes you in charge of your own creations, and no one can use it without your permission. its very easy to use obviously, just add the (c) sign to things, however, I'm not here to talk about copyright, but instead something more targeted.

there is something called the Creative Commons Licence, created for artists that want control over their intellectual property, but with somewhat more control and easier to understand documentation.
Creative Commons have a few different type of licenses. Some are for those who don't want any distribution of their works without them being credited for it. and some for free distribution and alteration of said artwork. the list is as follows:

Attribution. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your copyrighted work — and derivative works based upon it — but only if they give credit the way you request.

Example: Jane publishes her photograph with an Attribution license, because she wants the world to use her pictures provided they give her credit. Bob finds her photograph online and wants to display it on the front page of his website. Bob puts Jane’s picture on his site, and clearly indicates Jane’s authorship.

Our core licensing suite will also let you mix and match conditions from the list of options below. There are a total of six Creative Commons licenses to choose from our core licensing suite.


Noncommercial. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform your work — and derivative works based upon it — but for noncommercial purposes only

Examples: Gus publishes his photograph on his website with a Noncommercial license. Camille prints Gus’ photograph. Camille is not allowed to sell the print photograph without Gus’s permission.


No Derivative Works. You let others copy, distribute, display, and perform only verbatim copies of your work, not derivative works based upon it.

Example: Sara licenses a recording of her song with a No Derivative Works license. Joe would like to cut Sara’s track and mix it with his own to produce an entirely new song. Joe cannot do this without Sara’s permission (unless his song amounts to fair use).


Share Alike. You allow others to distribute derivative works only under a license identical to the license that governs your work.

Note: A license cannot feature both the Share Alike and No Derivative Works options. The Share Alike requirement applies only to derivative works.

Example: Gus’s online photo is licensed under the Noncommercial and Share Alike terms. Camille is an amateur collage artist, and she takes Gus’s photo and puts it into one of her collages. This Share Alike language requires Camille to make her collage available on a Noncommercial plus Share Alike license. It makes her offer her work back to the world on the same terms Gus gave her.

more can be found here.

i really like this license and its very easy to use once you know what you want to do with it. you can choose your license type here, and get some code to put on your website. It looks pretty good to

[andrei313]

That's pretty interesting I'll look more into it. Thanks for sharing.

[TinchoPF]

Really useful, thank you for the information

[Talon]

Cool info dude, cheers.

Btw, as far as I'm aware, anything that you make automatically becomes copyrighted to you, there's no need to add the copyright symbol. However, it always helps to be able to prove prior ownership (e.g. source files for a 3D scene, dated and sealed documentation of ideas, dated signature on artwork, etc...).

[ae.]

awesome fins i like it i might put it on my site when i get the chance

[st0lve]

Yeah when it comes to art, you automatically get copyright on your things.

But, taken that a lot of people use reference photos\concepts and such for their work, they should credit the place where they got it (or the exact person for that matter). I think that would be kinda "shared" copyright, you might own the model, but you do not own the concept or parts of your texture (since you used a free page to get them, which has a license agreement that nobody will ever read).

[requiem2d]

To add some detail to this, CafePress has a decent page on it with a relevant FAQ at the bottom:

CafePress.com : Help Desk : Copyright, Trademark and Intellectual Property Guidelines

More importantly, how does this apply to this industry? Although it's usually the cinematic / CG / high detail stuff which gets stolen in terms of renders and images, game art is more the victim of people stealing from your wireframes. This doesn't mean wire renders, but the actual topology. Say you've modeled a very efficient low poly human hand. It's something that's very generic but in our industry poly usage / efficiency is key, so someone may just remodel according to where you placed your verts. Whilst it may be hard to tell where the theft occured with something so generic, it could be easier to note on more stylized items, like an original character made by Alchemist101.

Moral of the story, look beyond the images and right into vert placement, may be yours. But do not jump the gun all too quickly as the positioning may just be common sense or random luck

Thanks for starting this thread Vamediah

[SnowFella]

Neckro posting but kinda relevant

Although it's usually the cinematic / CG / high detail stuff which gets stolen in terms of renders and images

Or it could simply be a random company that picks up your render, that since you made it has migrated onto several different imagehosts, and happily displays it on their webpage without you having a clue about it

Dynamic Armament Masada promopage
My original image
(since it started spreading I've corrected one error on the image, changed 7.62x45 to 7.62x39 for one of the rifles)



Had I clearly marked the render with name and contact info both me and said company likely wouldn't have to go through the motions of exchanging emails, found out just hours ago though so I haven't had time to send them an intial email...provided that they would of been honest enough to shoot me an email asking if they could use the image and not just edited the image.
And it's not the first time it's happened either, I've even found a render of mine in a Swedish magazine article. It's years ago now and I didn't have enough energy at the time to chase it down, other than sending the editor an email regarding it that went unanswered, but had I chosen to do so I could of scored a nice little chunk of change in compensation for the copyright breach.

[Masakari]

Some good resources guys. I checked wikipedia and it's pretty much the same, so i've got nothing to add.