When you realize you stole someone else’s work

November 3, 2008 • Monetize by Emanuele Feronato • 9 Comments

Interesting thing, the web… at a first glance you can find a lot of free resources, but sometimes when you look more in depth things may differ.

It happened with my last game, Halloween Couples.

When I finished coding the game, initially with coloured circles, I googled for “halloween icons” or something similar.

When I am looking for some images, usually I google for them.

Then I found some cute icons in a freeware site (I wish I can remember the url but it was some time ago before my computer screwed without any license… no license, no text file attached… nothing.

I used the icons for my game, and published it.

Now a reader pointed me to the official page of the author, where you can see the icons are not for use in a commercial project.

What to do now?

I mailed the author this message:

Later, deleket (this is the author’s nickname) left a comment in the game post saying he is waiting for a mail… probably he wrote before checking the email.

Now, I agreed with him to charge me $2/icon and I have the rights to use them everywhere I want (he will send me the Illustrator sources)

Everything worked fine.

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This post has 9 comments

  1. Richard Davey

    on November 3, 2008 at 6:40 pm

    Glad to see you got this resolved – $2 per icon is an absolute bargain given the quality.

    I think there is a serious message here that the rest of the Flash game dev community should take note of – don’t just “google for it”, because 99% of the time you don’t have legal rights to use what you find, and is it really worth the risk?

    You were very lucky this time. Had the artist not been so nice I’d hate to see the legal mess it could potentially have ended up with. Especially if you’d perhaps sold it to a sponsor, then it’s a whole different ballgame.

  2. Matthias

    on November 3, 2008 at 11:28 pm

    Also glad this sorted out so easily! Could’ve ended in a mess. Whew … :)

  3. zeflasher

    on November 4, 2008 at 1:16 am

    Hey,

    Just to let you know that when there is no license attached ( implicit copyright ), you can’t use them for commercial work and you can’t derivate the work.
    See http://www.templetons.com/brad/copymyths.html.

    ++

  4. Lanogame

    on November 4, 2008 at 3:56 am

    Perhaps you can list some useful “free to use” sources of game arts, icons, sound effect and music for flash developers here. This is very useful site for us (as a developer) to use it without to worry much on copyright issues.

  5. GrimDayz

    on November 4, 2008 at 11:05 pm

    I have just done exactly the same thing with the same icons :-/

    I wont post the game link here tho because Im waiting for deleket to get back to me.

    I feel like a complete idiot!!

  6. Emanuele Feronato

    on November 4, 2008 at 11:35 pm

    Never mind, there are at least two more games using the same icons…

  7. Jon W

    on November 6, 2008 at 7:10 pm

    Is this the site:
    http://www.poxline.com/2007/10/11/halloween-avatars-2007/
    It seems like it was stolen and put on there, just thought maybe you should tell the author about it.
    Ty!
    Jon

  8. bgfdtbhs

    on November 9, 2008 at 4:43 am

    I knew I’d seen that before!

  9. Halloween and the tropical storm Ketsana : Emanuele Feronato

    on October 3, 2009 at 1:39 am

    [...] Remember to look at the lincense, icons aren’t free for commercial use, don’t make like me… [...]

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