The Last Of Us Stole This Guy's Art

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What's up with all the "The Last of Us ripped me off" stories? First it was the actress saying they ripped off her likeness, now we have this story.

"Naughty Dog seems to have known that they couldn't use the official map without paying a hefty license fee," alleges Booth, "so it looks like they just went on the Internet and found another one. Cos, you know, images on the Internet are free for anyone to use, right? Not."
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Hmmm...I wonder if the artists knew it was copyrighted/custom made. Maybe it was the best/highest res image they could find. I doubt they stole it and used it intentionally. Doesn't seem like Naughty Dogs forte.
 
if you don't want stuff reused...don't put it on the internet
 
LeninGHOLA said:
Sure, if you want to leave yourself open to lawsuits, that's true.
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Most likely they just thought it was an official map which would be in the public domain since the MBTA is a government run institute.
 
demingo said:
Most likely they just thought it was an official map which would be in the public domain since the MBTA is a government run institute.
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Even then, there would be a licensing fee. MBTA would have contracted the artwork, most likely. Not everything is public domain.
 
Chunder said:
There's a thing called copyright and imaginary property. :p
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fixie

Isn't this just Unfarted with zombies, though? Even my wife doesn't watch movies as wacky as what this studio produces.
 
dgz said:
fixie

Isn't this just Unfarted with zombies, though? Even my wife doesn't watch movies as wacky as what this studio produces.
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Whats with the un-warranted Uncharted name calling? :S

Also... not even close.
 
Yarly.jpg


bonus
 
The guy is stuck in the early 90's.... NOT!

Who still says that?
 
"I'd really prefer to come to an amicable agreement without resorting to legal measures," he said via Twitter about an hour ago. "To clarify, I'm not after a 'payday,'" he said an hour before that. "An acknowledgement of error from [Naughty Dog] and a token licensing fee would be fine."
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Basically, "I'm not looking for a payday, but I want a payday."
 
Honestly though, with the rampant hotlinking and such, with a random given image you find, how are you even supposed to know who the original author is? If it's on the internet, it's essentially public domain unless you go out of your way to watermark it and brand it as yours and copyrighted.
 
tazeat said:
essentially public domain unless you go out of your way to watermark it and brand it as yours and copyrighted.
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Unless you put the watermark in the important area, distracting from the original art, someone will just crop out the watermark and put it right back up.
 
Lol

I copyrighted 01100010011011000110111101110111001000000110110101100101

nobody else can use it
 
01100010011011000110111101110111001000000110110101100101+1©

My copyright beats your copyright!
 
Maximus825 said:
Basically, "I'm not looking for a payday, but I want a payday."
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A token licensing fee is required to protect the work. If you don't defend your copyrights universally, you can lose the right to defend it/them later.
That said, I wonder what his idea of "token" is? Anything more than a few thousand would not be considered a token imho.
 
That and it's a super successful and popular game. People put in the extra effort to "get theirs."
 
tazeat said:
Honestly though, with the rampant hotlinking and such, with a random given image you find, how are you even supposed to know who the original author is? If it's on the internet, it's essentially public domain unless you go out of your way to watermark it and brand it as yours and copyrighted.
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No it's not. Finding an example is pretty easy
1372169003000-zimmerman001-1306251004_4_3_rx404_c534x401.jpg


Copy that image and put it on your website and the copyright holder can sue you (regardless of whether the Photographer or Gannet owns it) and you'll lose. It's also not terribly hard to find out who took an image. There's a firefox addon to find infringements. It's as easy as a right click on the image + left click. The laws on this are well established.
 
85113.jpg


Stuff like this happens all the time. ( I don't know if the ME team licensed this one or not)
 
JoeUser said:
Hmmm...I wonder if the artists knew it was copyrighted/custom made. Maybe it was the best/highest res image they could find. I doubt they stole it and used it intentionally. Doesn't seem like Naughty Dogs forte.
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For a professional studio there are really only 2 ways to go here:

The artist was paid and told to create an asset, but he just took something off Google Image results and passed it off as his work after saving it in the correct texture format. This is pretty straight forward and you'd think artists would be smarter, but that doesn't seem to hold these days. A little after Civilization V came out the civ community caught onto the fact that a lot of the technology/unit/building icons where basically just vector traces of the 1st or 2nd Google Image result for that term.

Someone was told to acquire an existing work, in which case the specifics of who owned the work and what licencing fee(s) would need to be paid to use it without direct credit in a commercial project would have been a requirement before it could be used. This is bigger then it sounds because professional companies know that the person who you owe money may not be the same as the name you see above it, there may even be more then. In BattleTech for example the 'unseen' mech designs where a result of a complex legal tangle between the makers of BattleTech, the Japanese makers of the anime the art designs came from, and a US distributor called Harmony Gold who licenced them to make Robotech and thus claimed ownership of those designs when used in the US and other markets.

This is not quite Limbo of the Last of Us yet, but it is part of an overall trend among industry artists (a lot of whom are hired on contract) to simply touch up existing images from the internet, with or without the required copyright. An example where copyright was technically followed would be the unmasked picture of Tali'Zorah from Mass Effect 3, which was just a quickly photoshopped copy of a free stock art image downloaded from Getty Images. It was entirely legal, but also entirely lazy (for example her species has only 3 fingers, which was taken care of in the stock image by just brushing off 2 fingers from the model, creating a misshapen mutant who looked nothing like the in game character).
 
Oh wow, and the Tali image is already here too, didn't read that far into the replies.
 
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