So PoE Zombies are Feral Ghouls?

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

How'd you bother with the effort to quote me and miss the first line about how everyone's making the assumption the artwork was used without permission in the first place.

I feel you're making your own assumption here. I didn't miss your first point, I wasn't responding to it so I left it out. Your opinions on what assumptions people are making and how useful that is are your own, I've nothing to say about those.

See, here's the problem. You selectively chose to ignore the first part because you can't argue against it.

No one has bothered to put in the effort to verify ownership of the various artwork - they just want to assume that because its so similar that it was stolen because GGG/Tencent is the bad guy always.

Maybe they did steal it, maybe they have permission. But people want to be accusatory and "rage against the machine" yet aren't willing to do the homework and find out the actual truth.

But what's really funny is how all these people have such a negative view of a product they still continue to use. I've got a less than stellar perspective of the PoE experience, but I'm not gonna automatically demonize anything and everything they do. If I felt that strongly about the company I wouldn't use the product/service at all.

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

See, here's the problem. You selectively chose to ignore the first part because you can't argue against it.

Please don't deign to tell me what's in my head. It's a waste of everyone's time, and a bizarre look for someone claiming to be concerned about people making assumptions. I've just explained to you why I left that part out of the quote in my response.

My post was specific. It was simply making the point that "zombies are a generic concept" is not relevant here. It was not (as should have been clear from the complete lack of anything saying such) an analysis of GGG's intellectual property rights. I would advise not assuming that just because someone contradicts one thing you write, they are automatically an active opponent of every view you hold.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

My post was specific. It was simply making the point that "zombies are a generic concept" is not relevant here. It was not (as should have been clear from the complete lack of anything saying such) an analysis of GGG's intellectual property rights.

True.
However, in SeCK..'s defense, in the context of this whole thread, it could be misinterpreted as also agreeing with those who say GGG stole the artwork.

I agree. The concept of a Zombie has nothing to do with this issue. You can have all the Zombies you want in your game as long as they don't look exactly like the artwork of anyone else... which is the case here.

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GusTheCrocodile wrote:

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

See, here's the problem. You selectively chose to ignore the first part because you can't argue against it.

Please don't deign to tell me what's in my head. It's a waste of everyone's time, and a bizarre look for someone claiming to be concerned about people making assumptions. I've just explained to you why I left that part out of the quote in my response.

My post was specific. It was simply making the point that "zombies are a generic concept" is not relevant here. It was not (as should have been clear from the complete lack of anything saying such) an analysis of GGG's intellectual property rights. I would advise not assuming that just because someone contradicts one thing you write, they are automatically an active opponent of every view you hold.

Allow me to explain why a generic concept is relevant.

If someone draws a bee, and another artist draws a similar bee, do you automatically ASSUME the artwork is stolen?

Anyone familiar with the fallout universe understands that Ghouls look like decaying corpses and feral ghouls are the world's zombies.

The reason I've even cared to focus on this conversation is how it reminds of of celebrities being sued by photographers for using photos of themselves. The one most recently in mind was a photo of a young Bruno Mars as a child long before he was famous - and a photographer claimed the image was used without permission despite the picture clearly showing a young Bruno Mars. If he's the sole subject of the photo, doesn't he have the right to use his own image?

In comparison, in this thread two similar photos are compared with a glaring number of similarities. But for all the accusatory language, no one bothered to actually check whether or not a copyright was violated and if artwork was actually stolen.

Now let's take it back to Giger's Aliens. They've been drawn by a number of artists, but Giger is still credited with originating the concept but the idea of aliens in general existed long before. Appearing in Dark Horse comics, those aliens were drawn by several artists but no one really questioned that they had permission, it was accepted (and it didn't take a lot of searching to verify they did).

These days with social media especially - everyone is quick to form an opinion but so few are willing to take a few moments to actually check if a possible problem is an actual one.

A real life application, people being mislead on facebook and interpreting fake news as real. People were so quick to condemn or condone it didn't matter if it was real or fake but whether or not it agreed with their perspective.

As far as this thread goes, its clear that a number of folks are heavily biased against the company of the game they play. The running assumption for many is that assets were stolen. When similar artwork appears in other mediums, people generally don't think twice.

What I find surprising is how negative these folks are and yet continue to use the service. If you're so set on believing tencent/ggg is maliciously stealing artwork, why would you even take the time to use a product from a company you viewed so poorly?

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

How'd you bother with the effort to quote me and miss the first line about how everyone's making the assumption the artwork was used without permission in the first place.

There are subtle differences, and not once have I seen anyone even bother to name the artists attributed to the original work. No no, its a ZOMBIE from Fallout 3 that looks highly similar too a ZOMBIE in a Path of Exile Icon so it must be stolen because ggg/tencent is evil and does bad things they can get away with.

If you missed the sarcasm my point was the lack of critical thinking in threads like this - all reactionary no research.

you forget they also took a licensed art from tabletop dungeon and dragon. Even if the F3 zombie was free licence I doubt the Wizard of the coast one was.



this zombie is behind on the left side of the icon, they just painted over it to erase few hairs and details. That s art thief.

That being said it s so little ingame that I think it is not really detrimental to the original owner.

You have to wonder why, though. GGG has a pretty gorramed good art department. Why lift/borrow/emulate someone else's artwork? =0[.]o=

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

Allow me to explain why a generic concept is relevant.

If someone draws a bee, and another artist draws a similar bee, do you automatically ASSUME the artwork is stolen?

...

It would only be useful to point out that zombies are a generic concept if the objection that forms the topic of the thread was that two people have both drawn the same concept. But it isn't. I'm sure we all understand that it's okay for two artists to independently and coincidentally create similar works on the same concept. That's absolutely fine. The point of the thread is that that appears not to be what has happened here. It appears to be someone else's work - that reproduction is the issue, not the fact that they're both zombies.

Now, you're right of course, it's entirely possible to use someone else's work with permission and thus not violate their copyright. I mean personally that seems a weird thing for a studio to do in a case like this, when they've clearly got amazingly talented artists who could create a small picture of a zombie. But hey, I don't run GGG, so sure, they might have. Most of us here are not in a position to know that one way or another; it's not like game companies have a habit of putting out public lists of attribution information for every tiny asset in their games. Hence, raising it as a discussion.

The keyword is "appears" - there are subtle differences between both the ghoul and the zombie. As Head_less pointed out, (and maybe one other) one of the background zombies is undeniably similar to that of one of the images used by DnD.

For those of us who grew up with Napster, for years (and a little less so to this day) companies would aggressively pursue copyright infringement. Places like youtube had to improve their systems because it would be common practice for companies to claim infringement simply over the use of keywords or titles and not actually verify whether the content was in fact their own.

With that said, a lot of folks here are quick to crucify ggg/tencent instead of actually questioning if an actual violation took place. Maybe the assets are licensed and the proper rights were acquired. Maybe it's already in public domain. Or maybe someone in the art department had too much to drink the night before and grabbed images on-line to make a deadline. Maybe an artist simply used some images on-line for references when drawing it up.

Questioning whether or not there was a violation is understandable and expected. The problem is when people draw conclusions based on just a partial picture without verifying whether or not something wrong actually took place.

It's entirely possible that the artwork was used without proper permission - albeit unlikely. The legal fallout would likely be far more time and money spent just for a tiny image most wouldn't even notice. Maybe it wouldn't be worth the effort to pursue if a violation took place given the time and money that would need to be spent.

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SeCKSEgai wrote:

...Allow me to explain why a generic concept is relevant....

But, it isn't relevant.

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If someone draws a bee, and another artist draws a similar bee, do you automatically ASSUME the artwork is stolen?

I don't have any onions. There isn't one onion in the house. This is someone's fault. I don't know who's fault it is, but someone needs to apologize to me for there not being any onions in my pantry.

^--- In other words, nothing you're saying here is relevant to the subject at hand. It may be "relevant" to you, but it has nothing at all to do with the OP's subject.

You can not copyright an "idea." That includes differing pictures of "bees." (You may be held responsible for there being no onions in my pantry, though. Just sayin'... :))

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...look like decaying corpses and feral ghouls are the world's zombies....

"Look like" has nothing to do with it. The contents of the GGG image consist of copy/paste work and what appears to be a filter adjustment to make it "more green." That's it. And, as demonstrated by others, at least some of the added background images were worked the same way.

This does not constitute a far enough deviation from the original source material to qualify even as "significant alterations" that can be used to justify the use of other images in critical or artistic works, for instance. Here, it's a quick copy, paste, adjust the tint/colors, dump in some cropped images in the background, fake some "fog" and done...

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The reason I've even cared to focus on this conversation is how it reminds of of celebrities being sued by photographers for using photos of themselves. The one most recently in mind was a photo of a young Bruno Mars as a child long before he was famous - and a photographer claimed the image was used without permission despite the picture clearly showing a young Bruno Mars. If he's the sole subject of the photo, doesn't he have the right to use his own image?

This is handled different in different countries, but the idea is pretty much the same - This is covered by "In the interest of the public." That's a pretty broad definition, but let's say there was a huge fire and it was "in the interest of the public" to see how their Fire Department responded. A photographer takes some pictures and there's a Ford Pinto in many of them. (Doubtless, the cause...) The pictures are put on the front page of a newspaper and, because they're so inflammatory (lolz) that edition sells like gangbusters. Ford can not sue the "News" paper for using the picture of a Ford Pinto to sell that edition, even though they completely own the Rights to that logo, name, shape of the car, the way the seats smell after a Prom date, etc... (It is a very controversial thing when it comes down to "celebrities" and their likenesses. At the most basic, you can't sell their pictures, alone as a product, to the public without appropriate permissions/etc, but you can sell "stories" involving those pictures that happen to contain them. At least as far as I understand it.)

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In comparison, in this thread two similar photos

The "similarity" is not divergent enough to constitute and original work. And, even if it was, if it used third-party source material and created a work that is then resold as original material, iconography in a game, then they would still have to have permission unless it was clearly and heavily, significantly, altered. Even then, it'd be iffy when dealing with proprietary works.

*Note: The Fallout 3 Wiki includes limited-use licensing agreements for the "text" contained in the Wiki. It does not extend those grants of license to the imagery as far as I know and for what bits of it I read.

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...Appearing in Dark Horse comics, those aliens were drawn by several artists but no one really questioned that they had permission, it was accepted (and it didn't take a lot of searching to verify they did).

Again, you can't copyright an "idea." If they drew something that looked like a telephone, would Alexander Bell (Or any others that have been credited for its invention) be able to sue them? No. It has to be specific and actually include the "work" portion that has value. "Ideas" have no value until they are acted upon.

Note: Artists are generally a very serious bunch when it comes down to protecting the interests of fellow artists. (It's one reason I keep revisiting this thread.) It is difficult, though, to fully protect something that is then represented as something that "looks like" it. "Looks like" does not count for much unless the offending artist is clearly attempting to represent "the work being protected." You can bet, though, that if someone sold a comic that had the name of the Sulaco in it and there were "Geiger Aliens" and "Chest Bursters" in it, someone is going to be making a phone-call to "20'th Century Fox and Ridley Scott et al, Inc." or whoever owns the right to that franchise. (Most likely, immediately greenlighted. But, because it's not their own IP, they have to get some kind of thumbs up from the original creator. The concept of a sort of "creative open-source" artistic movement like that has similarities with the Cthulu mythos and the number of authors that have written stories based on it, wholly approved of (while he lived) by Lovecraft, even though he could have sued for their use of his pantheon/setting/names/all-the-stuff-that-can-be-directly-copyrighted.)

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These days with social media especially - everyone is quick to form an opinion but so few are willing to take a few moments to actually check if a possible problem is an actual one.

It's wrong. It's "A Wrong Thing To Do." You don't condone theft, no matter how small it is.

This is a render of a game asset, by all appearances. Someone "worked" on that. It was originally part of a "free" asset - The Fallout Wiki. OK, I don't know who rendered it or if it came directly from Bethesda. That doesn't matter, yet...

What does matter is whether or not GGG, having then used this to build an in-game icon, which is a commercial asset placed there to induce purchase of in-game items, has any license to use it in a "for profit" product.

I could not find this in a quick open-source search or a search of commercial art websites. (At least, not legitimate ones. There are tons of illegitimate sites that just copy the assets of others and resell them.) That is the limit of my limited "investigation."

Do they have the rights to that art to use in a commercial capacity? That's the question that must be answered.

If they do not have such license, then it's a non-legal use of third-party intellectual property by most country's standards. By "ethical" standards it would be clearly a "wrong thing."

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As far as this thread goes, its clear that a number of folks are heavily biased against the company of the game they play. The running assumption for many is that assets were stolen. When similar artwork appears in other mediums, people generally don't think twice.

I have no bias against GGG. I like their game. I think they've done some amazing stuff that nobody else could have done. They've clearly done an amazing job at creating some extremely complex game mechanics that are in a game that fun and extremely replayable. I playe it "again" four times a year... Of course I like GGG for making it. (And, they seem to be profitable, so I have respect for that business sense as well.)

But, this is "wrong" if they do not have rights/license for that image. Wrong. If they do have some license to use it in a commercial product, then they paid someone or got permission from them and it's no longer "wrong." In that case, it's just lazy... (They have their own assets. They could have rendered those. At this point, given GGG's silense, I want to take a look at those models and compare their topography to Fallout 3 game assets.... Ripping 3D art out of games and repurposing it in unauthorized commercial products is a common injustice and it's why I'm bothering to participate in the first place. :) )

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What I find surprising is how negative these folks are and yet continue to use the service. If you're so set on believing tencent/ggg is maliciously stealing artwork, why would you even take the time to use a product from a company you viewed so poorly?

I want to know what they have to say about this before I can condemn them for the act. It "looks like" they've done what many others are accusing them of doing. I even think that's exactly what they did. But, I don't want to judge them until we know for sure. That's difficult, since any attorney worth their hourly rate would advise GGG reps/community managers to stay very far from this topic and to ignore it as much as possible. Hopefully, to lock it/delete it after it "gets out of hand."

If the artist/somebody in charge of making that icon for in-game use actually did these things and just ripped images from sources they didn't hold a license for... that is wrong. It's bad. In my opinion, their doing so would probably not even be noticed by anyone not at their workstation. So, it's very possible that GGG, in a management capacity, had no knowledge at all of the original source material. If that's the case and they don't hold the license to this imagery, I'd expect them to fix that by removing it and replacing it with original artwork. I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and the opportunity to correct the oversight.