ART/RESOURCE/ETC: HEADS-UP ON WHAT NOT TO USE!

Now we all know that rips and edits there-of are not allowed to be used for commercial projects. We know that taking from others' hard-created resources will get you in trouble here on the site, too.

Thankfully, there's a lot of great resource creators out there who make stuff that can be used both commercially and non-commercially.

Unfortunately, though, there are some assbutts who steal others' work and pass it off as their own in the hopes of making money/accolades/etc. This can catch people out who don't know better and trust content creators to provide good content that they can use in their games.

More than once people have been caught out - creating commercial (and non-) projects from resources that they've paid for, only to find out that legally they don't have any rights to those resources because the person they paid for them was not the owner.

So this topic is about keeping people aware of what is not usable for commercial and non-commercial projects. This includes all kinds of resources. It's not meant as a name shame type topic, but being that some people tie their names to their 'product', when it is found out that they 'did the dirty' it comes to reason that anything tied to that name becomes questionable.

Please use this thread to keep each other aware of what resources exist out there that should not be used in your projects.



Hanzo Kimura/Kaus - Started by editing XP resources and trying to sell them. Also made a resource pack called Valkyrie Series but when it was found out they'd used stolen artwork they changed their name to Kaus and started selling resource packs which contained content ripped from various games. Anything distributed and sold by that person is to be considered highly suspect and should not be used in commercial endeavours (or non-commercial if you don't know who to credit properly). More details can be found here.

This is for actual resources that are known to be 'hinky'. The guy wasn't selling or distributing the resources, so no, he wouldn't fit on this list. This is a basic guide for game devs to know what to stay away from name-wise.

So basically stuff that was distributed with the idea of 'you can use this in your games' and then turned out not to be usable or to have been taken from someone else or to have ripped work in them. For example, if someone was giving free resources but there were some rips among them that they didn't credit, then that set would go on this list. Someone who ripped some resources and made sure to point out that they were ripped and where from wouldn't.

Hanzo fits because he was selling actual content for people to commercially use when some of it didn't actually belong to him (some were rips from Ni no Kuni, others were googled sprites and art that he'd edited).

The topic is to help people know:
- what is viable for commercial use
- who/what sets to stay away from
- be aware of what is out there and why it might be a good idea not to use it

I'll add some more examples tomorrow.


I'm not sure that we can post this on the resources page, actually. It shouldn't be an issue, though, since resources do have to go through the queue before being accepted and the moment that someone's work comes into question it would be put on pending until it was proven stolen or not. (For example, if KAUS had shared his stuff here, after this I would have denied the set since his stuff cannot be trusted. We don't allow (most - there are some Mario ones that are for the Mario makers, but they're an exception) rips in our resource section unless they're very heavily edited and even then they have to have credits included so that people know where they're from.)