Things are not looking good for indie team Spiral Games. Activision has filed a DMCA claim and has taken down ORION from Steam. According to the DMCA claim, ORION used weapon art content from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, which is why Activision.
Going into more details, Activision claimed that ORION used – among other weapons – the following ones: the M8A7 rifle, the Haymaker rifle, and the Bal-27 rifle.
Trek Industries provided a comparison in order to prove that ORION did not use assets from Activision’s titles.
Trek Industries had this to say about Activision’s DMCA claim:
“This is extremely serious that a DCMA request has removed our entire game from sale, during the biggest sale event of the year. Apparently no cross-checking was done by our Partner, who we’ve been with for over 5 years and I have seen better and would expect better from them. At minimum, to contact us regarding our assets/defense before taking any action.”
However, Reddit’s member ‘Some_MelonCat‘ has provided some new comparison screenshots in which we can see the similarities between ORION’s and Call of Duty’s weapons.
It’s worth noting that Activision is willing to remove its DMCA claim once Spiral Studios removes all the infringing weapon assets.
It will be interesting to see what Spiral Games will actually do. If it decides to create some new content in order to avoid this DMCA claim, it will be critizised and this whole thing will have an impact on its image and status. And while some will claim that there are some differences in these weapon designs, and that a company can’t really file such a DMCA claim for weapons (for example, a lot of AK47s are similar in a number of games), it seems – at least for now – unlikely for Spiral Games to win this battle.
John is the founder and Editor in Chief at DSOGaming. He is a PC gaming fan and highly supports the modding and indie communities. Before creating DSOGaming, John worked on numerous gaming websites. While he is a die-hard PC gamer, his gaming roots can be found on consoles. John loved – and still does – the 16-bit consoles, and considers SNES to be one of the best consoles. Still, the PC platform won him over consoles. That was mainly due to 3DFX and its iconic dedicated 3D accelerator graphics card, Voodoo 2. John has also written a higher degree thesis on the “The Evolution of PC graphics cards.”
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just remember this when that star wars battlefront 3 remake called galaxies in turmoil launches.
this is what copyright is people.using the LIKENESS of another game is copyright.
Difference is that game will be completely FREE. Its no different that a fan movie (which are completely legal as far as I aware) and so you can say its a fan game and thus its fine. If they charge money for in the shape of microtransactions then EA and Disney will have every right to shut it down.
Maybe Orion will be free. Seems an easy way to get out of it.
Believe me, this cheaper and free games actually gives these “devs” money. Some of them can get quite a bit actually.
I know. Just saying. If they make it free, it falls under fair use. Or at least should. I just said its an easy way to get out of legal trouble. Then again, I don’t know that much about the legal system.
Fair Use wouldn’t apply to that.
This is a product not a transformative work.
Oh. Alright. Sorry, I’m not very educated on laws and such.
What makes you think I’m not pulling things from o?u?t? ?o?f? ?m?y? ?a?*?s? various internet sources? :))
Yeah look further in this dev history and you will find a lot of assets being ripped off, not to mention the tactics of changing the name of the game multiple times so their steam ratings go under the rug.
Scumbags.
Yeah after user post literally showing that they ripped parts from 3 COD guns and stuck it togather with the addition of a decal, I was pretty sold on content theft. Even the name of Every man’s sky is an obvious play off of No Man’s Sky, not illegal but it does show the dev’s willingness to use others namecreation to build hype for thier game
Even the achievements art is lifted from various sources without autorization.
…
Taking down an entire game over likeness to imaginary guns that don’t even exist in real life.
What happened to being inspired by something. I guess all handgun manufactures in the world should be sued by Colt because they all look similar to the legendary Colt 1911.
Besides the game is still on Steam and purchasable for just $0.49 at the moment so the story is slightly wrong as well.
Well, it really seems that the designer completely overtook Activisions design and then made some slight alterations. That’s just bad business practice and entirely the developers fault. I’m all for supporting the little guys, but this time not.
One thing is being inspired by and another is Bobba Fett with another color in one of the trailers.
The DMCA sure can be scary, but these guys are abusing their luck and Steam lack of curation.
They ripped game models from the game.
I agree, this is a bit reaching, but there is a major difference;
The Colt is a real-life item, this is just something that was originally pulled together out of someone’s imagination. Granted, there is a slight chance that two completely separate people just happened to design something extremely similar, but regardless, US Copyright goes by “first come first serve.”
Besides, copyrighting the colt’s “look” is too vague, copyright claims like that get tossed all the time. It’s like saying Apple can copyright the rectangular shape of the Smartphone because the iPhone did it first. They can copyright certain facets, aesthetic choices, designs, personally designed systems etc, but they can’t say “we designed rectangular phones, pay me money, motherf*ckers.”
Crytek should sue activision for ripping of the nanosuit.
Then Marvel should sue Crytek for ripping off the ironman suit
Well, the colt is based on the FN browing pistol. The russians ripped of the stg 44 to make ak 47 the m60 is a copy of the mg42, hk 416 is based on m4.
What they gonna do next copyright the safety mechanism?
Na, I bet they’ll go straight for the hammer mechanism…….
;D
This is nothing new for them. This is their business model.
They rip off other people’s work, get sh*t reviews, repackage the game with a different name.
For once I can finally say, “Good job Activision.”
I must say that some pictures look quite alike.
Ha! What did Craptivision expect? They make generic shooters and expect them to distinct themselves from the heap of pre-existing generic shooters.
Indie mafia got busted.
Activision is punk like apple
I’d suggest you Google Fair Use, but you like trolling, so I know you won’t anyway.
I’d suggest you Google copyright.
Ditto, kiddo.
Alternatively, just read the comment I just pasted above, & stop trolling, as I literally copy/pasted that from posts which you, personally replied to less than a month ago (24 days & counting), so it’s stuff you should already be familiar with.
I believe you should do more research on Fair Use law before stating such a ridiculous claim.
Criticism, commentary, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, or research may be considered fair. Though it may not be limited to only those, this is what Fair Use can be used for.
Its copyright infringement if the dev simply took the models and claimed them as his own work.
From the Galaxy in Turmoil Developers themselves (Frontwire Studios);
“To those of you concerned about this, I’d like to make a few points.
1) We’re not doing this just for media attention. We started as a group of Star Wars fans that wanted to resurrect the BF3 that we wanted all along.
2) According to our lawyers we are 100% compliant with all US copyright laws. There are 4 fair use defenses that one can use. We fall under 3 of the 4 defenses. We’re also considered a Parody. It’s not any different than how Weird Al and/or Saturday Night Live are able to use the Star Wars IP to make money.
3) We’re 100% free, which helps us in our defense against copyright infringement
4) Since Disney took over LucasArts they have sent out a total of 0 Cease & Desist letters. This includes fan films that have made hundreds of thousands of dollars. Most notably, the Darth Maul film that made a ton of money off of the advertisements on YouTube.
5) Final note. From the mouses mouth: “We do not claim ownership to your User Generated Content; however, you grant us a non-exclusive, sublicensable, irrevocable and royalty-free worldwide license under all copyrights, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, privacy and publicity rights and other intellectual property rights to use, reproduce, transmit, print, publish, publicly display, exhibit, distribute, redistribute, copy, index, comment on, modify, adapt, translate, create derivative works based upon, publicly perform, make available and otherwise exploit such User Generated Content, in whole or in part, in all media formats and channels now known or hereafter devised..”
In theory, we’re free to do as we please as long as we do not claim to own the right to the IP, which we don’t. disneytermsofuse . com/english/”
From the DSOG commenter called “dood”;
“Their game doesn’t use the Star Wars name nor assets from the leaked BF3 build, at least for the final version they have their own assets as stated in the polygon article. They do have a right to use it as it’s under fair use for entertainment and information/parody purposes only that’s why weird al parodying star wars isn’t copyright infringement and it’s also why the fan made Darth Maul film that made millions off ad revenue didn’t get a cease and desist.”
So… you think that this one case is something that proves Fair Use?
A few points:
1). Frontwire Studios never claimed the Star Wars IP as their own, or the User Generated Content. They said it themselves, they do not claim ownership over the User Generated Content and they get permission to use the content in their own game. Also the Galaxy in Turmoil is FREE!!!!! I can’t stress this enough.
“final version they have their own assets as stated in the polygon article” (you posted this yourself)
2). The purpose of this ORION article is to show that some of the COD assets were taken and put in ORION with no permission from Activision or any sort of statement that these particular assets were not their own in the first place. The dev simply took the model, fired it in their software, took some parts of the COD guns and placed them on his ORION gun. This falls under Copyright Infringement, plain and simple. The fact that they also make a profit from ORION makes it worse.
Now… is Activision in the right here? Sure. It’s their content and ORION is using it. Did they have to resort to such harsh actions. Probably not.
Right, something seems to have been lost at some point; if you scroll up a little further than Hvd’s original post to the near-top of the comments here, you’ll note I’m not contesting the Activision-ORION case. I think applying the DMCA to this is a little over-reaching, but if they did indeed ripoff the assets, then they had it coming for a while now.
Granted, their publishing partner doesn’t seem to have handled this situation very well (according to the shady devs), but that’s a separate issue entirely.
This particular comments thread was me replying specifically to Hvd the Troll on Galaxy in Turmoil & Fair Use, not Fair Use in general.
ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? OVER FICTIONAL GUNS? YOU GONNA COPYRIGHT THE HOLOGRAPHIC SIGHT NOW?
I mean seriously if we go by that route Activision should give money to deus ex human revolution and crysis.
Retards.
Too bad.. I really like Orion as a game. I found it fun, despite being a mess.
so assivision owns sci-fi weapon design now? lol. hope no one ever makes a game set in modern ages featuring anykind of warfare. aparently that genre is trademarked as well. guess thats why those swedish sjw cucks at dice are making a “ww1” game. with blacks everywhere for some reason.
This is a bad post and you should feel bad.
oh wow…. your trying to troll me again. plz kys ya nerd. lose weight and grow up.