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Maybe tone it down a bit. You claim to be ex military. Those types usually have more civil manners.
While this advice is not referencing to your question exactly, it is still the advice that counts. If whatever you plan to do will be considered stealing, do not do it. Now you only have to find out, if it is considered such or not. And you will not get any qualified legal advise in community. We are not lawyers here.
I did read the question, in your very post you admitted to taking other people’s work to resell:
If I were to take multiple screenshots of popular AAA 3D games (such as Call of Duty, Doom, Left 4 Dead etc), then manually cut-out the weapons (in GIMP/Photoshop), then manually re-trace them as “pixel-art”…
I don’t see how there is any ambiguity there. You’re looking for a way to take the work of others and change it “just enough” so that you won’t get caught. I think the intent is pretty clear here, and I can tell you now that it is against our terms and you will be suspended. I’m going to close this thread since there doesn’t appear to be any constructive discussion to be had here.
Thanks
Uhm. Now that I think about this, is this allowed? Are there any legal issues with having a known real world item be converted into digital as an asset? Do the makers of CoD and others pay some license fee or whatever?
It might be different for movies, where you would simply take the real thing (maybe not weapons) and have it as a prop. But as it can be seen as advertisement, most movies refrain from that (apart from product placement of course).
If you are tracing them anyways and it is an exact replica, meh. Depends how legal tracing is, if you traced copyrighted material. There is a grey area that is called referencing. But if those weapons are "free", you can bet that there are 3d models of them available.
Activision will have licenced it's use for their COD games from the manufacturer (Heckler and Kock remain the owner)
Is this a known fact? From what I could dig up, in artistic works like this, that is not needed. In general. All this is case by case decisions.
Trademarks do not really apply, since Activision is not trying to sell guns and HK is not selling video games.
And if patents are violated because there is a depiction of the gun, that puts a lot of questions on the merit of patents and the meric of the gun. The patent was not granted for a video game represenation of the gun, but for the real life gun.
There might be copyright issues, if they simply took renders of promotion material from HK and extracted the 3d model.
The point is, this is not a case of a toy gun manufacturer wanting to create a toy version of that weapon. They make a shooter game with the characters using context appropriate equipment.
Maybe they have an agreement, maybe there is even a 3d render model maker that has such agreements to sell assets. I do not know. But since contemporary weapons are popular in contemporary shooter games, I would assume they do not all reinvent the wheel and make their own assets from scratch.
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You using CoD as a base has it's own problems. Mostly copyright, I guess. Screenshotting is not an excuse for anything. They are neither analogue, nor does it matter how your copy process was done. They own the copyright for that game. The whole game. Not excluding parts of it. That's like saying, since they do not own the sky, a screenshot of the sky out of that game would not be protected. It is the rendering that was done on their engine in their game with their textures. Making an imperfect 1:1 copy of those pixels is copyright issue, in my opinion. Do not forget colors and shades.
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The worst would be, if HK offers assets themselves. If I would own that company, I would. To ensure accurate represenstation of my products in fictional media like video games.
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But here is the kicker. Everyone using your asset would face the above issues. If there are any. I do not know. It is an interesting question.
Uhm. I do not really understand what exactly the problem was or is on that site. (And I do not care)
https://sketchfab.com/tags/mp5
Also there is lots of weapons and models of brand items and characters on that site.
Now if only we knew, if that was empty threats or if they had a case. Whoever sent those evil letters. I assume they got evil letters.
I only spent a few minutes on that site, and you can't scroll for a second without seeing something that is from a known ip. Including stuff from Disney. But I looked longer on the H&K things.
And there might be another aspect about all this. Maybe you could have the implement in your game, no problem. But offering the model of the implement might be problematic.
They have their faults and quirks, but this is not the impression I got from Itch. Maybe cool down a bit and read what really happened and what was really said. And consider that Itch is not an advertisement platform. They do only make money from sales, and only when the developer adjusted their revenue share. So they can't pay you for downloads and traffic and site views, as some other sites might be able to. You can switch to direct payments and deal with all those things yourself, if you make sales.