$ Paid Urgent Request Created 11 years ago2013-10-11 13:56:52 UTC by SmashBits

If trolling new members is a crime, then shit, then give twhl 25 to life!

He came here looking for help and to offer paid work, not to be grilled on copyright law ffs..

If you wont provide background info why you want this, who you are people will just look at you like some kid who wants these models badly on any forum you will go to.

Ripping content is generally frowned upon everywhere. But, it's not like you were using the content to make another game, just spoofs on it right? That's pretty cool, but the premise still stands.

Why not make "similar" models without decompiling or anything. Good luck finding someone.

The redistribution\usage of ripped content is not the illegal part (Well, I'm pretty sure it is illegal actually), it is the decompilation\reverse engineering of the software that you get the ripped assets out of that is illegal.
It doesn't matter if you're using ripped content for cancer research, the act of reverse engineering without permission is illegal. It just depends on whether or not the developers care about it.

I don't think you've looked at the examples of 'fair use' correctly or the court cases to date, nor do you seem to understand how a business or how courts works.

First up:

Bungie gave them all the contents of Halo Reach before the game was even out so they could use it in their machinimation.

I still don't understand why you keep saying this since Halo Reach came out three years after the first Red vs Blue episode, and Bungie wished them well after the second episode and supported them with bug fixes and features since Halo 2, which is much earlier than Reach.

I would be interested in how the secretary who knows nothing about what is in production would respond.

This was a dumb comment on your part. If you know anything about business, then you'd know that secretaries filter emails and then forward emails to the relevant persons. The only emails that a secretary would respond to are emails regarding the positions they are fulfilling, for example, a secretary to the CEO would respond to emails about organising meetings for said CEO, ect.

If Riot tried to sue Machinima it’s not as simple as “bam, lawsuit.” That would be passing the entire courtcase...

I have no idea what you were thinking here. To clarify, the definition of a Lawsuit is a case in a court of law involving a claim, complaint, etc., by one party against another; suit at law. How you can say that it's passing an entire courtcase, when it is one.

I am fully aware of the 'four factors' and how the US interprets 'Fair Use', in fact Australia's equivalent of 'Fair Dealing' is even more relaxed than the US. I have more freedom here in regards to 'fair use' than you do in the US. I've learnt a great deal of this myself in the past few years, but even Wikipedia covers this very well.

For example, "[US] Courts have been more willing to grant fair use protections to parodies than to satires" - Wikipedia. Red vs Blue has been considered a parody, but not of the original work which is Halo, but of other topics such as games, military life, and science fiction films. Therefore, had Red vs Blue gone to court, the copyright laws were leaning against them in regards to 'Fair Use'. They may have possibly won the court case, but it never got that far, so we don't know.

Basing your argument on Fair use, while plausible, is also very risky, as a court's interpretation can vary wildly from judge to judge.

In Australia however, fair use also includes satires, so I could easily create a LoL Machinima in the League of Legends game without too much worry.

Now we get into the nitty gritty of the problem. If you were doing all this in the LoL game, then there wouldn't be a problem, nor would we be having this discussion. But you want someone to export models from LoL and transform them into Source models, with payment.

You've admitted that this is Freelance work and therefore this is effectively making money off someone else's work, without alteration. Because the work involved is almost a complete copy, and I am making money off it, Fair Use is not an adequate excuse. This is because I am not using them in any production, rather I am just porting them to another format for money and distributing them. It may not be public distribution, but it's distribution nonetheless. Unless I was an employee of the company that is using the works, then any admittance of me performing the job would highly likely see me end up in court with the real possibility of facing prison time.

As Zeeba said, if you were to hire someone to build models from scratch that were not "substantially similar", then you'd be much better off.

I really don't like arguing this point, and I would like to see you get on with your work, but I also don't want to see someone facing fines or prison time for a job that could be done the right way.

Prison is not a fun place.

Hey everybody. I have definitely found somebody who is taking the job. I want to thank those of you who were actually helpful. Thanks.

definitely ?