Can i get sued by using a VFX in game, that are similar to Marvel`s VFX (The Avengers)? I am developing a game and ended up creating an effect which triggers on enemy death. An enemy dissolves and spreads particles around. The end effect reminded me a bit of the movie The Avengers and Thanos disintegration effect. The VFX doesn't really look just like in the movie, has a different color, and is much more simplified. Can I get sued in this case by Marvel (or someone else related) for using this effect in my game? If not, what if I were using the exact same effect or very much similar to that in the movie (to be sure I am 100% safe with my current setup)?
This would be fine for two reasons. First, this is not what copyright is for. It's not that this exists, so nothing like it can- it's that someone worked on this, and that work shouldn't be used by someone else without their consent. Your work is not derivative of the effect from the film. Second, Marvel doesn't have a copyright or trademark or someone turning into particles. I don't think such a thing can be and even if it was, they're certainly not the ones who created it. For example, Undertale used it 3 years before and that was a reference to many classic 8-bit games.
One reason could be because of the scènes à faire doctrine. Many of the things you notice as similarities are not infringement. I don't know the counts of lawsuits for music infringement vs screenwriting infringement. There may just be more songs than screenplays. Screenwriters/producers do get sued, though. See Cinar Corporation v. Robinson 2012 SCC 25.
You may have issues if you take their content wholesale. Even if they freely distribute them, they still retain copyright. As such, they absolutely can claim copyright. Whether they will or not is another question. Your best bet around this is Fair Use doctrine. You can take a part of their work (e.g: a single question) and do your video based on how you work out your answer, with your video mainly focusing on the 'working out' part (thus satisfying the 'educational purposes' part)
Yes The relevant legal concepts are copyright, contract law and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. You are liable to be sued by the people affected for damages and/or be prosecuted by the government for the felony under either or both laws. Let's start here: "I bought a game". No, you didn't; you bought a licence to use the software in accordance with the terms of service (licence) that you freely agreed to. All modern ToS will not allow you to reverse engineer the software. If you breach those terms of service then you have broken a contract - that is what allows them to sue you. They will no doubt argue that the prevalence of cheat routines developed by people like you reduce the number of people willing to play the game - say 100,000 users x $10/month * 12 months = $12,000,000. They will also ask the court to impose punitive damages to discourage this sort of thing. Which brings us to the copyright violation. You are allowed to copy their software provided you comply with the ToS. But you didn't. Therefore you are in breach of the Copyright Act and subject to additional civil and criminal sanctions. Finally, your "cheats" access their servers in a way that the ToS doesn't authorize. This puts you in breach of the CFFA - breaking this carries serious jail time penalties. Not to mention that in the US, a criminal conviction will preclude you from many jobs, including, naturally, any with access to company computer systems. Putting aside the illegalities, cheats are unethical and ruin the game experience for hundreds of thousands of people who don't use cheats. You are a criminal - stop being one!
Can I sell below parody T-Shirts? Sure, you can sell those shirts. But there is no guarantee that your own determination and claim of Fair Use for a parody would prevail in court. The determination that your use of those derivative designs - Fair Use as a Parody - is not yours to make; it is for a court to make, if and when the copyright holders of those two franchises choose to take you to court. Your determination of Fair Use could only be valid in the US; there may be no Fair Use law in your country, and any relevant international laws and agreements will impact what the legal steps the copyright holders can take against you. Read Fair Use again for exceptions to the law and about international laws such as as Berne Convention and World Intellectual Property Organization. Warner Brothers (Superman) and Paramount (Godfather) could decide at any time to confront you with a cease and desist letter or a lawsuit to challenge your claim of Fair Use. They may win; you may win your defense of their lawsuit. That's a risk you will take. The fact that other people currently produce shirts with similar designs doesn't mean anything. They may not have been confronted by the copyright holders; or the copyright holders may not care to confront small producers of possibly infringing designs and products.
You cannot be successfully sued nor charged with a crime in the US merely because a movie, book, or other work is violent. Consider the rape scenes in the movie Deliverance, or John Hersey's The Wall, a 1950 novel which describes in detail the Warsaw Ghetto and the massacre and torture of its inhabitants by the Nazis during WWII. Or Plevier's Stalingrad, a 1940s novel about the aftermath of the Battle of Stalingrad, also during WWII, and the suffering of both Russian and German soldiers and civilians there. (Both novels were later filmed in less violent versions.) Many other examples could easily be mentioned. Triggering anxiety or PTSD in a reader or watcher would not be grounds for a suit either -- attempts to bring such suits have been dismissed. Claims that violent works inspire or encourage crime or anti-social acts have led to attempts to regulate such works, from comic books in the 1950s to video games in the 1990s. None of these works have prevailed. The so-called Comics Code Authority survived for a time because it was a strictly voluntary process -- some publishers never submitted content to the CCA censors. The Motion Picture Production Code was similarly voluntary, as is the current system of movie ratings. Works that defame someone can be the subject of libel suits. But to win such a suit in the US, the plaintiff must show that statements were made that were false, and not matters of opinion. The plaintiff must also show that such statements were &quot;of and concerning&quot; the plaintiff, that is that they were specifically about the plaintiff. The plaintiff must in most cases further show actual harm to the plaintiff's reputation, unless the false statements were of the limited category known as per se libel, which give rise to a presumption of harm. These include false claims of improper business or professional conduct, false claims that the plaintiff committed a serious crime, or false claims of sexual improprieties. Moreover, in many cases in the US the plaintiff must show actual malice, that is that the defamer made the false statements knowing them to be false, or with reckless disregard for whether or not they were true. This applies when the person bringing suit is a public official or public figure. Mere general violence will not be grounds for a libel suit. Incitement Several comments have asked if violent depictions could constitute incitement and therefore be unlawful. The current rule in the US is that speech (or writing) can only be punished as incitement if it is &quot;directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action&quot;. This language comes from Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), and has thus been stable for over 50 years. Prior to that the US Supreme Court used the &quot;clear and present danger&quot; test, first adopted in Schenck v. United States, 249 U.S. 47 (1919) The actual passage from Schenck was: The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent. It is a question of proximity and degree. In Brandenberg the Supreme Court held Ohio's criminal syndicalism statute unconstitutional, because that law generally criminalized simple advocacy of violence. Under neither test would a book or movie that simply depicted violence be subject to legal action simply for that reason. A work would have to specifically advocate violence. Under the current Brandenberg test the work would have to urge people to violent lawbreaking right away, when it is read or watched. and actual lawbreaking would need to occur, or be reasonably likely to occur, for legal action to be constitutional. Actions against incitement under this test have been largely aimed at speeches before crowds or groups, urging them to riot or take other violent and unlawful action right then. While a book, movie, or video could be incitement under this test, it would need to be much more than just violent, it would need to strongly advocate present unlawful violence. That is not what the question asked about.
Alice has been developing her own enhancements, and they're pretty similar to Bob's. Neither Alice nor Bob has copied the other's enhancements, so neither has violated the other's copyright in the enhancements. Whether that could be proved in court is another matter, of course, but since the original work is licensed under creative commons the question unlikely to arise in court. Would Alice be prevented from coming up with enhancements to her own game if other people could prove they thought of and released the idea first? No. Copyright does not protect ideas. It only protects a particular expression of those ideas from being copied. Theoretically, if two authors come up with identical 500-word descriptions of something and can establish that each did so independently, neither has a claim against the other. The practical problem there, of course, is that it would be impossible to prove such a thing. Could Alice outright claim Bob's "Adapted Material" because he developed it on her original work? Assuming that in publishing his adaptations Bob followed the terms of the creative commons license with respect to the original work, Alice's only claim would be that he copied her adaptations without following the terms of the license. If Bob can show that he did not do so, her claim would fail. In a comment, you wrote: Suppose Alice went ahead and intentionally, somehow provably ripped off Bob's "Adapted Material" because she liked the content so much, does Bob reserve any rights on his adaptation, or is Alice able to commercialize the work that Bob did in extending her original work? If we assume that Bob complied with the license of the original material, we know that he licensed his adaptations under "the identical terms," so Alice would be able to use Bob's adaptations under those terms for non-commercial purposes. Since the assumption here is that Alice provably copied something of Bob's, I think it is fairly clear that she would be liable for damages if she exploited that material commercially without paying royalties.
Is the superhero American Crusader in the public domain? I have insufficient knowledge of the actual practice of individual and corporate owners of rights in superhero characters to protect their rights in individual characters to provide a definitive answer the first part of the question about American Crusader without extensive research. Copyright Considerations The character debuted in August 1941 to April 1944, published by Better Publications, and lots of works from that date are still not out of copyright. Better Publications, later renamed Standard Comics, folded in 1959, which leaves open the possibility that it failed to renew its copyrights as it would have been required to do in the time period not long before the expiration in 1967-1970 of the first of two possible rounds of copyright protection under prior law, but it appears that the copyrights may have been sold to a third-party when the company folded, and that third-party may have preserved the copyright in a timely fashion. If the copyrights were renewed, they benefited from an extension of copyright periods for copyrights still in force when the current law (pre-amendment) was in force, and from a later extension of copyrights under that law. It also depends to some extent on who holds the copyright. If the copyright was held by the natural person author, whose identity isn't clear, the date of that author's death matters (even thought the date of death had not been relevant when the copyright was originally issued under prior law. Alan Moore with America's Best Comics revived the character in 1999. There was also an earlier revival by AC Comics, which is also not out of copyright. So, any public domain aspects of the character would at a minimum not include anything derived from either revival. It isn't clear if either revival was done with the permission of the copyright holder, or if either company reviving the character had determined that the copyright had expired. Trademark Considerations Better Publications and its successors may also have had trademarks related to American Crusader, but those probably expired from lack of use prior to two recent revivals of this character. But, even if the copyright on the original version of the comic in 1941 has expired and provides a public domain core upon which you can expand independent of AC Comics or Alan Moore's revival with ABC, either AC Comics or ABC may have a trademark in connection with American Crusader that materially limits what you could do with this character. There is one live American Crusade trademark on file with the U.S. Patent and Trademark office: The summary of the registration is as follows and it does not appear to apply to the comic book character: Mark Image Word Mark AMERICAN CRUSADER Goods and Services IC 008. US 023 028 044. G &amp; S: Filleting knives; Fishing knives; Folding knives; Hunting knives; Pocket knives; Sport knives. FIRST USE: 20160215. FIRST USE IN COMMERCE: 20160215 Standard Characters Claimed Mark Drawing Code (4) STANDARD CHARACTER MARK Serial Number 86896152 Filing Date February 3, 2016 Current Basis 1A Original Filing Basis 1B Published for Opposition December 27, 2016 Registration Number 5159010 Registration Date March 14, 2017 Owner (REGISTRANT) Patriot Outfitters, LLC LIMITED LIABILITY COMPANY KANSAS 206 Maple Hill Road St. Marys KANSAS 66536 Attorney of Record Joseph T. Leone Type of Mark TRADEMARK Register PRINCIPAL Live/Dead Indicator LIVE The dead trademarks which can be reviewed via an easy internet link also do not refer to the comic book character. So, you probably only have to worry about copyright considerations and not trademark considerations, although there could still be a state trademarks (arising from state law filings), or common law trademark rights in it (arising from use in commerce in a particular geographic area), asserted. If so, what aspects of the character can be safely used? If it is in the public domain (not just under copyright, but also under trademark law which does not have a fixed expiration date), then you can use all public domain aspects of the character. For example, it isn't a coincidence that there are lots of Sherlock Holmes and King Arthur and Merlin and Aladdin and Brothers Grim fairy tales, and Jane Austin book based stories in TV and movies, because those characters are in the public domain, so no one other than the staff used to create their versions of those characters needs to be paid a royalty or needs to provide permission to do so. In the case of Sherlock Holmes, part of the Sherlock Holmes works are in the public domain, and other parts of the original Sherlock Holmes works are not, so anything specific to the copyrighted portion of the original works are still protected by copyright.