On Wednesday, news hit the wire that a video game's indistinguishable logo and art style had been lifted without permission, all done to advertise a wholly unrelated product. Sadly, the news brought on a real case of deja vu. As in: wait, didn't this just happen?
As it turns out, it had. Two very similar stories unfolded within 48 hours of each other, and they each speak to a pair of modern copyright issues: the ease with which images can be lifted and reappropriated by a lazy design firm, and how easy it is for such copycats to be busted by the court of public opinion.
The more recent case involved a professional hockey team from Beijing, which was announced last week as the newest team to join an upstart, highly budgeted Eurasian league known as the Kontinental Hockey League (KHL). Once the Kunlun Red Star revealed its logo, eagle-eyed hockey fans noticed that it was very nearly a beat-for-beat copy of the dragon head from MMO sensation Guild Wars 2. Eyes, nose, tongue, and general shape—it's very clearly a match, minus some weak width-stretching efforts by Kunlun's Photoshopper. (Props to Guild Wars 2 fan galveyra2 for the specific image analysis posted above.)
😒 Ahh, remember when Henry and Delilah were excited about the Ford Freedom Sales Event? #ripoffexpress @camposanto pic.twitter.com/kF5wZnH1ZT
— Panic Inc (@panic) June 27, 2016
This news followed a Monday complaint from Panic Inc., the co-producer of a beautiful video game called Firewatch, who noticed that its particular brand of sun-scorched, Utah-inspired visual design had been lifted by a Massachusetts Ford dealership. A modest e-mail ad had been spotted in the wild promoting the "Ford Freedom Sales Event," as if to encourage shoppers to drive out of a gorgeous, virtually rendered national park in a 2016 Ford Focus.
The dealership in question and Ford's national arm issued prompt apologies, but not before Firewatch dev Sean Vanaman made a much bigger point: that the game's lead artist, Olly Moss, faces such infringement issues "100 times a day."
we live in a time of infinite free content so it's really no wonder everyone thinks everything is free on the internet.
— Sean Vanaman (@vanaman) June 27, 2016
Indeed, a small Ford dealership isn't going to face much more than a "my bad" moment on the Internet, while the KHL and Kunlun Red Star have yet to issue any statement about their apparent Guild Wars 2 infringement, let alone announce plans to change or scrap the offending logo. (On top of those stories, the editors at Eurogamer noticed on Wednesday that a Los Angeles hotel had used a Grand Theft Auto V image—specifically, one lifted from a fan-run GTA V wiki site—to promote the hotel’s downtown location. That hotel, the Figueroa, promptly reversed course upon being caught.)
While copyright infringement in China is an admittedly common problem, this isn't the usual case of a Chinese company lifting wholly American content and reselling it in a copycat state. Guild Wars 2 is run and moderated in China by Kongzhong, a wholly Chinese company that received the GW2 license to operate the game locally (a requirement to overstep the regulatory hurdles placed on video games in the communist nation). Therefore, Kongzhong is in a position to take whatever legal action is possible against the KHL. ArenaNet, the game's American development team, has confirmed that it has "flagged" the issue for review—and that neither ArenaNet nor Kongzhong formally permitted this use of its lead logo.
But like Vanaman said, this is but one blip in an Internet where image theft for the sake of lead images on social media, blogs, and news outlet stories runs rampant and generally unchecked, save for the occasional eagle-eyed DMCA request—but that's quite the burden on smaller-fry creators who don't spend time double-checking the entire Internet for image-borrowing. In those cases, the only thing on image creators' sides is a legion of online fans with reverse-image searches at the ready and justice on their minds.
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