2d sprite makeover legal or illegal?
oragwar
Member Posts: 20
Can I alter a 2D sprite from another game and use it? This question comes from a hiphop thought process and procedure known as SAMPLING; when you take a small piece of a created work (sampled audio), and turn that small piece into a whole new creative work and it's legal. CAN YOU DO THE SAME WITH SPRITES? For example, lets say I take an egg from a nintendo yoshi game and creatively alter it into a whole new piece of created artwork. Would that be legal? Are game developers allowed to do this?
Comments
And sampling has been around since the early days of recording, Hiphop just abuses it.
"...it must display some originality of its own. It cannot be a rote, uncreative variation on the earlier, underlying work. The latter work must contain sufficient new expression, over and above that embodied in the earlier work for the latter work to satisfy copyright law’s requirement of originality."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work
When I'm making music, I generally like sampling because I feel like I'm reinventing the song and giving it another twist for others to hear.
The real question might be whether anyone can tell that you copied the sprite. If you are remaking an egg from a Mario game, the more you change it the safer you are. If you changed the shell texture and the outline a bit, no one would be able to tell unless you did that with every sprite in your game. People only care about sampling when the sampler has some money to take, after all...
If for some reason you think you have a unique approach to recreating a Yoshi egg, thus calling attention to the importance of the original art and the new art, then by all means, "sample" away.
However, if you're just being lazy because you don't want to draw an egg shape, then you really aren't like any of the hip hop artists, are you?
So, people can make Mario's likeness, but they aren't charging money for it and they aren't taking a market away from Nintendo when they do it. That's a fair use.
If they made a game with Mario in it and sold it, that would be infringement of course.
Basically, to use your egg example... the idea of an egg done as a sprite is not protectable, but their original drawing of an egg is protectable. Your question is actually a lot more complicated than it appears due to a jurisdiction split and other legal issues, for instance if you redraw the sprite using their artwork as a base does that count as incorporating their artwork? Like I said, there hasn't been a case on that concerning digital things to my knowledge, but jurisdictions differ on if tracing over a physical work can result in copyright infringement or not.
So basically, to be safe, just make sure it isn't recognizable as Yoshi's egg and you are probably going to be OK.
P.S. You are not my client or prospective client and this should not be considered professional advice, just something written for educational purposes.
As far as sampling…I've been a professional musician for over 20 years, Ive used sampling before on collaborative jams, and one of the biggest debates on sampling was between Vanilla Ice and David Bowie. Ice simply added a extra note in the bass line and got away with it. Won in court.
I was just being a smart ass and throwing my personal opinion of sampling, which I don't consider people that do sampling exclusively, as musicians. They are D.J.'s.
Like I said, just my opinion.
Just do your own art man, it will save you a ton of time, and will end up better for you anyway.