Last year, so December 2021... a really annoying incident occurred.
I heard the news that there is an NFT game utilizing SPUM (Soonsoon Pixel Unit Maker) which is being serviced through the Unity Asset Store.. Upon looking into this, it turns out to be a license violation issue..
SPUM Asset Store link
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/188715
Since last year's second half, SPUM has been selected as a popular asset multiple times, becoming a regular customer for Unity Asset Store's various discount events, causing a rapid increase in users. As overseas users also began to emerge... I thought some CS issues would occur, but... an NFT game? An unimaginable problem occurred.
The problematic NFT game project
I found out about this when a user in the SPUM community reported it to me. At first, I thought... it was just a common Unity game project.
By default, since SPUM is an asset sold for a fee on the Unity Asset Store, anyone who purchased the asset is entitled to obtain the right to utilize the SPUM asset to sell game units as in-game items or implement features such as gacha within a Unity project, thereby utilizing most of its functions.
However... but you see. An NFT game, you say.. It felt a bit suspicious.
So I went to that page and looked around, and I was like.. Huh?? If someone doesn't know about the concept of the Unity Asset Store, it looked like the game project creator had created the design assets and was selling them in a sales where you can obtain and trade characters combined with those assets in the game, calling it NFT? which is a commonly known right.
"Captured image from the website.."
Actually, I didn't really understand the concept of NFTs, and I wondered if it was okay to trade the identities of the characters I made with my assets in this project. However, upon thinking about it carefully, it seemed that if the game developer revealed or exposed on their website or other channels that the game was made with the Unity asset SPUM and that the design rights belong to SOONSOON, there would be no problem at all... but I couldn't find any such mention.
And when I went to the Discord and Twitter channels publicly available on the website, I saw that they kept creating characters that can be composed of SPUM and Euro Add-on assets, bragging and selling them as if they were their own designs.
While looking at the YouTube video for that project, I discovered a video that made me question my own eyes.
Dead Knight YouTube (currently removed due to copyright report)
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTzFwKLZ6uD8cWoJIMV9v7A
Right now, I have filed a copyright report and YouTube has accepted it, so the video is down. Of the two videos, one uploaded a single prefab image from the SPUM Undead Add-on under the title "How Dead Knight NFT’s Were Made" as if the creator had designed it themselves.
” This is a capture of the video cut due to copyright issues “
Screenshot of the SPUM Undead Add-on for sale
Wow, my head was totally blank here.
By the way, the SPUM premium add-on asset is the result of Mr. Hoho's design work, who has been designing the dot art for my game projects since Dot Rangers. Naturally, the copyright belongs to me, SOONSOON.
However, the creator of that unidentified NFT game project was uploading videos as if they had designed the characters themselves.. Although the video has been taken down and cannot be verified now, they created and uploaded a video making pixel art as if they had designed it from scratch.
Perhaps, in order to sell NFT games, they created the designs for exposure to their customers, making the design copyright issue appear to be non-existent.. That was my thought.
So I left a comment on YouTube asking the creator to reveal the design source and asking them not to upload videos spreading incorrect information like this (as if the design rights belonged to the developer of this project)...
It was deleted in just 1 second... The post was deleted in real-time..
When I went to Facebook, it seemed to be a Vietnamese game developer.. They don't seem to have any concept of copyright at all.
First, I checked the Unity license again and interpreted it as a copyright infringement by the user, and I have already contacted the Unity Asset Store about this.
I will share the future response methods or progress once I receive a reply from the Unity Asset Store.
Thinking that my asset's design could be traded like this due to an unimaginable NFT game project... it gives me goosebumps.. I hope this issue is resolved well so it can become an example that helps others.