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[Hound]

So I've decided to start making a game, using SDL and I was going to come up with some reasonably simple animated sprites for it.  But I was thinking about it, and I really have no way to protect them, do you guys think I'm worrying about nothing, or are people gonna jack my hard work and claim it as their own as soon as I finish this game?  I mean I'm not an amazing artist, but animations still take a lot of work, so I could see it being worth it to lazy people

Also, anyone know of a way to protect art in indie games?  I dunno how the big guys do it...  I was thinking I might try to come up with a simple encryption algorithm for my images, though that might make loading times a bit longer.

so, do you guys think sprite theft is an issue and if so, do you know of any solutions?

[Sensei]

You'll probably be fine with boring old sprites.

[Omegastick]

Get a creative commons license on them, that's pretty simple.

[lordnincompoop]

Get a creative commons license on them, that's pretty simple.

Licenses are overrated; just a fancier way of saying "please don't steal our shit".

Evony stole tons of material from the AoE series IIRC, and they had some big nqames backing them. There's some more examples out there, but I can't think of them at the moment.

[Dasleah]

Sprite art theft is pretty widespread I'd say - just look at any of the various game maker communities, or something like DA, and 90% of sprite art is someone else's art recoloured. But honestly, this is just something you're going to have to learn to live with. No matter how you release your work, if someone wants to take it, then they're going to take it. It's paranoid and stupid to not release something because you're afraid of things like this - it'll still happen, no matter how high-tech a solution you attempt to engineer might be. And this is assuming of course that whatever project you're diddling away on will outgrow the 4-person niche it's in and becomes wildly Square-Enix popular (protip: the odds of this happening are not great)

So yeah, just make sure you license a work appropriately (it takes like 5 minutes at most to determine which license).

Licenses are overrated; just a fancier way of saying "please don't steal our shit".

They're a legal way of saying don't steal our shit. Asking politely won't have much stand in court - producing evidence that you licensed the art under a particular version of a legal contract will protect you and make any legal proceedings work much easier in your favour. All law is basically just a fancy way of saying "please don't do x" but the difference is laws have precedence and many years of being argued for and against in a court of law and found to be not completely useless and in some cases quite handy things to have.

[lordnincompoop]

Yes, but will minor projects like these, if sufficiently disturbed, have the necessary resources to sue? Licenses don't scale down well.

[Sensei]

You don't really have much to sue for unless you can prove they're making money they wouldn't have been able to without your sprites, or preventing you from making money.

You can post a disclaimer that says "If you take these sprites you are bad and you should feel bad" or a CC license, but really not much is going to stop people who really want to use your art.

[Hound]

while I realize that any form of protection could be broken, and certainly I don't have the resources/know-how to be able to come up with a good one, I believe that a very simple encryption algorithm would at least discourage people who don't want to do any work.  I mean, IMO, 90% of the people who might steal sprites are doing it just cause it's easy.  Even though the type of algorithm I have in mind is technically not hard to break, it would still take an investment of time, which is exactly what most thieves are trying to avoid.  I think I'm going to go ahead and look into it.  Thanks everyone for the responses

[Retro]

Yes, but will minor projects like these, if sufficiently disturbed, have the necessary resources to sue? Licenses don't scale down well.

That's not really a good reason to not get a license. It's like getting offered free insurance and not taking it on the principle that you don't really think your house is going to burn down. Sure, he'll probably never use it, but if he's worried about art theft it's still a good idea to pick one up.

[Armok]

Umm, why is others using your sprites a bad thing?

[Dasleah]

Umm, why is others using your sprites a bad thing?

Because you're using copyrighted works without the express permission of the copyright holder? It's a little thing we like to call 'illegal', Armok. Now I know they may not have such a concept in your post-transhuman Swedish future paradise, but gawsh dernit, the rest of us down here on planet Earth like it the way it is!

[Armok]

so just give them permission and then there is no problem!

[Retro]

so just give them permission and then there is no problem!

He doesn't want people to use his sprites. He's concerned about art theft, man. Did you even read the thread? Or even the title?

[Virex]

Cue Armok going in anti-copyright-rage mode...


Anyway, 90% of the sprite stealer can be dissuaded by simply saving the sprites in a non-standard format so they can't just open it in another program.

[Sensei]

Good point. Save them as some special variant of jpeg in irfanview to really confuse 'em.