Activision files DMCA order against indie dev for copyright infringement – UPDATE
UPDATE — June 30: Trek Industries developer has admitted that they did in fact copy Call of Duty assets in their title and are working hard to remove it from their game.
“Last night I received evidence directly from Activision regarding assets not even mentioned in public yet,” he writes. “Upon receiving this it became immediately apparent that blatant rips were made. While the artist offered to remake any assets at no cost, he has now been fired immediately upon learning this. This will slightly affect production and I will get into that later.”
Their entire new statement is available here.
Original Story:
Activision filed a DMCA takedown notice against Trek Industries’ ORION video game, which has resulted in their title being removed from Steam. Orion is an open world-sci-fi shooter title, but Activision claims that company has used assets that were in Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 in their game without permission.
Activision’s request stated that they filed the notice “on behalf of Activision, who alleges that the game Orion uses weapon art content from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. The weapon art in question includes the M8A7 rifle, the Haymaker rifle, and the Bal-27 rifle.”
Trek Industries developer took to the Steam Community page in anger over this, but looking at comparison images…they assets look very similar…
Furthermore, a user on Reddit posted more comparison images, which appears to show the independent developer’s game featuring weapons with the exact same sights as Advanced Warfare and Black Ops 3.
The developer claims that they did not use any assets from Activision, but the similarities are hard to pass over. The developer has posted an angry comment on the Steam forum, stating that Activision is “taking away” from their revenue opportunities.
We’ve made Steam our primary platform, but this has put a definite scare into us going forward considering our entire livelihood can be pulled without a moments notice, without any warning or proper verification. I cannot even confirm that the representative from Activision is a real person as absolutely no results pop up in any of my searches.
We have worked VERY hard for many years to not only ensure our community and products were great and supported, but we made sure that we were doing a great service to Steam as a platform and programs like Early Access. This is extremely evident in any of our Product reviews.
We need everyones help and support to rectify this immediately as this erroneous claim has already costed what is a very small team a significant amount of money and we need it remedied ASAP so we can get back to work on real content, something that Activision should take note of.
#OrionNeedsYou
Activision has not issued a statement about this yet.
Valve sent the developer this full comment regarding what was happening:
*REDACTED*, on behalf of Activision, alleges that the game Orion uses weapon art content from Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. The weapon art in question includes the M8A7 rifle, the Haymaker rifle, and the Bal-27 rifle. Use of this weapon art content without permission infringes Activision’s copyright in Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare. https://www.activision.com/games/call-of-duty/call-of-duty-black-ops-3,https://www.activision.com/games/call-of-duty/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare.
As a result, we have removed your posting from Steam.
Valve follows the procedure set forth in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The DMCA is a United States copyright law that governs online service provider liability in case of copyright infringement. When we receive a DMCA notice, Valve must take down allegedly infringing copyright materials; otherwise Valve could be subject to a claim of copyright infringement.
SOURCE: Steam
