First off I want to address Matt. We had a good conversion on the phone, and to his defense, he is 100 percent right. I’ve posted this on my website to address it.
“Something that was just brought to our attention was the use of copyrighted artwork. We must first of all, apologize for this. We were not aware of that situtation and it’s our fault for not doing our research. So for the time being, we will not be offering all of the artwork we did in the past. We have to be very careful about what we can offer. Both of our in-house artists are working on some great new artwork to offer in the next few weeks.
We do apologize for this. We will honor all current orders, but any new orders from this point on will only have a few options of custom artwork and we will provide those options on our website in do time. If you are considering one of our controllers, and want and overlay, we ask that you please wait a few weeks as our overlay catalog will get larger. As always, if you have artwork that was designed by or for you, we would be happy to print it for your stick.”
With that said, I can understand where some of you are coming from attacking Matt. But he correct. In my business I have always tried to stay in the law, even when the big companies couldn’t give a crap. I could be making MAME cabs for a living and doing pretty well at it, but I can’t do it in good conscience. This is the same thing, and Matt is coming from where I come from when battling the “MAME Sellers”. It’s just not right, and I know that. That should be enough for me to work in good faith, within the law, and respect the artwork done by other people.
With that said,
Shin00bi-
Yes, working on a solution over the next few weeks that won’t just be for the 360. But multiple systems. I need to finish up this batch of orders then I will get to work on it ;).
so you registered to this board just right now (Jan 2008) just to call out this vendor? why didn’t you contact the vendor or the SRK admin personally if you are so conscience about it? seriously what a way to ruin a thread, brotato.
totally unprofessional on your part. i dont think i will buy a stick from you
hey ed, any chance you could fit japanese joysticks in your boxes a la top mount? cause japanese layout + jamma = winnar all i need are some carts, a coin dump and an old 25" and i am sold
Matt actually did call me on the phone this morning. I’m not sure when his original post went up, but he did man up and call me. Though the first two conversations didn’t go too smoothly, the third one was much better ;).
Thanks for the confirmation on your future plans for multi-platform sticks.
I thought I might add to the Art-Copyright discussion a bit too.
A couple years ago or so, Capcom sent an official notice to SRK regarding their artwork, created by Capcom-paid artists was being used to sell custom arcade controllers. At first everyone heeded it. Now it seems that people have called their bluff and are using the artwork again.
I am partial to artists, because I’m an artist myself.
It’s good you’re taking this step, it must be hard when you’re competing with several makers that don’t heed this particular law.
Ed, if the customer provides the artwork then will you put it on the stick? You are not using the custom art to actually sell the stick. You are merely providing a service of rendering the customer-provided art onto that customer’s arcade stick. If you did not do it, then the customer would merely do it himself.
This next part of my post is directed at mattin. Here are a few suggestions not enforced by a threat of harm (hence they are not attacks)
-stop bitching
Do you work for Capcom? Did you actually design Ryu and Ken? Did you draw the artwork? If the answer to all 3 is no, then please just go back to your little hole in the ground and kill yourself.
Do you even lose money because Ed put Ryu and Ken on his default template? If you think so, then the reason is not because he has Ryu and Ken. The reason is because he actually had the intelligence to set up an easy to use website and reach out to the community. Also he builds good superguns according to many reviews.
capcom cant afford to piss off the fighting game community as we are the primary consumers of street fighter and buy allowing us to use art on our custom sticks, they increase our joy for sf which increases demand which increases revenue
tons of stickbuilders on srk use capcom artwork/characters without any legal problems whatsoever.
you registered on this forum just to bitch at someone for using copyrighted characters. go get a life and stop trolling.
why the fuck are you going after Ed? Go after the people that actually DO HARM and cause damage to a companies business by violating copyright law. An example is the Hamas kids TV show with a Mickey Mouse knockoff that tells small Palestinian children to go blow themselves up. Another example is the stuffed plush shit given out by amusement parks and carnivals. At least half of that shit is unlicensed.
Have you ever considered the fact that maybe those two people that appear on Ed’s sticks may not be Ryu and Ken? They may be just traditional fighting game archetypes of two palette swapped dudes in karate uniform/suits/whatever.
Ed is in noway affecting Capcom’s bottom line. If capcom actually gave permission for SF characters to appear on another Xbox 360 joystick of similar quality, then Ed would probably stop. They have not and probably will not until SFHD comes out.
Get a life. Stop sitting in your mom’s basement driving up her electricity bill.
Why don’t you just permaban yourself from SRK? That would work out well.
I think Matt just went about this the wrong way, and now is getting attacked for that. Like I said before, he is right to certain extent, which we talked about on the phone. Though I think the issue with me is more the fact that I didn’t realize I was using artwork that artists themselves created. I will be contacting artists of various artwork I have about purchasing licenses to their artwork.
The Ken/Ryu “shoryuken” image was not the issue. That was actually designed by a good friend of mine for his arcade supergun and he gave me permission to keep using it. He is doing other artwork for me now that will hopefully help take some of this burden off.
The thing that sucks now is I have to hunt down these various artists and get permission. This is my fault, but it takes away a lot of the day I would rather use building sticks :).
I think what I will do now is put a disclaimer on my site when you check out stating that the artwork you sending in for printing is original artwork and does not break any copyright laws. I don’t have the manpower to search for every image someone sends in. If you check the disclaimer, then I am no longer responsible for the origination of the artwork unless I know for a fact, who created it. Then I will step in.
From what I understand, after speaking to my lawyer, I can use all the original artwork I want, even if it resembles a street fighter character. This is as far as Capcom is concerned.
What Matt probably should have said is, have I gotten permission from the artists to use their images.
I have wanted to ask you about this but would you be able to build a hybrid Xbox 360 joystick that uses a Korean Fanta joystick and Happ or Sanwa buttons?
Just wanted to give everyone a quick update on the whole artwork thing.
I have started hiring artists on a commission basis from various art websites. These people will be creating original artwork that I will now use on the overlays. All original artwork featuring characters from various games and done in the artists own style. I hope to have a large enough collection that everyone will be happy.
In a few weeks time, I think the collection of art I have will be great and will continue to grow as artwork is submitted.
Your disclaimer sounds like it’d hold up, although if you reasonably should have known or reasonably could have discovered that an image was copyrighted you’d still be liable.
And your lawyer hasn’t given you very good advice. The character of Zangief is copyrighted by itself, not just individual pieces of art showing him, and making your own reproductions of a copyrighted work is against the rules. You can’t draw an image of Zangief and claim that you haven’t violated Capcom’s copyright; you’ve still reproduced their character and repurposed him for your own profit, and you can’t do that. Regardless of whether you’ve drawn your own Zangief or used an image someone else has created, you’d still need to get a license from Capcom itself to avoid liability.
Capcom actually has entered the joystick market, so you can’t make a claim of fair use by saying you’re entering a market Capcom wouldn’t enter. The fact that Capcom has actually entered that market might also mean that they’re monitoring it, so using such artwork might be risky. Capcom reps have said that Capcom is ok with some forms of infringement (like match videos, for example), but they’re probably not cool with this kind.
The chance that they’d actually sue you is pretty slim, but I can understand not wanting to take the risk.
Thanks David,
Though I understand people’s desire to have their favorite characters on the stick, I think I will shy away from it as well. The more I think about it and talk to people about it the more I worry about it.
With that said, I will still have the artists do their thing. If anything seems to even resemble a character I will be careful about what I use.
With that said, one of the members of the UDON Crew has given me a contact at Capcom about controller licensing. That needs to be done first before UDON can license me their art. I doubt Capcom will give me the time of day, but we’ll see I guess. At least UDON responded too me :). Since you mentioned Capcom was in the controller market, I doubt they will license me.
I’ve sent and email and left a voicemail for capcom. The next question is, can I afford it? Well that will depend on what they say :).
If I ordered a stick from you and wanted a Lone Wolf and Cub or Batman image on it, (provided by myself of course) would you let me put it on the stick?
