Old School Rally gets hit with a DMCA and taken down from Steam

This is why you don't source models from Sketchfab, especially for something like cars. Sometimes, people will just put stuff up there without any regards to licensing. Though, in this case, it seems that the original uploader changed their mind.

If anything, try opengameart.org, where yyhe content have a licence that clearly states what you can and can't do. At least, that way, you can't get sued or DMCA'd.

Sketchfab is not unique in this, and the same could happen to any site, including opengameart.

Yeah, I am at a loss here. Copyright is incomprehensible to me. You ask for permission, you get it, have a license and then get taken down anyway?

well, at least it was not a car company saying "you cant use our car", while i understand their point, gaming is a different media, its not like someone was making their cars and they use this excuse to kill game preservation so screw then.

Yeah, I am at a loss here. Copyright is incomprehensible to me. You ask for permission, you get it, have a license and then get taken down anyway?

anyone can purchase something, reupload it claiming it was the original author to make a profit on thirdy party content.

If anything, try opengameart.org, where yyhe content have a licence that clearly states what you can and can't do. At least, that way, you can't get sued or DMCA'd.

that wont solve the issue as i said above, the probem is about figuring out who own the copyriht to an piece of media, any site need an contentID technology that, unless its perfect, wont catch all the cases of plagiarism.


i would say, even pirate sites need an contentID if they want to at least give proper credits to the original authors so those who want can support then.


Last edited by elmapul on 18 Jul 2025 at 9:10 am UTC

Anyone wanna bet that both the modellers just happened to make almost exactly the same model because they just kinda ripped off existing cars?

Yeah, I am at a loss here. Copyright is incomprehensible to me. You ask for permission, you get it, have a license and then get taken down anyway?

There are two problems here. First one is the DMCA, which is a stupid US law that puts the burden of proof solely on the user of a certain digital product. This opens it up for anybody to get something offline without having to proof anything themselves and stores like Steam have to do this. So this claim may still be false, but how the hell is a solo dev going to prove that?

The second problem is that unless there is an official registration of something or you actually made it yourself, it is hard to know who actually owns something. It's like that so called NFT "ownership" thing where the only actually prove that you own that number, but not the thing that it "points" to.

Using assets downloaded from the internet in a commercial project is always a bad idea. It's too hard to trace the provenance.

The law is really kinda weird. If I understand the case right, some random person on the internet claiming "It's mine and my proof is because I said so!" is enough to take down a game whose developer can prove that they bought the assets in good faith. It would be really nice if at least the claimant had to produce some actual proof that the assets are actually theirs, and their first addressee of complaint had to be the asset store which allegedly sold the assets without license. Not a person who did absolutely nothing wrong.

The number of cases of games using 3rd party assets ending in legal disaster like that is mind-numbing. I think many developers don't realize what a legal minefield 3rd party assets are. From that perspective, it's kinda easy to understand why some/many small projects switched to using AI rather than 3rd party assets. AI isn't without risk either, but it's nowhere -that- bad.

@Kimyrielle: The law isn't so much weird as bought and paid for. It's the kind of thing that happens when your lawmaking process is dominated by the lobbyists of small elites. The DMCA happened at a time when you were seeing the rise of things like ALEC, the American Legislative Exchange Council, which is a corporate-backed lobbying outfit that literally just writes legislation and gets US governments, typically starting at the state level, to pass their bills as is.

It always feels like the ones targeted by these things are those who don't have the resources to fight back.

Yep the older I get, the more life I experience, the more I read and research the more I realize that America is not the land of the free. It is the land of the most persistent and the those with the most resources. The average American is preyed upon by corporations about 10 times a day.

1.) Century Link signed me up for $65.00 Internet for life. Then they just started charging me more and would not fix the issue. They have actually been fined by the feds for doing this in the past and they are doing it again. Thankfully Google is installing fiber on my street and they have not changed their prices in well over a decade. I will soon be saying goodbye to Centurylink, but I am one of the lucky few who will be able to.

2.) Health services are very costly for the average American family. You either have a great job or a lot of money or it hurts financially. Health insurance providers are for profit companies and they plan for it to cost us more then it does them.

3.) The cost of running a car down the road is astronomical. It isn't just the cost of the original purchase. It is the cost of the maintenance, the fuel, the insurance, the registration and the taxes.

4.) YouTubers are getting copyright strikes for playing/promoting films and music which actually falls under Fair Use, but companies have lawyers and you don't. So when you get a strike you are likely going to fold if you don't have an attorney on retainer. If YouTube is a significant income stream for you or your only income stream this is going to be potentially devastating. Some YouTubers have agreed to permanently give up monetization for certain videos to copyright holders without a fight because they can't afford to fight.

5.) Corporations have managed to twist American law to benefit them, when the law should exist to always protect the people. Corporations should always have to prove something before being able to take action. They have the resources and they are not people so the burden should always fall on them. A guy playing 14 seconds of a song and praising a band does not hurt that company in any possible way.

6.) Workers in the food industry expect customers to supplement their wages with tips. They expect this because employers are not required to properly compensate their staff because compensation with tips has actual codified laws.

Sorry to go off.


Last edited by mi1stormilst on 19 Jul 2025 at 3:43 am UTC

DMCA is such a cancer. There is a reason, why in a state of law, 'innocent until proven guilty' is an absolute cornerstone.
The fact that DMCA takedowns are first enacted and then verified makes them prone to abuse and we've seen time and again that more then enough people use it as a weapon.

Here's an idea--access to the law as a public service. Someone wants to sue, they go to the government and get a lawyer assigned to them--and that includes megacorps. Defender gets a lawyer assigned to them as well, everyone's even. If the government assessor deems that it's a really complicated case, they both get the same size of team assigned to them. If there's a fee, it's proportional to the entity's income. Voila, big companies cannot come after you with teams of lawyers and bankrupt you with fees.

Secondary benefit: The government now has a motivation to make the law simpler, because the more complicated it is, the more lawyers they have to pay.

It is stuff like this that would make me wary of even buying assets for my commercial game, if I was doing one. If even your own employees can put unlicensed assets/code in your game because of laziness, imagine the stuff that is out there for you to buy/license? What warranty you have it is not stolen stuff from others and put for sale to make a quick buck?

And of course, artists who do honest work making their own material end up penalized by cases like this.


Last edited by M@GOid on 19 Jul 2025 at 4:09 pm UTC

@mi1stormilst
I hear ya. It's not much better up here in Canada either.

This reminds me of exactly what happened in music with kujo and ren