- May 31, 2018
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I mean, it kinda depends on how Illusion licenses HS to its users. Their terms might specifically provide for derivative works.Can someone explain to me the difference between what the person on patreon is doing, compared to any dev that uses Honey Select for example as a base for their game. After all Honey Select is owned by Illusion Company and FAKKU paid for the license to release Unlimited. But devs will release Honey Select based games on patreon and take money for something that is not originally their work.
I'm pretty sure I've seen at least some Japanese games using HS specifically (not my scene; can't be sure--I KNOW that 3D Custom Girl was often used for that), so if Illusion was interested in moving legally they'd have
Now, if the folks using HS in their games are using pirated copies of HS, then they're on much shakier ground. Can't speak to any specific developers, but I'd be amazed if there weren't at least a few out there doing this.
Same basic ideas would apply to DAS's stuff and Source Filmmaker, except that those are more or less designed to be environments for stuff to be created in--I'm pretty certain the terms of use for those are probably pretty explicit about what you can and can't do, or at least how much you have to pay to do what you want to do. HS is probably harder because I don't know if they get a lot of English purchasers, and so who knows if they even have EN-language ToUs.
Of course, none of that has to do with pirating video games, which is redistributing instead of producing some kind of derivative work.
Disclaimer: I'm not a legal scholar.
EDIT: Actually, I know for something close to a fact (fact-like? has the fact nature?) that a bunch of the Japanese doujin software scene runs on the idea of copyright being weaker in Japan. You can get away with stuff like censoring one letter in a character's name and the folks owning the original IP probably won't come down on you with a legal hammer. Part of it's just cultural differences, I guess.
In fact, I remember one recently released doujin game that actually had to patch a character's appearance and the title screen of the game because they were too similar to some other Japanese IP--and that situation, I think, was actually pretty unusual. Didn't hear the Japanese side of things, but since you basically never see that sort of thing done I'm not completely sure why that shook out the way that it did.
(I'm kind of a big deal when it comes to half-told Japanese porn game anecdotes that go nowhere.)