Legality & liability: IP, AI use, names, store rules

The legal branch of the Project setup gate: you reach this page when you choose to take the optional legal and licensing guidance during project setup.

Not legal advice. This file is an engineering checklist written by an agent from public sources read. It is not a lawyer's opinion, it does not cover every country, and the law here is moving month to month. Anything that ships for money, uses a name you plan to keep, or touches a known franchise goes to a qualified lawyer before launch. When a rule below and a lawyer disagree, the lawyer wins. Re-read every cited page before relying on it; terms and case status change.

What applies to your release

What applies depends on your release type, recorded during setup as legal_guidance.release_type in setup-answers.yaml. Read only your row; everything else on this page can wait.

Pre-ship checklist (run before any asset, name or store page ships)

Answer each with evidence (a file path, a log line, a search result), not "yes".

1. Provenance row exists for every third-party or generated asset: source, license or plan tier, version or date, the file it landed in (PROVENANCE-LOG-IS-THE-DEFENCE).
2. Generated assets came from a VERIFIED paid plan: the provenance row names the tool, the plan name and the generation date, and that plan was active on that date (not just today); Tripo or Meshy free-tier output is regenerated on a paid plan or removed (FREE-TIER-AI-ASSETS-ARE-NOT-SHIPPABLE).
3. Screenshot test passed: no character, creature, logo, UI or level reads as a named franchise (FRANCHISE-SCREENSHOT-TEST).
4. No real brand, logo or real person in the build or store art without a written licence (MARKS-AND-LIKENESSES-ARE-PLACEHOLDERS).
5. Name cleared: title and store name searched in USPTO, TMview/EUIPO and the stores, classes 9, 41 and 28 (NAME-IS-CLEARED-BEFORE-IT-IS-USED).
6. AI disclosure drafted for every store the build ships to (STORE-AI-DISCLOSURE-IS-A-SHIP-GATE), and live-generated content has filters plus an in-app report button.
7. Credits file carries every attribution a licence demands, including CC BY tool credits (LICENCE-TERMS-TRAVEL-WITH-THE-FILE).
8. Paid competition (prize, entry fee): no undisclosed bots, no clone of a patented platform (PRIZE-PLAY-IS-A-LEGAL-POSTURE).
9. Unresolved row = no ship. Report it by name; do not ship around it.

PROVENANCE-LOG-IS-THE-DEFENCE

• Every asset an agent imports or generates gets one row at the moment it lands: source URL or tool, licence or plan tier, version / commit / download date, prompt and input images for generated assets, the output file path, and who accepted it.
• Keep the log in the repo beside the assets (a credits or provenance file per asset family). A row written later from memory is not evidence.
• Why: in every dispute below, the first question is "where did this come from and under what terms". Vendor indemnities also exclude claims you cannot tie to an eligible, unmodified output.
• Check: grep the asset folder for files with no provenance row; any hit blocks the ship.
• See also: THIRD-PARTY-CLIP-HAS-A-CREDIT (the audio page), UI-ICON-SOURCES "Record the source, the license, and the version" (the ui design page), provenance README for copied vendor files (the editor tooling page).

AGENTS-OUTPUT-IS-THE-PUBLISHERS-LIABILITY

• An agent, a model or a generation service is not a legal person you can hand the risk to. The studio or person that ships the game is the one sued for infringing content in it. Store agreements say the same: on Steam you promise Valve the game has no illegal or infringing content.
• Vendor IP indemnities are narrow. Adobe's Firefly indemnity covers eligible outputs only for qualifying business/enterprise plans, and excludes outputs you modified, combined, generated from non-text inputs (e.g. an uploaded image), or used against the terms. Do not assume an indemnity exists for a tool until its current terms say so for your plan.
• Agents must not: paste a franchise name, character name or artist name into a prompt; feed a copyrighted image as an input or style anchor without a licence; or "clean up" a found asset to hide its source.
• Why: liability follows publication, not authorship. The defence is provenance plus distinct design.
• Check: the provenance row names the human who accepted the asset.
• See also: STYLE-ANCHOR-LEAKS-ITS-SILHOUETTE (the ai modelgen page).

FREE-TIER-AI-ASSETS-ARE-NOT-SHIPPABLE

• Project policy: an asset generated on the free tier of Tripo or Meshy is a licensing violation in a shipped commercial game, by default. Regenerate it on a paid plan or remove it.
• Tripo free: Tripo keeps all rights to inputs and outputs; no commercial use at all. Commercial use needs a paid plan (Pro, Max or Team on the pricing page).
• Meshy free: CC BY 4.0 with mandatory attribution. Ownership with no attribution duty needs a paid plan (Pro or higher: Pro, Ultra, Studio, Enterprise on the pricing page).
• Caveat: Meshy's own terms let free CC BY output be used commercially with credit; this project's rule is stricter. On Meshy paid plans, ownership still lapses for a model published to the Meshy community, and no plan covers an infringing input image.
• Verified means: the provenance row records tool, plan name, and generation date, and the plan was active on that date (not now). Ideally attach account or invoice evidence. A row without a plan name is treated as free tier.
• Why: rights follow the plan active at generation; upgrading later does not relicense old output.
• Check: grep the provenance file for generated rows with no plan, a free plan, or a date outside the paid period; each hit is regenerated or removed before ship.
• See also: SKELETON-FIT-LANDMARKS "licensed pack skeleton" (the ai modelgen page). Plans and terms read: Meshy pricing and ownership pages, Tripo pricing and commercial-use pages (Sources).

AI-OUTPUT-MAY-NOT-BE-YOURS-TO-PROTECT

• In the US, material generated by AI without sufficient human control is not copyrightable. The Copyright Office (Part 2, Jan 2025) says prompts alone are not enough; human selection, arrangement, modification, and human-authored inputs visible in the output can be protected. The D.C. Circuit upheld the human-authorship requirement in Thaler v. Perlmutter, and the Supreme Court denied review.
• Consequence: a competitor may be free to copy purely generated art from your game. Put protectable value where humans author it (characters redrawn and edited by hand, level layouts, writing, code), and record that human work in the provenance row.
• When registering copyright in the US, disclose and disclaim AI-generated parts.
• Why: you cannot enforce rights you do not have.
• Check: hero assets (key art, main characters, logo) have a recorded human authoring step.

FRANCHISE-SCREENSHOT-TEST (HARD)

• Keeping franchise terms out of prompts does not stop a generator converging on a famous design. Before a concept is accepted, ask: "would a player screenshot this and name a specific franchise unit, character or game?" If yes, redesign the silhouette or creature, not the palette.
• An image passed as a "style" anchor also donates its shape; gate outline overlap against the anchor and never anchor on a third party's art.
• Mechanics are free; expression is not. Tetris v. Xio (D.N.J. 2012): rules cannot be owned, but a near-copy of the pieces, playfield dimensions, colours and look and feel infringed. Clone the rule set, never the look.
• Why: generated work that resembles a protected character is the fact pattern studios are suing over (Disney/Universal v. Midjourney, pending), and the publisher of the game is the easier target.
• Check: a reviewer who has not seen the prompt names no franchise from a screenshot; record the answer in the provenance row.
• See also: IP-DISTINCTIVENESS and STYLE-ANCHOR-LEAKS-ITS-SILHOUETTE (the ai modelgen page).

MARKS-AND-LIKENESSES-ARE-PLACEHOLDERS

• Logos, brand marks, real products, real people's faces, names or voices in a mock or proposal are placeholders, labelled as such, and never ship without a written licence.
• A free licence on the file is not a licence on the mark: CC0 on a logo SVG set does not waive the trademark (Simple Icons says so). Right of publicity covers a real person's likeness and voice separately from copyright.
• Apple App Review 4.1(c) (Nov 2025): no other developer's icon, brand or product name in your app icon or name without their approval. Google Play and Steam reject impersonation and infringement too.
• Why: trademark and publicity claims do not care how the image was made. Getty v. Stability (UK High Court, Nov 2025) lost almost everything except trademark infringement on generated watermarks.
• Check: grep build and store assets for brand-logo imports and real-person names; each hit has a licence row or is removed.
• See also: logos and likenesses are proposals (the ui design page), Simple Icons row in UI-ICON-SOURCES (the ui design page).

A-PREVIEW-IS-NOT-A-LICENCE

• A free preview, a watermarked or low-resolution file, a trial export, a pack you can see in another project, or a file found online is not a licence. Premium sets need the purchased licence before import.
• Vendor packs stay in the project that holds the seat. Copy only the files the licence covers into project-owned paths, with a provenance README. Re-author materials and shaders from quality packs in the project's own shader rather than shipping the vendor's.
• Unverified: whether a given Asset Store or marketplace licence is per seat, per project or per title differs by store and by pack; read the current EULA for that pack before copying.
• Check: every vendor-derived file has a row naming the licence holder and the licence.
• See also: UI-ICON-SOURCES (the ui design page), quality packs are structure references and VFX-VENDOR-DERIVE (on the VFX with AllIn1 page), vendor mega-packs stay with the seat (the editor tooling page).

LICENCE-TERMS-TRAVEL-WITH-THE-FILE

• Every file the project did not make has a credits line: source, licence, and the file it landed in. CC0 is still named; CC BY needs the attribution text the licence asks for; share-alike and non-commercial licences are flagged before import, not after.
• Why: the licence travels with the file, and a missing credit can turn a free licence into an infringement.
• Check: the credits file has one row per third-party file; a file with no row stays out of the build.
• See also: THIRD-PARTY-CLIP-HAS-A-CREDIT and PHYSICAL-HIT-IS-A-RECORDING (the audio page), License credit block (the ui design page).

NAME-IS-CLEARED-BEFORE-IT-IS-USED

• Before a working title becomes a repo name, store page, domain or logo, run a knock-out search:
• USPTO trademark search: exact name, spellings, sound-alikes, in class 9 (downloadable game software), class 41 (online games and entertainment services) and class 28 (physical games and toys), plus their coordinated classes.
• TMview (covers EUIPO and many national offices) and EUIPO eSearch plus for the same classes.
• Steam, App Store and Google Play search for games with the same or similar names.
• A conflict in a related class or a famous mark in any class is a stop. A clean search is not a clearance opinion; a lawyer does the full search before you spend on marketing.
• Why: a renamed game after launch loses its store history, reviews and marketing.
• Check: the search date, databases, classes and results are saved beside the name decision.

FAIR-USE-IS-NOT-A-PLAN

• Fair use is a US defence decided case by case, after you are sued. Most other countries have narrower exceptions. Do not ship anything whose only justification is "fair use" or "parody".
• The recent AI cases are about training, not about a game shipping a look-alike, and they split: Bartz v. Anthropic found training fair use but not the pirated library, and settled for $1.5B (final approval); Kadrey v. Meta found fair use on that record only; the Third Circuit held in Thomson Reuters v. Ross that copying to train a competing non-generative tool was not fair use. The Copyright Office's Part 3 report (training) is still a pre-publication version.
• A game is commercial entertainment that usually competes in the same market as what it borrows from, which is the weakest fair-use position.
• Check: no provenance row lists "fair use" as its licence.

STORE-AI-DISCLOSURE-IS-A-SHIP-GATE

• Steam (content survey, rewritten Jan 2026): AI tools used for efficiency (e.g. code assistants) are not the focus; content made with AI that ships in the game or appears on the store page or marketing (art, sound, narrative, localisation) must be described, and the description is shown on the store page. Live-generated content also needs a description of the guardrails against illegal output. Valve reviews AI output like any other content.
• Google Play: apps that generate content with AI must prevent restricted content and offer an in-app way to report offensive output without leaving the app.
• Apple 5.1.2(i) (Nov 2025): disclose and get explicit permission before sending personal data to a third-party AI service.
• EU AI Act Article 50 transparency duties apply from: tell people when they interact with an AI system unless obvious, mark synthetic output machine-readably (providers), disclose deepfakes (deployers; lighter for evidently artistic or fictional work). Per the Commission, the Digital Omnibus gave generative systems already on the market until for the marking duty only.
• Check: the disclosure text exists for each store before submission; live-gen builds show the report button and log filter hits.

PRIZE-PLAY-IS-A-LEGAL-POSTURE (HARD)

• Building a game mechanic is free; cloning a patented tournament platform (seeded same-shuffle matching, entry fees, payouts) is not. Ship on a licensed platform.
• A bot in a paid match is disclosed at entry. Undisclosed bots were a false-advertising case under the Lanham Act: a jury awarded $420M (Apr 2026) and the court ordered $719M disgorgement instead (Jul 2026), with appeal and collection still open.
• The patent case: a $42.9M jury verdict for willful infringement (Feb 2024), then an $80M settlement (Apr 2024) covering that case and a separate false-advertising / copyright / unfair competition case.
• Prize play is region- and age-gated by the platform; read the platform's list, never hard-code a copy.

MECHANIC-PATENTS-EXIST

• Game mechanics can be patented even though they cannot be copyrighted. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company sued Pocketpair in Japan (2024) over Palworld on creature-capture and riding patents; Pocketpair changed mechanics in patches. Status comes from secondary reporting only (no court ruling found) - treat it as pending.
• PUBG Corp's 2018 suit against Epic over Fortnite was dropped without a ruling: genre similarity alone did not produce a precedent.
• Check: a core mechanic that copies a specific, distinctive system from a big publisher's recent game gets a patent search (Google Patents, USPTO, JPO) before it is built.

Sources

Read. Status lines are as of that date.

• US Copyright Office, Copyright and AI hub (Part 2 copyrightability, Part 3 training pre-publication): https://www.copyright.gov/ai/
• Part 2 report (Jan 2025): https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf
• Part 3 pre-publication (May 2025): https://copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-3-Generative-AI-Training-Report-Pre-Publication-Version.pdf
• Thaler v. Perlmutter, cert denied: https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/25-449.html
• Bartz v. Anthropic, final approval order: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/california/candce/4:2024cv05417/434709/680/
• Kadrey v. Meta, summary judgment: https://cases.justia.com/federal/district-courts/california/candce/3:2023cv03417/415175/598/0.pdf
• Thomson Reuters v. Ross, 3d Cir.: https://www2.ca3.uscourts.gov/opinarch/252153p.pdf
• Getty Images v. Stability AI [2025] EWHC 2863 (Ch): https://www.judiciary.uk/judgments/getty-images-v-stability-ai/
• Disney/Universal v. Midjourney, C.D. Cal. 2:25-cv-05275 (pending; Oct 2026 hearing order): https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.973999/gov.uscourts.cacd.973999.143.0.pdf
• Tetris Holding v. Xio Interactive, D.N.J. 2012: https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/new-jersey/njdce/3:2009cv06115/235418/61/
• PUBG drops Fortnite suit (2018): https://www.theguardian.com/games/2018/jun/28/pubg-drops-fortnite-lawsuit-epic-games
• Nintendo v. Pocketpair status (secondary): https://courtdocket.org/nintendos-palworld-lawsuit-update-30k-cap-and-patent-rejections/
• Skillz v. Papaya $719M order (company release): https://investors.skillz.com/news/news-details/2026/Federal-Court-Orders-Papaya-Gaming-to-Pay-719-Million-to-Skillz-Platform-Inc--a-FIRY-NYSE-FIRY-Company-Disgorging-Its-Unjust-Profits-From-False-Advertising/default.aspx
• EU AI Act Article 50: https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/article-50
• EU AI Act timeline: https://ai-act-service-desk.ec.europa.eu/en/ai-act/timeline/timeline-implementation-eu-ai-act
• Steam content survey: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/gettingstarted/contentsurvey
• Steam Jan 2026 change: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/valve-tweaks-and-clarifies-ai-disclosure-rules-for-steam
• Apple App Review Guidelines: https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/
• Apple Nov 2025 update: https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=ey6d8onl
• Google Play AI-generated content: https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/answer/13985936
• USPTO federal trademark searching: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search/federal-trademark-searching
• USPTO coordinated classes: https://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/search/using-coordinated-classes-your-federal-trademark-search
• EUIPO availability / TMview: https://www.euipo.europa.eu/en/trade-marks/before-applying/availability
• Adobe Generative AI product terms (indemnity): https://wwwimages2.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/legal/servicetou/Adobe-Generative-AI-Product-Specific-Terms-en_US-20240618.pdf
• Meshy pricing (plan names, free = CC BY 4.0): https://www.meshy.ai/pricing
• Tripo pricing (free = non-commercial; Pro/Max/Team = commercial): https://www.tripo3d.ai/pricing
• Meshy ownership: https://help.meshy.ai/en/articles/10137554-what-is-the-ownership-of-the-generated-models
• Tripo commercial use: https://www.tripo3d.ai/help/privacy-policy/how-to-use-tripo-models-commercially
• Simple Icons disclaimer: https://github.com/simple-icons/simple-icons/blob/develop/DISCLAIMER.md