Comment by shalmanese
1 day ago
> This is a very risky take though and so nobody should risk it.
People keep on insisting when it comes to these things that various things are risky in a rather handwavey way but they never fully come out and articulate the risks.
I asked this question to ChatGPT a bunch of ways and tried to understand what the specifics are when people say this is risky and I can't really seem to get to anything that is a nuclear level risk, just a garden variety risk that you need to manage amongst all the other garden variety risks involved in running a business (when inputted with a reasonable set of realistic assumptions, it's possible to create assumptions where this is a nuclear level risk but that doesn't seem to apply to the majority of real world cases, including this one).
You're not going to to get a good answer to this, because 1) 99% of people here aren't lawyers and 2) the ones who are lawyers or know the law have better things to do than argue with the nonsense machine, certainly not via proxy.
Willful copyright infringement means liability for statutory damages, compensatory damages, claims on all profits, and legal fees (yours and theirs).
(I am not a lawyer, I am not your lawyer, chatgpt is a very bad lawyer).
The risks are not something we can know. They are not we put you on death row bad. The courts decide what to do. Every country has their own laws and you could be taken to court in more than one. You can get a better answer from a real lawyer not me, but that will costs money.
The worse case is if they have a registered copyright which means they get to charge triple damages. I'm not completely clear on what triple damages mean. I think that means they subtract your costs to publish the game and count only the profits, but I'm not sure. I'm also not sure if they assume your costs, or what they would have charged if they had done this (that is if you sell the game for $50 but they would charge $100) - you can bet their lawyers will argue for whatever gets them the most, and may also ask for lawyer fees.
For a small company the above will bankrupt you.