Community Announcement

Hey friends,

Some of you might remember how we put a very controversial ban on any Riot titles back in January, which was ill-received by our community in the middle of the Arcane hypetrain, but we didn't want to overstay our welcome with the IP owners. We recently lifted the ban just because many people kept begging us for that one more model. Turns out, we had the right idea the first time.

This week we've been contacted by a company that claims to represent the interests of Riot games. The initial validation checks out and it doesn't look like a scam (unless it's a very elaborate one, but if someone seriously went to such lengths on our behalf, I'd be honored).

First, they accuse us of "use of Riot’s in-game content", "use of Riot’s proprietary content and images" and "the unauthorized display of original content, including character artwork."

Second, they accuse us of "fostering confusion about whether Riot has authorized or endorsed your products or conduct" and "false advertising, and other forms of unfair competition, as well as the import, distribution, offer, and sale of counterfeit goods."

Third, they claim the existense of our Merchant Tier "improperly purports to grant rights in Riot’s IP to third-parties" and "shows a clear effort to induce, encourage and support infringement by others".

As a way of "amicably" resolving the matter, they demand a complete and permanent shutdown of all our platforms, social network pages, and the Discord server. Additionally, they demand to "provide the identities, locations, and complete contact details of all" our Merchant Tier subscribers so that they could pursue them as well.

In light of all the above, I'd like to make a few things perfectly clear on the off chance anyone was confused before.

First of all, we never display any official content for commercial purposes and we do not use any in-game assets or other proprietary materials in production of our work for anything other than inspiration. Each and every one of our models is sculpted from scratch by our artists, which can be proven by WIPs we post regularly.

Secondly, we have always gone through every effort to make it perfectly clear: we make fanart. Not official merchandise, not knock-offs of official products, but fanart, i.e. art made by fans and for fans. If anyone ever confused our work for anything official, that was done by mistake and utterly without our intention or knowledge. And over the entire history of the studio we have never sold a single physical product to anyone, or received any % commission from sales made by someone else. Some people offered this to us multiple times, but we always firmly declined, because we are not in the business of physical products and want nothing to do with it.

Furthermore, our Merchant Tier subscription does not grant anyone access to the IPs we do not own, and we never claimed otherwise. Anyone who ever contacted us and asked to give them an official licence to sell merchandise got the same answer: we cannot grant it because we do not own the IP rights. What we can give to the Merchant Tier subscribers is our promise we won't be chasing them if they try to sell their prints, and that's it. To put it in other words, if you plan to sell work created by one person based on the intellectual properly of another person, you need to obtain permission from both of them to make sure they won't pursue you for it. In that sense, we are only liable to give permission from our side, but we never imply you don't need permissions from the other parties. As to whether you received such permission from them before putting any items on sale, that's beyond our area of concern. And it works the exact same way for any fanart studio, regardless of what you may hear. In other words, every merchant assumes their own risks and responsibilities when deciding whether to sell any prints.

That said, we do not intend to lay down and give into all the demands we received, especially considering how some of them sound less than legal from where we stand. Not to mention even if we wanted to doxx all our merchant subscribers, which we don't, we lack the information they request anyway. So if you are a merchant tier subscriber, don't start sweating profusely just yet.

Anyone who ever printed our models can agree that the amount of effort and love we put into our projects goes way beyond mercantile interests and shows how much we actually care about characters we sculpt. We are not in it for money and we certainly don't have dozens of thousands of dollars (let alone millions) stashed on our bank account. Moreover, as I pointed out many times in the past, nobody in the 3D printing fanart field makes nowhere near so much that they could retire at any point and live out their days in luxury. Personally, I don't even have a car or my own apartment. Our studio continues to exist and grind through each month solely thanks to the people who keep supporting our work and we struggle with keeping the balance out of red every month just like your average Joe. So if any large company decided to seriously come after us, we can't exactly stop them, but they'd quickly find out they'd spent much more money chasing us out of business than they could ever return from ruining our humble livelihood. Fun fact: Patreon aside, when it comes to direct sales of any affected models, I did some calculations yesterday and was surprised to conclude that all the earnings we had ever received did not even amount to how much we'd spent to sculpt those models. And while I'm not willing to throw around the exact numbers, I kid you not; it's the sad truth of the current STL industry with all its piracy and scalping - we made less from selling those models than we spent creating them.

We've always believed our work helps to foster healthy fandoms and bring more people into our beloved franchises. At the same time, we've always taken special care not to lean so much into any particular fandom to make it seem like we are leeching from them. We do our best to maintain good relationships with developers of the titles we work on. I don't normally brag about it, but over the last few years our models were gifted to or obtained by a good number of people with direct ties to these companies. At the same time, we know when we are not welcome and prefer not to tilt at windmills. As such, effective immediately, we are re-establishing the permanent ban on any characters and titles that belong to Riot Games. I'm sorry to anyone disappointed by that news, but there is nothing we can do about it.

Sincerely,
Des