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Starsector-Portraits

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(that said, thank you for creating these! I have used the lora for my own mod, as have many others to enrich their mods. My only concern is with making the model so public; Starsector's art has been ripped off for commercial gains before)

Hi, thank you for reporting. Would it be possible to bring the artist into the conversation here? Happy to help mediate the discussion and figure out a solution.

I'll paste the artist's response and a link below, but the tldr that I understood from it is:

• The assets used were commissioned by the game dev, Alex Mosolov, so actually it's his call.
• As long as these lora/checkpoints are used exclusively for Starsector mods, it's ok.
  -And what I'm getting here is that this a request that would need to come from the rights holder, so I'll close this. It'll be up to them to handle any third parties that create commercial game assets using the files hosted here (before the advent of generated content, the game Space RPG ripped sprites from them directly, and then "fixed" the situation by deep frying and kitbashing the sprites when challenged, so this isn't pure conjecture).

(quick edit: the game's official forum (there is one main developer, Alex, and one artist, David; they are Starsector) removed the ban on unethically-trained models since my report here, so that and the discussion around it forms some of the context for David's response)

https://fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.php?topic=27431.msg407809#msg407809

As a baseline: If someone asked me for permission to do this in general, I would answer "no".

If someone did this with the assets I sell via Unity Asset Store, Cubebrush, Itch.io, I would consider the spectrum of polite request to legal means to remove the models, depending on context -- and I do explicitly request in the documentation for those assets (those which I've updated lately, anyway) that they not be used as input for procedural image generation.

For Starsector, the copyrighted material I create is owned by Fractal Softworks so, as a baseline, it is Alex's decision what to do with it.

There is such a thing as moral rights for a visual artist's works, though they are weakly enforced and not often respected. I'll quote a relevant section:

The right of attribution allows an author to enforce the attribution of their work, prevent the misattribution of their work to another author, and permits the author to retain anonymous or pseudo-anonymous ownership of the work. The right of integrity does its best to prevent distortion or modification of their work, easing an artists' worries surrounding negative defamation directly applied to their work affecting their own personal, creative, or professional reputation through misrepresentation.

The models linked above do credit me in the remote sense via crediting Starsector. The right of integrity is... dicey, but I/we've already decided to open that up via the policy of allowing kitbashing. And as for negative defamation through misrepresentation/association... well, that comes down to what people do with the images, which is a matter distinct from the tool used to generate them.

Due to practical considerations already noted, and the non-commercial nature of game modifications, I don't strongly object on ethical grounds to procedural generation of images for Starsector mods created using Starsector assets (see also: kitbashing). This does not speak, of course, to those copyrighted images and works of other artists used to populate the datasets of these procgen tools.