Found this pic on a blog called 365 Concepts by Rupinder Singh.

Seems like a rip of this design by Glenn Jones from Glennz Tees

A quick google image search of “snake charmer” also turned up this picture by Major Drapkin & Co which Rupinder Singh used for his version.

So, I’m sure everyone’s seen the Mortal Kombat (WARNING: NWS) concept teaser by now. At one point, the character Sub-Zero’s face appears on screen for a split second. It looks like this:

Someone noticed it looks suspiciously like some artwork done by a ZBrushCentral artist named – FoOD -. And by “looks suspiciously like,” I mean someone took one of his renders, mirrored it, and added a filter or two.

If you look at the last page of the thread, some people are asking the artist if it was a theft or if he was working with the creators, and he hasn’t responded yet (edit: He’s now responded and it is in fact used without permission). Thoughts?

Thanks to the Something Awful forum.

On Facebook there’s a game called SuperPoke! Pets on Facebook. You create a pet, take care of it, and can buy things for it’s habitat. You can purchase toys and stuff. On thing that poped up today was the Mystical Pandorable Lizard which looked strikingly similar to me for some reason. It reminded me of a pet you get in the RPG World of Warcraft, the Sprite Darter Hatchling. Coincidence?

Irony comes in some interesting forms.  For years I have been preaching about big companies blatantly ripping off lesser known artists. Despite this, sometimes the little guy can be just as much a plagiarist. I was walking into one of my favorite record stores today when I saw a giant poster advertising this:

Which reminded me a lot of one of my favorite video games:

Don’t get me wrong, EA is no saint. In the past the game company has had several lawsuits filed against it for questionable business practices and has even gone as far as erasing parts of their own Wikipedia entry to cover their questionable ethics. However art theft is art theft, especially theft as blatant as this. Lets have a closer look shall we?

Photo Left URL: http://www.gamespot.com/users/xHiTmAnxi/show_blog_entry.php?topic_id=m-100-25734820 (Center Picture on page)

Photo Right URL: http://www.myspace.com/dmwcd (top banner on page)

The “S” really gives it away. Whoever copied this didn’t even bother hiding where  the “S” was cut off by the Need for Speed text.

Here is the link to their  main site and myspace:

http://www.denversmostwanted.org/

http://www.myspace.com/dmwcd

Go nuts.

I’m sure you’ve seen ads for Kingory popping up recently. They’re hard to miss and reek of a certain other online game’s indecent ad campaign. I was wary of Kingory going down the same road, so I researched and found a statement from one of the company’s team (by the name of Megan Liu) implying they had nothing to do with Evony or its product. For the moment, I was satisfied with that.

Now I am not so sure—or perhaps it is par for the course with these games.

Before, the ads featured a modestly clad, attractive Asian female, along with an all too familiar use of the word “lord”, the initial reason I associated the games with one another. But today, I was shocked to see a new Kingory ad—one using a picture of, no, not a scantily clad model or boob shot, but Chun-Li of Street Fighter fame.

Blatant theft?

As if it couldn’t get any worse, I followed the ad directly to the Kingory site, where they are using Chun-Li as the background to their login screen.

Really, Kingory? Really?

Better still, doing a simple Google image search brings up the same picture they are using in ads and on site (around the second page of image results).

I would keep an eye out for more theft from this site in the future, but for now, I can only hope Capcom will catch wind of this.

Edit: It seems like they have a new layout for their site, sans the Chun-Li art.

Also, the art apparently belongs to Artgerm, as posted on their deviantArt page.

Edit 11/9/09: My attention was brought to this—

They seem to have alternate links to their main site, which link to different versions of their homepage. Here is the one with Chun-Li, still existing, and this one, with Po from Kung-Fu Panda.

Hi All,

Help me out here, tell me if I’m going crazy or not.

Lately on the radio in Oz we’ve been bombarded my LadyHawke’s My Delerium

To quote Wiki, which’s in turn quoting  the artists own blog on the subject

Ladyhawke, when describing her songwriting process, stated she tries “to keep simple hooky guitar riffs throughout the tracks…” and she “wanted to capture the ‘happy sad’ vibe that so many eighties classics had.”^[6]

Fair enough, here’s the song. appolgies for using the karaoke version, they wont allow embedding… must be worried about copyright violation.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfnzRrKLXL4

My Delerium – LadyHawke

Now On a recent trip to Japan I had a 10 hour flight each way, and I played a game for the nintendo DS called “The world ends with you” a LOT during that flight. One of the big songs of the game’s brilliant soundtrack was Déjà Vu, vocals by Joanna Koike.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L_ym7LUD_gs

Weird coincidence time, video posted in 2008 by a user named Hawke… still thats just a coincidence. But help me out here, am I going mad, or is LadyHawkes song a very mild reworking of Déjà Vu? Sections of melody are carried over, the guitar riff is the same as the organ in Déjà Vu. Everytime I hear My Delerium on the radio I cant help but think its the slightly less interesting pop-rock knockoff of a quirky gamers j-pop masterpeice.

Am I going mad? Are the similarities just skin deep, or is anyone else hearing what I’m hearing? Lemme know!

The developers of “Castle Age”, a Facebook RPG, apparently not only chose to prettify their game with stolen art (discussion removed by Castle Age developers) they also thought it a good idea to swipe from rather well-known sources.

After some intervention by Jason Manley from Massive Black, they have now started to replace images (discussion removed by Castle Age developers) in their game. The final outcome remains yet to be seen – the law has been involved.

Stolen from Jason Chan (Massive Black)…

Also note the witch girl with the red hat, which actually is a recoloured version of Spring by Phoenix Feng, and the woman on the upper left, which comes from an artist featured on a banner on Fantasyana.
Also very suicidal: Ripping off Assassin’s Creed:

More information and examples can be found on Conceptart.org.

Small Update: The story is now featured on plagiarismtoday.com: Another Facebook RPG controversy

Medium-sized Update: The developers of Castle Age have now completely taken down Underworld, another game of theirs, after another post about copyright infringement (discussion removed by Castle Age developers) by Jason Manley a few hours earlier. It’s getting interesting!

Another Update, slightly late: The Castle Age developers have deleted their forums (and every mention of the controversy contained within) from Facebook and have opened their own forums elsewhere. Probable reason: While the Facebook forums didn’t allow this, they can now delete all unwanted posts about their copyright infringement (and do just that, according to a Castle Age player commenting on the plagiarismtoday.com blog.)

YTWWN SAYS :Im not sure about this being a rip, but the game video is worth a watch regardless…
——————-

Autotrader ad

Saw this Auto Trader commercial on tv tonight. It look more than a bit familar, so I went to view an old viral video I remember from a few years back.

1k Project II

Maybe not a rip, but definitely a heavy influence. Not the first time Autotrader has borrowed for their ads, remember the matrix ad?

———–
As pointed out in the comments, this is more of a rip of the video game movie:

Being a shadowy Assassin isn’t really a new concept, but it’s too similar…

Covers from the last two of the three books of the Night Angel Trilogy by Brent Weeks.

Altair from Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed