Comment

BeatlesEternally (joined Sep 2026 · 21 posts · 51 karma) , 2 weeks, 5 days ago (edited 2 weeks, 5 days ago)

If I may: trademark and copyright law concern themselves with pecuniary gain when using copyrighted and trademarked items. I know this because I was responsible for compliance as a manager at Penn State and the University of Michigan. I was tasked with ensuring that faculty complied with US Trademark and Copyright laws and regulations.

Even though ActionSims is an online game, you are not supplying trademarked or copyrighted material. Creating the means for end users does not violate trademark and copyright. Documendous LLC is not responsible for what end users do.

That being said, you should not supply a repository FOR logos and player images nor should you allow sharing of them on the ActionSims site. While copyright has gotten stricter, trademark laws can be especially vicious. MLB has not shut down online image sharing because these are targeting end users playing a game rather than using them as financial gain.

Only MLB The Show and OOTP Baseball can legally distribute logos in the game because they are licensed.

2 Reply 1 reply

Replies

Harlin (joined Aug 2026 · 239 posts · 389 karma) , 2 weeks, 5 days ago

I appreciate the feedback. I think I've figured out a way to make this work, and I've already written up the development tickets for it.

The idea is to let users add their own player images and team logos, with everything stored locally in their browser. Nothing gets uploaded to ActionSims servers, and there won't be any shared image library. Whatever images you add will only show up in the browser where you added them.

There are a couple of drawbacks. If you clear your browser storage, you could lose your images, and they won't automatically carry over to another computer or browser. But I've accounted for that by including an option to export everything to a backup file and import it again whenever you need to.

I think this is a pretty good compromise. People can customize their games with their own images, and this feature won't require ActionSims to host or distribute any of those uploads. It doesn't eliminate every possible legal concern, but I think it avoids some of the bigger ones.

None of this has been built yet, but the tickets are ready. I think this is probably the best way to handle it.

0 Reply