What's the legality of stealing from huge companies? - Developers

Before I make a huge life-ruining mistake, I am on the verge of unpacking all Pokèmon models, textures and animations from a copy of Pokèmon Ultra Sun. I needed the animations the most but since they weren't found online I decided to fiddle around 'til I got them myself, I also got the brilliant idea of making the models, textures and animations available in this forum so noone will ever need go through what I had to, then I thought to myself: "Is the reason these weren't found online because Nintento ass-blasted them all?" My intentions are pure-ish, maybe Nintendo can turn a blind eye to the occasional Pokèmon playermodel, but how likely is someone to get copy-striken to the depths of legal hell for making these publicly available? I myself am not the kind of guy who'd use the excuse of "someone else does it so it must be legal", but the closest example is how the Models-resource has many nintento models (pokèmon included) in their library, are the animations the ones off limit or am I just being paranoid?

Play with Nintendo's napalm at your own risk but be ready to get burned.

Well I would never call it "stealing" but Nintendo are infamous for being anal about this kind of thing. Also from a legal standpoint, it's as legal as a company wants it. So in Nintendo's case, it's as if it were illegal. For another company, it would be completely legal.

I mean it depends on how you release them. You could wait a couple months for everyone to forget about this and post a link in the model releases thread claiming you just happened to find them. Not legal at all but you probably wont get into trouble. You wont go to jail or anything tho so dont worry about that.

Nintendo won't bother going after someone just publicly releasing extracted assets. Unless you're putting your real name on everything or selling it, I doubt you need to have any realistic concerns.

Wasn't there a guy who got the forums in trouble because he released models from an alpha game here? Can't imagine what Nintendo would do, yikes. I think it's best to leave this as it is, to just do my little projects in secrecy, I'm sure nintendo wouldn't spy on people to make sure they don't break any rules, right?... right?

According to huge companies and the US government? You're worse than Hitler and a pot-smoker combined.

Hitler and a pot-smoker combined. I get the Hitler one a lot, but a pot-smoker? That's just going too far...

It's certainly not legal, but Nintendo hasn't yet taken down full archives of them on the VG-Resource boards. Check out the VG-Resource thread here. There's a few links to resources that have most/all models already, and the animations are there as well. One of the tools can even export the models and animations to SMD format.

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/57863/7fce4636-6f2a-4bb6-a60d-56b8eb2346ae/image.png Oh boy, here I go digging in, wish me luck. Thanks for the answer, this is exactly what I needed, if what you're saying is true, then it's absolutely worth reading every single comment on that thread.

One indie developer ripped a gun model from a cod game to use in their's, Activision caught him and made him cease and desist.

I see, so in that case it war more of a "using their assets for profit" rather than for funzies. But I'll take the opportunity to tell that Ghostlier 's link is perfect, it was a good read and also provided me with everything I needed, if anyone is having problems or found this thread in the future then that thread is a good bet.

Yes it's Nintendo's (and Pokemon Company) property and they have told you (by way of a long TOS) that you can't reverse-engineer, extract or do anything else with their property. So they would be within their right to sue you. If your intention is to save other people time and you care not for internet fame then release the assets under an alias, through a VPN, on a different location then here on facepunch and with any other anonymisation techniques you can think of. Again, what you're doing is not illegal in the sense that police will come knocking on your door for it, but if Nintendo finds you and is able to form a lawsuit against you a judge will rule in their favor.

Maybe if you can automate the steps with a tool you could release it instead of the models. This way you don't distribute any of Nintendo assets and only people that already have the game can get the models.

This idea is way better. Do this and don't even mention Pokemon or Nintendo with the release of the program or anywhere near it.

aye but that was a different issue because the devs had very politely asked him not to port anything before the games release he did he got banned and now everyone else can port from it to their hearts content It really depends on what Devs you're dealing with, like what everyone else has said above. Bohemia, Games Workshop, Nintendo they're the big ones

We get requests from game developers to take down model rip threads of their game, maybe once a year, and we delete those threads when asked. Last takedown request was from the DCS developers a few months ago.