Foreign IP in Development
After receiving a notification from the Steam Team at the end of March regarding compliance with their Intellectual Property (IP) policies, I began working on the required documentation. To release on Steam, it’s mandatory to ensure all third-party assets are properly licensed and accounted for.
To partially address this, I started recreating potentially problematic third-party assets using AI. The goal was to generate imagery that is visually similar but legally distinct, avoiding any IP infringement in the commercial release:
This process is ongoing. I initially reviewed all 350 entries, identified potentially infringing items, and ultimately am reworking now around 80 of them. To document everything, I created a Summary Document that will later go to the Steam Team containing details for each third-party asset used:
In addition, I created a new licences.json file within the app, listing all relevant licenses and their respective URLs which will crossreference items where needed. This ensures proper attribution and legal clarity:
Alongside that I also introduced a new property to mark logos and trademarks (that are used limited and for education purposes) within the application. In-app, all these new changes appear like this:
At launching the WPF WebView2 App, a legal disclaimer was added to explicitly reference Steam’s own IP guidelines and disclaimers:
To go the extra mile (and keep my PHP skills sharp), I created an IP Request Form and hosted it on my webspace.
Besides entering textual information, I added a Google reCAPTCHA against spam and enabled also limited size file-uploads that e.g. PDF attachments can be submitted alongside. This allows anyone who believes there’s an infringement to submit a formal notice:
A small confirmation is displayed upon submission and I verified that the PHPMailer backend correctly forwards these requests to me — tested and working:
The URL to the form is now embedded within the app. It’s not prominently placed to avoid spam, but it’s discoverable for those who need it:
That’s the current status of the IP compliance work and i’ll keep you updated on how it progresses.