[Legal issue] Paid assets on GitHub

Hey,

recently I started working on a project in Unity with my small team and we would like to use some paid assets from the Asset Store.

The thing is, we are using GitHub for version control and I’d like to know if that would break any legal condition since those paid assets would be publicly showed on our repository. We don’t have private repositories.

I’ve read that GitHub has some default laws on public repositories but I can’t really tell if it’s legal or not. This should be a problem a lot of people have faced before but I just can’t find the right answer.

Thanks.

DISCLAIMER: not legal advice.

If you don’t have a license to distribute it in raw format, then you can’t. public repository obviously should be considered distribution. they shouldn’t have special status legally. it’s basically a webpage. uploading music you bought from a music store for example would clearly be illegal to upload to your own blog even if you consider it for your own use. It’s also unfair for the creator, if someone downloaded your project and used it somewhere else without paying.

There are private repositories for free. I believe gitlab offer one. But technically it might also be in violation of the license for sharing with the git host. but not as bad as uploading to a public one.

You could also exclude those assets using gitignore

Did a quick search on Github for one of the Paid Asset, find a lot public repos that contain it.

To be honest this whole Asset Store system need some serious rework to protect those asset creators.