Hrm... this is a bit odd, actually... It sort of comes down to the game developer's call. Here's how it breaks down: The game's publisher or developer owns all rights to the models, textures, etc. So, technically, it's copyright infringement to take them and redistribute them in any form, whether your making money on it or not... but... Most game's publishers don't care. In fact, it's good press for their game to have modifications for their game in circulation. When I helped with modding the Bioware games, we actually got support from Bioware and Black Isle, who would often times look over our works before we released them to fix any problems we encountered... I've heard similar stories from the teams that build mods for Quake, Half-Life, etc. So really, extracting the model from the game isn't copyright infringement ( at least not an infringement that would ever get prosecuted ). Redistributing the mesh/texture is, but the game company likely wouldn't care. Usually, the individual company's site will maintain an FAQ with how to extract these models, and what's ok. As far as I know, most don't care as long as you're not trying to reverse engineer the game engine, or make money off of their hard work. I hope that clears some of this up. Paul