[Action Needed] Upcoming Changes to Asset Privacy for Audio

After reading this, it’s pretty clear to me that you have no idea what the laws surrounding music are and how they’re applied. Roblox was exploiting by means of developers the works that were ultimately being infringed on. This is not a policy. This is not a conditional change. These are laws. A court system doesn’t care about how convenient or how happy it makes a developer. They care about laws and whether or not it violates said law. Which it does.

All these publishers and labels are direct competitors to each other. Some of them being absolute giants like Universal. All these companies would not be doing a class action lawsuit if there was no reason behind it. Roblox was definitely in the wrong on this one.

They settled it based on their terms. The better way to solve this issue is impossible to automate. No software in the world can automate audio at that scale and determine if it’s legit or not. Or if the user has a license before it’s uploaded. They didn’t have much of a choice.

It’s really not. Its easier for someone to steal work than it is to maintain ownership. You just haven’t been on the opposite side where your work has actively gotten stolen. It’s not a cool feeling. Being robbed of money that you worked hard for is not a cool feeling.

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This update is awful I don’t have the effort to reply in detail but devs who have over 900 audio needing to be fixed are just going to abandoned ship (I.E I’m included)

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You really like to ignore how this update does more harm then good - see the 10 upload limit & unjust bs privacy ‘’’‘solution’’’’ that solves absolutely nothing.

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This entire thread is you complaining about a change that respects and values audio works. You want convenience because you’re lazy.

You get free audio uploads. 10 upload limit is not that bad. It’s free. Would you rather have this change and pay robux? Probably not.

This solution solves what that lawsuit aimed for and removed works that were in directly violation of copyright law. It did exactly what it’s supposed to do. Again, this is a direct action of a class action lawsuit. They didn’t have a choice.

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Okay, I definitely see what you mean by this, so let me ask you a question that will really put this into perspective.

How is this going to help prevent audio theft?

Think about it.

It’s going to be fine for the first few months, can’t steal something if you can’t even find it or use it. Right?

Wrong, if someone so much as finds your audio ID they can still do some real damage, stealing the file and re-uploading it for their own use.

People can and will get around the moderation, and as soon as that happens it’ll solve nothing…

Then people will eventually be allowed to set their stuff to public.

This will make the issue propagate even further and guess what?

We’re back to square one again.

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Roblox’s copyright detection has been absurdly trigger happy lately. I do some work for RoBeats and it’s been taking down audio that makes no sense to be taken down, such as:

  1. official Monstercat songs, uploaded by the official Monstercat account
  2. songs we have licensed, and as far as I’m aware have already talked to the moderation team about before to say they’re licensed and to allow them
  3. songs that are custom made for Roblox and definitely should not be tripping any copyright bot

Something in their system over the past week or two has been changed to be hyper aggressive. There’s a massive risk in reuploading all your audio now, because even if you have full rights to upload them the copyright bot just might decide that you don’t. Even worse that you aren’t ever told what’s being removed in specific or what it’s being matched with.

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Ok, I’m going to hold off on uploading sounds then, which sucks cause my game is going to have 0 background music for a while then.
Both audios that were moderated were under Creative Commons — Public Domain Mark 1.0
Can’t believe they made it so aggressive.

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While in some aspects I agree, they must have had choice in terms of audio uploading. As it is, it would be better to just have the tax.

For some developers it is now impossible to make a more polished game due to the upload limit.

I want convenience because convenience is better than waiting a month to upload half the audio I need to finish one feature of my game. If not liking how I have to wait a month for something so minimal is lazy, then I agree.

I would rather fork out Robux than have a limit of 10 audios. Robux isn’t that much of a problem for me because I upload short sub -10 seconds sounds more often than music.

And it was done in a terrible way :[

I’m done with this discussion and this update, I’m going to learn a different engine until this update is softened up or until i get a 2000 audio upload limit, whichever happens first

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It actively prevents widespread use because the sound id can no longer be spread across different games which what was happening before (sounds are now private). However, manual reupload is going to be hard to verify. No software in the world is able to verify whether or not you have the rights to a song. I think even YouTube has a policy where you have to manually declare it or all fees from that video go to the copyright holder.

I think the limit is there because of how costly it is to upload audio. For every audio a developer uploads for free, the company loses money. If you multiply that with millions of users, you lose a lot of money. Having a limit per month allows them to regulate it. It sounds temporary and I see them appending the limit to be far less restrictive. Similar to what they did with group space.

Dangerous mindset that can get you sued. All the time you spent on a game, profit, etc wasted because you decided to be lazy. Not very smart.

FYI, it takes years to publish a game with a different engine and you have to do that yourself. It’s also a money pit when you have no financial backing. Goodluck with that.

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Yeah, I just used up 4 of my 10 allowed and Roblox took down 2 of them randomly for copyright infringement. This sucks

They can afford it but nobody makes every single sound in house because that’s incredibly impractical. No major game dev is out there recording 5 hours of wind audio so they can have their very own wind audio for the game, and barely any indie dev is doing it either. Pretty much every game you’ve ever played has used some sort of stock sound effect and that doesn’t degrade them for it.

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Even then they could have managed this in a much better way. Why not just restrict uploading to devforum members? This is gonna make the situation even worse. Now people can just create alts and upload all audios they want. This did what the opposite of what it wanted to do. It is damaging more the developers than the rulebreakers.

Seriously, a minimum limit of 50 would work well. Not what we got.

I really hope they do not go forward with this new uploading system.

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Why are you so aggressive? Having a convenient workflow is not lazy? How can not waiting months to upload audio get you sued?

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Yes, right NOW audios are forced to be private, this IS NOT however going to stay like this forever.

Eventually you’ll be able to make your audios public, which means anyone will be able to use it.

Through this logic it’s safe to say that as soon as the public option becomes available it’ll just go into a full loop, it doesn’t matter if the ORIGINAL is private because someone else will reupload it as public through exploits or other methods, and from there it’ll quickly get out of control once again!

Like you said as well, every audio can’t possibly be verified either so in the long term this solves nothing!

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You don’t get any backing on Roblox either? There’s plenty of people who can’t even make a cent on this darn platform.

What are you trying to do, scare people way from other engines/platforms because you were paid by roblox to do so?

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Unity is not a hard program to learn. It can take years to make a game on any platform. It just depends on your scope. You can also decide how much money you are willing to put into it. The only thing unity lacks is access to stuff like datastores and some APIs. Many people have made games on other platforms with 0 finances.

Roblox handles the hard work for you. You don’t need nearly as much to create a game as you do in Unity and Unreal. The quality is also far better than Roblox. Roblox did not pay me to say that. Although, they really should.

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I’ll say this… YOU KILLED MY WORK AND MY PROJECT THAT I’VE BEEN WORKING ON FOR 2 YEARS AND NOW IN ADDITION OUR AUDIO WILL BE FREE!? THIS UPDATE JUST BLEW ME AWAY
sorry but I don’t like this update

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Are you implying that designing, coding, and polishing a game is not hard work?
Just because Roblox gives you stuff like datastores does not mean they do all the “Hard Work” for you.
Roblox just offers APIs to make saving data not require a server of your own. If you need to do that in Unity you will have to make a server. But that doesn’t mean making games on Roblox is easy or that making games on Unity is harder, there are just differences between them. Sure Unity is less user-friendly but it is actually quite easy to use after a month or two of practice.

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