As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to check how many DMCA strikes I have, or if I have any, and find out when these expire.
If Roblox is able to address this issue, it would improve my development experience because alot of developers uploaded copyrighted content a few years back which could’ve been DMCA’d recently and gotten some strikes.
Currently, the only way to check this out is via Support, however you always get very inconsisstent messages, sometimes they will tell you that you have more strikes, other times they will only tell you that you have one strike, and when you ask about the expiration date, they will either refuse completely saying “We’re unable to provide more information” or just not answer the email. Rarely you can get them to provide an answer.
I think this feature would help a lot of developers to understand what claims they have, where they come from and how they can save their accounts in case they still got a lot of copyrighted stuff uploaded on their accounts.
I imagine that this could either be a notification in the creator page, similar to this mockup I made:
(Copyright & details are fake, they’re just there as an example of what the page might look like)
Or they could be part of a whole new tab in the settings page! This could be a whole new menu dedicated to “Moderation & Appeals”
(idea for this page came from this post! Allow users to see their moderation history)
While not all of the DMCA strikes could be appealed because they were assigned longer than 6 months ago (for EU members) or longer than a month ago (for the rest of the globe) I think users should still be able to see these strikes so they can take action and delete other possibly copyright infringing content that they might have uploaded.
One of my biggest concern was a case I heard of a developer getting DMCA Striked by using the word “Olympics” in their item’s title (who would’ve known this is trademarked??) and having their account terminated. Being able to know how many current strikes you have on your account, would save a lot of people from getting terminated, because they could check how many strikes they have, and take some time to rename & archive stuff that could potentially break some IP.
Another case this would be useful for, is clothing creators, being able to check how many DMCA strikes they have from old clothing they uploaded, such as Nike, Adidas & other brands, so they can then carefully look for every single instance of Copyrighted content they have uploaded, and archive those.
One of my friends was hit by a DMCA, which terminated his account, after trying to archive all of his clothing items. He said he had 0 strikes, but he still got terminated as if he had 2 strikes previously, being able to check DMCA strikes, would come in handy just for cases like this.
I would love to see something like this being added.
Would be nice to see other DMCA System changes that I have mentioned in this post: Improvements To DMCA system, however I understand that not all could be changed, because of how Companies should work with the copyright laws.
I still think it’s worth mentioning though, and I think being able to see your current strikes wouldn’t go against any Policy or Laws which companies have to follow. Platforms like Youtube will give you a warning & a possibility to not only permanently remove the copyrighted material, but also see your current strikes.