Better guidelines or support for uploading licensed assets that require appropriate credit

Feature Requests Website Features
#1

As a Roblox developer, it is often impossible to conform to both the Roblox Community Rules and Creative Commons license rules when uploading assets that require a Creative Commons license if their material is not hosted on YouTube, Twitter or Twitch.

The problem

Many creators rely on audio, code and art that are provided for free by other sources. This is especially true on Roblox where most creators are young and do not have the right skill sets to cover all aspects of game development. Even many of the top games use licensed assets.

When using licensed assets however, it is often necessary for the user to provide appropriate credit. The Creative Commons license is very flexible and therefore also very common. This license type allows users to use the licensed material for free, so you see many assets on the platform that include this sort of license. However, appropriate credit is required. But what does it mean to provide appropriate credit? Creative Commons 4.0 summarizes appropriate credit as follows:

If supplied, you must provide the name of the creator and attribution parties, a copyright notice, a license notice, a disclaimer notice, and a link to the material. CC licenses prior to Version 4.0 also require you to provide the title of the material if supplied, and may have other slight differences.

Notice the highlighted part of the quote. Users must link to the original material. Let me take a random example to illustrate why this is a problem.

Kevin Macleod makes a lot of popular music that uses the Creative Commons license so I went to his website to grab some audio. I picked a random song and after pressing the download button the following pop-up was displayed:

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So according to this pop-up I have to include this text in the audio’s description after I upload it. But hold on a second, what does the Roblox Community Rules say about off-site links again?

Offsite website links, services, and additional 3rd party content are not permitted on Roblox with the following exceptions: YouTube, Twitter, Twitch. Users under the age of 13 are not permitted to share YouTube, Twitter, Twitch links for their privacy and safety. Permitted offsite links, content, or references must contain Roblox appropriate content or your account will be moderated up to immediate termination. Using partial links, filter-breaking, using permitted website links to indirectly link to non-permitted sites, content, or services, describing or otherwise encouraging users to go to unpermitted offsite links, content, or services is also not allowed.

So as it stand right now, I am unable to use music by Kevin Macleod because I am unable to provide appropriate credit. However, not everyone caught on to this as can be seen when you make a quick search for Kevin Macleod through the Roblox library.

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Of course there are many more creators whose assets have been uploaded to Roblox that also include such Creative Commons licenses or other alternatives that require appropriate credit. However, none of these uploaded assets are allowed to be used in Roblox games if you follow the rules. Either the assets do not provide appropriate credit, in which case the uploader did not conform to the license details, or appropriate credit was provided, in which case the asset’s description breaks the Roblox Community Guidelines. Neither of these situations are ideal.

The solution

If Roblox wants its developers to use licensed assets in their games, there needs to be a better system in place to provide appropriate credit. This means that either the community rules have to change to allow developers to provide appropriate credit, or we need a new system that allows us to provide appropriate credit without breaking the community rules.

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How to upload music to Roblox without getting a false copyright strike
#2

Agreed. If we were to link to something inappropriate, that could be reported like any other link on the site. It doesn’t take much effort to link an inappropriate Twitter account, something I’ve seen a fair amount of users do with their own profile. Bots have also shown that they’ve been able to post links to scams for years, with many of those links still shown in comments even if the accounts are removed.

So if these users are able to have their link up for awhile until it’s reported and shown to be inappropriate, why can’t we have our links up, standing on their own accord as innocent?

There is one unfortunate angle I must bring up that worries me in regards to how this is handled, and that’s how currently permitted links are handled. Technically we’re supposed to use those social media fields on our profiles/games/groups to share these links, since those buttons only show up on +13 accounts…

But if we were to implement something similar for our CC licensed content, I feel that preventing some users from seeing the credit may break the terms of the license. One solution could be that Roblox could handle these links with a “Woah! You’re now leaving the site, we can’t verify whether everything up ahead is kid friendly.” sort of like they do with YouTube videos for users under 13, and those not currently logged in.

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#3

This is still a major issue that plagues the development process, I found some really nice audios I wanted to use in my Roblox experience, however because they were licensed under creative commons, I was unable to use them. I can understand that Roblox may not want to do this as it can create moderation concerns, however we aren’t living in a time where everything can be centralised on a few “kid-safe” websites anymore. We can even see this with recent Roblox events in-where companies had to get approval from Roblox to link a website of the brand they were using for attribution (see the current Elton John concert which links to an external website for their copyright notice).

This issue has been made much worse by the fact that users now are unable to share any links to <13 users, this means even if the content is supplied on YouTube, you are unable to comply with the license for anyone who may be logged out or <13. You also cannot have any links on audios themselves.

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#4

Some workaround is to make a devforum post containing all the credits & links you needed then linking the post to the game’s description (or the credits), though I’m not sure if this is safe for now.

#5

This is not a solution, these posts are only allowed in #bulletin-board however the rules there prohibit off-site links with a few exceptions, I’ve even had a moderator close my licensing posts that followed all the rules of the category, the only reason I can think of why is that legal licenses don’t fit the category of ‘community announcements’

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#6

Abcreator is right that BB doesn’t allow direct offsite links. You’d need to add another link into the chain. For instance going from the user clicking a link on the audio.
roblox → DevForum BB → Youtube link (iirc allowed on BB) → required CC license link (put inside of description of YT vid.

#7

flood escape 2 ayeee also yeah, we should be able to send more offsite links.

#8

There are various issues of copyright on the Roblox platform. One of them being that you cannot effectively prove whether or not you actually own the license to an asset you upload.

Within Roblox’s core value of ‘taking the long view’, an attribution system should not be made just for Audio. I also feel allowing off-site links for attribution in descriptions is not a good solution. Rather, we should have an entire system for proving copyright for all assets uploaded to Roblox.

This is the only staff response I’ve found on this issue so far:

What got me to make this reply is my conflicting ideas on dealing with copyright on the Roblox platform. Copyright is an issue on Roblox, it’s being abused, and it needs solutions. Whilst my attempt of a solution was flawed, I feel the one listed in this thread is less so.

Speaking of various solutions, we should be able to archive clothing assets and delete assets we upload to better deal with copyright strikes. Those should be a given imo.

Anyways, I hope to hear an update on this.

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