I’m here to discuss a problem that we’ve seen overlooked and ignored for far too long. Something that’s been around for years and yet currently has absolutely no solution or fixes. I’m talking about clothing theft & plagiarism. Plagiarism by definition is the practice of taking someone else’s work or ideas and passing them off as one’s own. In most real-world cases this can lead to massive lawsuits. If someone like myself steals another companies assets or game themes and profit from it (ex. Pokemon or Nintendo), they can contact Roblox or file for DMCA and have it taken down. That also goes for Builders like myself if our maps or games are exploited, we can request for the copied place to be taken down.
So then, why are we not seeing this done with stolen clothes? This isn’t even just a few people stealing the item… this is THOUSANDS of bots and users taken the original users design and reselling it as their own making the profit. The sheer amount of stolen clothes puts that original users design to the very back and takes away all of that persons profit.
This is destroying an entire section of the Roblox community. We’re not just builders or coders, we have thousands of amazing artists and ones making unique clothes for the millions of daily players. Yet for some reason they’re shown no respect when it comes to this matter.
The solution?
Start going after these groups and individuals using bots to mass-clone from the catalog. There’s hundreds of groups currently making hundreds of thousands of robux off of these stolen assets that continue to grow, and the users using these bots receive no consequences.
We should have the ability to report these stolen items and have them reviewed and taken down, or to detect replicated items and have them auto-denied. They of course could change the items slightly by a pixel so of course that’s only a temporary solution. Implementing a captcha when uploading items might be another option to somewhat put a dint in clothing bots.
Either way this is an issues that’s long-over looked and should be reviewed. I feel like the clothing/art community we have is not given the respect it deserves.
Let’s come up with some solutions, stop ignoring the problem, and give them the credit they deserve.
I agree, I’m really tired of hearing the excuse “there’s no solution” when they don’t even try. It’s very demotivating and I’m sure my profits would be a lot higher if my clothes weren’t always copied and resold
I made a point about this too a while ago suggesting a few things. It’s such a bummer that this has been going on for such a long time and little to nothing has been done about it.
Before an update we’d be able to subtract 1 from the URL and find the template to that clothing, and that’s usually how I found out something was by someone else and reuploaded (Usually has a signature on it somewhere). Of course that also was part of the problem with reuploading by just taking the image. I wonder how they continue to take clothing now that that feature is taken off for new clothes…
I do agree that if an item contains a real-world logo, it shouldn’t be protected - as it’s technically infringing on that brand’s copyright. However, if it’s 100% original work, Roblox should ban anyone copying said clothing.
I would seriously love to see some sort of action taken against this though. Pages upon pages of the same shirt is really annoying.
Roblox is not ignoring the issue, they just don’t have a sound solution. Neither preventing the issue nor fixing it after the fact is simple.
There are just so many bots and so many copies of clothes that Roblox needs to rely on automation. We are able to see the same shirt hundreds of times in the Catalog, but the system is not. Yes, I think Roblox should better respect clothing theft claims, but we still can’t expect them to remove every single copy since none of them are pixel-perfect to the original.
Please read these (all the following replies are from other clothing theft threads):
A good start would be going after these groups and individuals directly with moderation action. Start terminating some of these groups dedicated to making profits from stolen assets and maybe there would be less intensive to steal in the first place if they know they can be banned. At least allowing the items to be reportable and have the original owner able to file for the item(s) to be deleted is better then nothing.
Once again though this brings me back to all of my old posts, Roblox neglected the botting issue for so many years that now it’s almost completely irreparable. It’s going to take a lot of work to get things fixed, but we need to start somewhere.
I would already assume that as these users are capable of controlling hundreds of bots at a time, they aren’t afraid of being banned on one account at one address. They can easily make new users and new groups, and will probably get some earnings before they get caught again.
As I previously said, “yes, I think Roblox should better respect clothing theft claims, but we still can’t expect them to remove every single copy since none of them are pixel-perfect to the original.”
If Roblox isn’t virtually capable of doing it the first time, I wouldn’t expect the help line to have much more power over the issue.
Town of Salem also faced a bot plague not too long ago, they tried a lot of methods of dealing with it but ultimately they now make you purchase an account for what is a free-to-play game. Bots are not easy to get rid of, at least, not without hurting other users.
It seems that with Roblox’s recent efforts with stopping bots, the clothing stealing thing seems to have stopped.
Of course, I’m only looking at “Recently Updated” currently.
The very few botted clothing items have been “CD’ed.”
I’m also beginning to think the bots aren’t very intelligent and could just be copying whatever the title is.
So you could put in the description: “Original here: link”
Or put a link to your game and let the bot masters advertise for you.
You know, I was thinking a few days ago about the situation with plugins.
Perhaps there could be a category or filter that shows only longstanding user designs, or people only accepted in the dev forums.
There needs to be some way to filter by the ‘quality’ or legitimacy of the creator.
It may also be nice to have categories on the dev forums dedicated to developer created content - somewhere were we know we’re going to receive quality assets and confirm the original creators.
