In the 1860s, the establishment of the Red Cross would spark the beginnings of the Geneva Conventions, a series of international humanitarian laws written to protect the rights of civilians, military personnel, and prisoners of war. With the declaration of the First Geneva Convention in 1864 came the protection of the Red Cross, to be used as a universally identifiable symbol of neutral medical aid offered by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
While it is true that these Roblox items may depict an accurate reflection of real world scenarios where the Red Cross emblem is used without permission, recreating those instances in Roblox would be considered misuse as well. As described in the Red Cross Significance Flyer linked in the original post, “misuse occurs when an unauthorized party uses the Red Cross emblem without permission.”
If you wish to read more about the International Committee of the Red Cross, and the Red Cross emblem itself, you can visit the ICRC’s website at https://www.icrc.org/en. Their website not only offers plenty of resources describing their work, but gives you a quick and easy donation page to help directly fund their efforts!
Never thought that red cross VIOLATES any rules. There’s TONS of games which utilize it for medkits or smth like that, but bruh, who, when and why someone desided to block use of them? It’s widespread symbol for a lot of healing items in games. Even just changing it to green will negativelly impact a lot of games. Just example of health potions: Red cross, red blood, red health bar. Everything is red. Never saw green or blue health potions.
It’s specifically a red cross on a white background. So your last two images are not in violation. However, I wish to point out that the Geneva Conventions does not apply to civilians in peace time.
The red cross symbol becomes very important during war and armed conflict because it means that’s a place where people can be safe, receive medical aid, food, shelter, etc… It’s neutral and violation of that is a war crime. My initial reaction was this was bogus bug report. But after doing some research, I see the importance of it and why it’s protected by international treaty.
Furthermore, you can be fined and go to jail for not using it correctly. So the United States does take this very seriously.
On an unrelated note, I discovered that the ICRC is encouraging people to conform to Geneva Conventions when playing combat games. This would include the international rules of engagement.
This is fair, since I don’t know the Red Cross to just sue everyone like Nintendo does. Even if it is a low priority, I still think it is good to at least bring up and have in the backlog since it is a potential trademark issue. It would also be a sign to others to not use the symbol as well.
The Red Cross routinely enforces this, especially against video games. It’s not a “trademark issue” it’s literally a legal provision of the Geneva Conventions that the Red Cross symbol is restricted.
This isnt really an issue. Like the whole half life series literally uses a red cross with a white background in their medkits and health stations and they’ve never had issues.
so unless they do something i dont think gabe is going to jail
Appreciate the update! Was talking with a friend about this, and we realized there’s still an official Roblox asset which uses the Red Cross. Back in the first few years of Roblox, they used to include common assets with your install of the Roblox Player, such as brickbattle tool icons. One of those icons was MedKit.png, an image of the Red Cross.
These days the Roblox engine reads anything pointing to those original local files and loads images uploaded to Roblox’s account. I believe rbxasset://Textures/MedKit.png currently points to this asset here.
First off violating Geneva Convention is illegal, secondly it probably took like 15 minutes to recolor these textures and different people are responsible for fixing bugs in the client and changing textures of items.
I dont know if models are managed here on catalog asset bugs
fortnite has a red cross on im unsure on the rules as its extremely low key, as in your the first person in the world to bring this up on roblox. This report is important as its violating it, but also i dont know how much more this team changes
This doesnt relate to them bug fixes its catalog only but also there are many bugs in the catalog team as well roblox continues to ignore but fixes stuff like this so i get how this could cause questions ?
Also cant it still be used as long as it isnt violence or a logo for a miltary group for example ? medkit for example is known for a red cross by millions of records, im unsure on this all but im glad roblox changed them ?
thanks for the thoughtful report
