Before I start, I wanna preface this by saying a few things:
Firstly, I did not create this, I am merely bringing this guide to the devforum (since some people don’t use twitter/aren’t in clothing communities) and giving the formatting a slight spruce up along the way. ALL CREDIT GOES TO @goldflakes FOR THE ORIGINAL GUIDE please give all love to them, they deserve it more than I do. @goldflakes again huge thanks for this guide
Secondly, this guide is focused on mainly clothing takedown requests, however it can likely be used for other types of content (games/models) with not much trouble.
Thirdly, I am not a lawyer and none of this should be taken as proper educated legal advice. This just shows you what works for a takedown request (worked for me and a few other people), since it’s not clear at all to anyone how to file a proper request without a ridiculous amount of googling. Apologies to any actual legal experts here who are probably having a fit just reading this.
I also suggest reading all the way through it all before trying anything, because there are some important notes along the way.
Now that is all out of the way, let’s begin!
Copy the content of this template into an email, or somewhere to edit it before putting it into an email. This is all the legalese you will need to make your takedown request in one nice premade document.
Fill it out with your real information. Real name, real address, etc. This is an actual legal document, so it has to be treated as such. The person who you are filing this claim against will not see this information, only your username.
NOTE: If they file a counter claim, they will see this information. If you are filing genuine claims, especially filed against robots or alts specifically for theft, you shouldn’t have to worry about this.
For reference, the email they get will look something like this
While you can file a single claim/email for multiple pieces at once, you can always spread it out one piece per email. Each separate claim = one strike. This is better suited for people and bots who are stealing your stuff in a huge amount/repeat offenders.
Send the email to copyright_agent@roblox.com - This is the address Roblox uses to handle this type of thing.
IMPORTANT NOTES/FAQ TIME:
If your clothing has copyrighted material (especially Nike, probably Vans and Gucci also) the person handling your claim may see this and ask for proof of permission to be uploading the copyrighted content. If you are unable to provide this, they will simply take down your clothing as well (This happened to me once for some AF1s, I didn’t receive any visible punishment from it, so do not panic too much about that.)
You cannot file claims on other peoples behalf. If you do want someone to file a claim, point them to this guide (either this devforum post or the original twitter thread linked up top)
You will not get any monetary gain out of this. You won’t get any Robux that was put into the stolen copy, the stolen copy won’t redirect or reference your one. It sucks, but that is how it do be.
If there is anything I have forgotten or anything important that I should add to here, please tell me. I want this to have as much info about the process as possible since Roblox themselves refuses to do anything about the problem.
Just so this is clear, Roblox doesn’t “refuse” to do anything because they’re negligent, it’s because UGC is already a massive legal headache on its own considering the volume of uploads the site processes on a regular basis. Therefore, Roblox approaches this passively. They will not mediate disputes between developers or serve as a legal arbitrator. They will act based on the documentation they have on hand as well as what they receive via their copyright agent.
Roblox will positively assume that you have permission or a license to the content you’re uploading unless otherwise stated where they will assume the opposite and you will need to provide documentation expressing that you are allowed to use an asset. These scenarios happen on a case-by-case basis and each scenario is unique based on how the IP holder acts.
Speaking of copyright agent in the first part of this post, these posts don’t mention where the DMCA emails should go; they should be sent to copyright_agent@roblox.com.
Though they could fix the problem with stolen clothing in particular by comparing the new asset to existing clothing on upload. I understand that Roblox isn’t google and they don’t have their fancy AI image recognition, but it would simplify the moderation process significantly.
Roblox has already shown on many occasions they have the tools to identify identical reuploads of content (based on hashes, I presume), so I agree that they can very easily tell if there’s an exact reupload of something.
Personally, I feel like the most efficent way of doing it would just send a message to the original creator saying “this asset was reuploaded, do you approve of it y/n” and having that original creator agreeing/disagreeing. Saves a ton of time and effort on every single side.
Firstly, hash checks are not the same as image recognition. Image recognition works by converting pixel data into a function. Minor changes like resizing, slight blur or sharpening and color change will still mark the image as a duplicate since it remains within the threshold value. This basically clears most methods used to avoid detection.
Asking the original owner for authorization is somewhat complicated. Imagine permanently losing an old account with lots of uploaded clothes and you decide to reupload them to a new account or a group. You’ll have no way to confirm whether or not these clothes belong to you. Adding onto that, it would be easy to spam someone’s messages. Roblox should be able to handle this on their own, with some kind of a “dispute moderation” button being present to allow the uploader to explain why it is a duplicate. I’d bet this will stop practically every bot account and most re-uploaders.
Hello, I know a somewhat late response but I do have a question. In the email where is says “Designated Agent:”, Do I need to put something after that?
What? This is 100% incorrect. A designated agent is someone within an organization who is responsible for the enforcement of copyright enforcement/claims.
In most cases the designated agent will be someone from the legal department, but for Roblox based DMCA takedown notices you would most likely put yourself down as the designated agent.
If you want to. I guess yes. Because I had to file DMCAs on some videos somebody stole from my channel and directly reuploaded. Since I didn’t want them knowing my actual name I put down my username and the claim still was approved.
A game studio is the owner of assets (copyrights) that developers or artists makes. The owner can be organizations or people. An agent is someone that the owner entrusts to manage the copyright. If you’re the owner definitely say you’re the owner because Roblox will be more expedient and waste less time to verify.
Wrong, I tried that in the past (long before I found this tutorial which I reposted to here as this thread) and the support team just repeatedly told me to re-post my ticket under the DMCA claim section (despite the fact that’s where I posted it in the first place.)
Making new tickets as well as replying to the tickets saying that’s the section that it’s (where I put it) in did nothing but get an exact word for word copy paste of the same message over and over.
No idea if that section has changed and if that category gets taken as seriously as its supposed to since I made this thread, but that was my experience thinking it was smart to file a legal request through the alleged “support” section.
Roblox Customer Support is pretty incompetent. I suspect most of them are employees outside of the U.S. and don’t even have training of U.S. copyright laws.
In future takedowns, I might just send them actual physical mail with my DMCA and call their legal office. I feel they Roblox will prioritize my DMCA if I send them via mail and phone because they will literally ignore you in email.
+1 on the copyright department on being incompetent - They’ll allow you to DMCA archived content (even though that’s literally the whole point of archiving) and if you try to contact support about getting the moderation strike removed they’ll insist it was never archived to begin with.
Source: Had this happen to me.
No, this isn’t a case of me forgetting. In march I legitimately had to email the copyright agent an enormous list of hundreds of items from my group that I wanted to archive. They received and acknowledged the list, as well as telling me that I should no longer have any moderation issues with it (ie DMCA claims) - Nothing gets archived, clothing stays up completely untouched two months later (now 4 months in still nothing)
Get hit with a strike in may, tell them “hey there seems to be a mistake, I archived these and was told this shouldn’t be an issue in [ticket number]” and get told that they never got any request to archive it. Repeat myself showing the ticket number again, get an identical copypaste of the previous message. Repeat again and have been getting “we won’t help you, refer to the previous information we sent you” messages ever since.
Two appeal tickets have gone silent out of nowhere for the past 4 weeks now and I’m never getting my account back because of archiving not being a protection against DMCA claims.
I wonder if it would be possible to sue Roblox (or take some other legal action) for not archiving/removing your content after you request it to be taken down?
Legal action could be done if they’re hosting your content somewhere without your permission (hence all the DMCA stuff) so I’d assume that this would fall under that, correct?
