Glad to see a response to this. Can’t wait to see Tommy in the community.
I am on the side of ROBLOX…
OOF is an iconic sound that has been around for years. It is not the base of Roblox but the subject of memes and just a memory that many of us have. What Tommy is doing is disgusting - threatening to sue a corporation that fosters creativity for children, unless they PAY for a 1-second sound that did not take a LONG LONG time to create. This isn’t an example of abuse of corporate power… it’s called being realistic.
Are we forgetting that these memes and memories, which are an icon of Roblox, have likely helped them positively? The law is the law, regardless.
It doesn’t matter about people’s emotions, or how short the sound is. What matters to the law is that Roblox has been using his sound, aware he owns it. (Hence, technically having a copyright)
As stated in a lot of replies above, this seems to be getting out of hand (information seems to not quite line up). At this point I’m starting to believe that something is going on behind the scenes and I’m not sure what my opinion is anymore. I think I’ll let this play out before I decide anything new.
IMO, I think Tommy is kind of in the wrong for making this whole situation public and adding more flame to the fire. I feel this situation should have been kept private. But then again, he has presented proof on his twitter that he owns the copyright to this sound?
I don’t know man, not the best with copyright.
Just adding to the information here as well as discussing some examples of some neat photo forensics tricks I’ve picked up (for people who want to verify some of these documents), the date in the top right is aligned rather well. (This isn’t really suspicious on its own or anything to me since the dates are so close together, unless its covering something but I kind of doubt that). These dates are 4 days apart so it’s likely this is just due to repeated transferring of the image through different fax machines.
Notice the slant of all text on the page vs the perfectly aligned text in the top right.
Additionally, through artifacting we can sort of date how relatively old the text is by looking at the build up of artifacting (be mindful of ink since this will cause this artifacting meaning it will “spread” through multiple faxes). We can assume the top right portion was faxed very few times however most of the text was faxed frequently. We can also assume this document was faxed several times due to the amount of artifacting around the black header bar.
We can tell for almost 100% certainty the text I was talking about has been faxed due to the artifacting present directly around the text.
The blacked out phone number text is additionally most likely present. We can see some artifacting in certain locations which would suggest a character being there. This tells us the black phone number overlay was added in post (with the red line)
Finally, we can tell this image is most likely unedited (excluding the red marking). All text has artifacting around it and the full image (excluding the red marking) appears to contain only black and white pixels (meaning no text is directly added on top).
In conclusion, this contract appears genuine imo. That or Tommy sent this thing through the fax machine in just the right ways to create this artifacting which I kinda doubt tbh.
P.S. if you’re wondering how I did this, I used paint.net and the Alpha Mask Plugin from boltbait’s pack. I selected all white pixels and all black pixels with the magic wand tool (in this case it made sense to set sensitivity to 0%). I then moved these to their own layers. Next I took the remaining “aliased” pixels, moved them to a new layer, and used the alpha mask plugin to apply transparency.
Here’s my pdn file of what this produced: Contract.pdn (2.0 MB)
As for the copyright office image, this is definitely a digital screenshot taken from (most likely) Windows. We can tell due to the subpixel rendering around the text (this produces weird looking colors. Essentially subpixel rendering treats the red, green, and blue components of each pixel as its own pixel allowing for more accurate text and the colors produced appear to be produced by Windows’ cleartype software, however, this could still be another OS, just probably Windows).
The image appears to be produced in possibly Microsoft word due to the box to the left of the “Declaration of Tommy Tallarico” text appearing similar to word’s rendering of boxes (this is DEFINITELY too abstract to say with any confidence, just my guess). This is most definitely NOT a real document.
Based on the text leaking from under the red coverup there are NOT numbers underneath, in fact it appears that these are just underscores. We can see 1px tall lines spanning 32px in width. The font appears to be rendered in the same dimensions (For example, measure the width of the capital Ts in the image ignoring subpixel rendering. They span EXACTLY 32px in width)
Additionally, in the below image, there is absolutely no plain text character which would follow this shape excluding underscores. I originally thought maybe this was a two, however the two would curve much sooner.
In conclusion, this document is most definitely fake imo and it does it follow the quality or format a government document would.
Diagram/map showcasing what I have pointed out:
Oh my god! That is some good analysis right there
I’m still quite shocked by this situation. I never really thought of Roblox potentially getting into court in any way at all. This whole thing is a mess honestly…
I hope that this problem can be resolved quickly!
this has zero to do with roblox and should be 100% handled between him and the people who sold the liscensed CD
I get roblox doesn’t want to go to court just to clean sweep this guy’s money (Who is, without question or doubt, 100% in the wrong) just to retain rights to a stupid little sound.
But idk. Just seems silly.
I get it’s a bit unfair he gets nothing out of his sound becoming so famous- I just don’t think the onus is on Roblox to give him money for becoming a meme. If he wanted royalties fair and square he would be getting them if he handled his stuff correctly instead of being really weird.
No, I say it would be invalidated due to the claimant of the Copyright not being Shiney itself, but it being Shiny. Also for that seems like it was SHINEY afterall, but in 2003 they changed the company name to SHINY, if you search in the copyright catalog for Shiny Entertainment, you’ll find out that it copyrighted in 2003 in the same location as Shiney, and then they also copyrighted Messiah(as a document(?)) so, if the document was created before the 2000s it shouldn’t have Shiny, but it should have Shiney.
So, I’m just gonna drop some knowledge for everyone that’s been following this case, as it seems a lot of people have been running with my series of tweets trying to get to the bottom of everything going on. Some people have just used my tweets as a talking point to start with, and others have flipped it 180 and went the wrong direction.
Tommy, made this tweet, with a picture that is to be used as “Proof” that he’s registered the copyright of the Oof (or in his case, Uuhhh, as it was named in Messiah) sound file. The reason why Tommy NEEDS to register his copyright, is NOT because he doesn’t "currently own the copyright. At this point, the Owner of the Oof/Uuhh (from here out, I will only refer to it as Oof) is up for some line of debate. Tommy is right that once something is created, so is the copyright for that item, and owner is whoever created it. Tommy needs to register the copyright for the sake of going to court. If your copyright is NOT REGISTERED, it cannot be established in court, and therefore he has no lawsuit.
However, here’s a few things to note about his “Submission Form” as he’s claiming it.
So, going over a few bullet points here:
- What is this excerpt cut from?
- Why is there no US Copyright Office crest on the page?
- Why is Correspondence spelled wrong?
- Why is the format of things wrong compared to examples?
- Why is the Case No. (something that will be public domain anyways) crossed out?
Now, let’s break down what I think versus what I’m being told by Tommy.
- Tommy claims this is something his team submitted to the Copyright Office.
- I believe this isn’t true, because:
– Why would it have a USCO Header on it?
– Why would it have a Correspondence ID?
— - Correspondence IDs are something the USCO office uses as a form of book keeping so they know if a Copyright Request has been processed or not. They have the ability to go through everything they’ve ever mailed out, to make sure they know exactly what they said / didn’t say to someone submitting a copyright claim. Tommy’s Team would not put one of these on their own submission.
- Why is there no US Copyright Office Crest on the page?
- This is how something from the USCO, like the letter appears to claim to be, should look like:
3/4. Well, there’s a bit more than just Correspondence being mis-spelled now…
Correspondence is spelled like so. Correspondance is not an “alternative” spelling. It’s a common mis-spelling, but that does NOT, mean that it’s an alternative. And as we can see, on a REAL letter from the USCO, they spell it right.
But not only do they spell it right. They also call it a “Correspondence ID” not a “Correspondence ID No.” meaning not only the spelling from the letter is wrong, the whole format is wrong.
- Well, there can only be 1 explanation
- It’s a dead lie. The document is a falsification. It’s the only reason he’d want to block out the case number.
Now, here’s time for my bold claim on the whole situation.
Tommy is currently being directed by one of the two following initiatives:
A. Tommy has no claim to this copyright, and his Attorney that he loves to claim is the best in the world, realizes this, and is telling Tommy to make as much noise as possible to try and get Roblox to just pay to get rid of him.
B. Tommy has no attorney, or a really awful one, because if Tommy had any real claim, the attorney would just explain how they’ll win in the court room not on Twitter.
I think he’s going for the A, and it really tells in his tweets. He is constantly talking how much he doesn’t want to go to court, and it’s likely because he has no claim.
But hey, that’s just a theory. A Twitter Theory. Thanks for reading.
Oh, and on one last note, even if Tommy somehow wins this, he’s already lost, at least in the eyes of many. He has lost the respect of many young minds who will one day take over his role in the game development community. It’s quite sad to think someone with such a stature as his, has resorted to telling off children from the ages of 8 to 14 as apart of his case against Roblox, but, that’s just the way it goes, I suppose.
Does not people not seeing what is going? Is folk that blind that they can’t even see that post is full of lies? Roblox here is trying to get people to believe that they didn’t steal it! You got it from a CD-ROM with licensed, free royalty music? That’s okay, but the creator of the of that CD-ROM may just have stolen it, the sold it, then got Roblox to buy it, and now this is happen. Even if Roblox loses this (because they may do, because KreekCraft got loyal proof and is gonna be there under the court) they still have to pay like between x3 - x10 more than they could have done if they just bought that sound. I’m on Tommy’s side.
Seems very odd that it’s a misspelling on every copyright declaration they have, even having the company name registered as SHINEY
And considering the actual name Shiny was registered years after.
Even so, the simple fact of a misspelling would make the entry invalid, right? I mean since there’s supposedly no Shiney Entertainment.
I’ve got results from 1994 here
EDIT: screenshot because the search tool puts session IDs in the URL #govermentWebsite
This is the copyright office’s site. Wasn’t that search result just created by the misspelling on the registration for Messiah?
I don’t know, would it? What are we even arguing now, that Shiny/“Shiney”'s copyright registration for Messiah is invalid? That has nothing to do with whether the sound effect has a valid copyright by Tommy.
No. He has enough proof of him, own the sound effect.
Nobody is denying he made the sound, however it is unclear who legally owns the sound.
There is varying evidence and many complications— ranging from Tommy’s activity on Twitter, to the fraudulent nature of his copyright registration.
I don’t know, would it? What are we even arguing now, that Shiny/“Shiney”'s copyright registration for Messiah is invalid? That has nothing to do with whether the sound effect has a valid copyright by Tommy.
If the company name is actually Shiney, that makes his entire contract invalid(which could still be invalid because there’s only proof it exists, not that it’s signed.)
And just the way he’s handling this situation is very sketchy, he’s now always on twitter or doing interviews about it, always ready for the next one. Censoring Correspondence ID was also really suspicious and if it was a document made by his “lawyer”, they would know that there’s no point to censor it.
This really wouldn’t be too hard to do with some money and infrastructure behind,
Many other corporations already implement similar systems using AI learning to stop copies in their tracks even if somewhat altered to throw them of the scent.
And roblox’s can’t even tell when two images are the same?
Roblox already employ this on a level when it comes to moderation. Infact, under the Fairplay Alliance, I believe they’ve opened up their Image Recognition Software for use. The only reason why they aren’t using it under moderation, is the heavy toll it’ll have on the system. Let’s be real here, there are likely over 10 million shirts and pants (probably more) and if it still takes time for Roblox to go through normal moderation on current items, it’s going to take exceptionally longer to not only locate UGC but also establish whether its a copy or not.
There’s also the issue of establishing what the original maker of shirt or pants were, as if this wasn’t checked, you could end up where the original maker’s copy gets taken down and another individuals is still up. There’s a lot more that goes into the system, than just analysing an image.