Headdress of Aken-Aten, the Sun King, which uses the lead of the Wikipedia page for Akhenaten as its description. Similarly to Fandom, text on Wikipedia is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and requires attribution.
Hedge Maze, which uses the lead of the Wikipedia page for hedge mazes as its description. Text on Wikipedia is licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and requires attribution.
Masked Hood of the Doomspeaker, which uses the flavor text of the Apocalypse (Tempest) card from Magic: The Gathering as its description. Bottom of the page states that content on the website is licensed under “All Rights Reserved”.
To avoid any copyright infringement, the descriptions for each of these items should be rewritten.
They’re just a small fraction of the work used under these descriptions; most of these being short sentences. They don’t necessarily require attribution and can fall under fair use.
However; an argument can be made for the Headress since it takes a large amount of text from Wikipedia. I think proper attribution is best instead of removing it entirely to preserve it’s history.
They can fall under fair use, but the question is will they? If anyone listed here wanted to take legal action, where the coin lands depends on the court’s subjective decision. Maybe when these items released it wasn’t seen as much of a risk to include a cheeky Magic quote, but these days? Roblox is a multi-billion dollar company using these writings in commercial works. Whether they want to risk a legal battle is their decision.
I understand your perspective and I do agree to some extent. These are just brief descriptions of items though, and I doubt legal action would be taken for something as minuscule as this. (Compared to other mediums Roblox has been in legal trouble with such as music, sound effects, and images.)
I think the best option is to give proper attribution to the source in the description.
That is an option, but only for three of the five items listed in this report. The Kwanzaa Kinara and Masked Hood of the Doomspeaker would still need their descriptions rewritten, since the websites these items took text from to make their descriptions are copyrighted “all rights reserved”.
Maybe, maybe not. It’s possible what seems tiny now could be a small part of a larger case later down the line. All up to Roblox on if they want to take that risk.
Why point users towards a site they have no control over? As much as I support giving credit where due, it seems better to just write new descriptions here. Makes sense for something like software or assets, but it wouldn’t take long to come up with a few snappy lines of flavor text.
I mean this is exactly what happened with the oof sound effect. Tommy Tammarino did not create the sound effect, but had ownership of the media from which it originated. Roblox could have argued that this usage was fair use but instead of going to court (which is a long expensive process) they just ended up removing the sound effect. Copyright is a messy domain and just because you should be able to use something doesn’t mean it is worth it to try and argue that.