There’s been a lot of stuff related to copyright on roblox coming out in the last year, and I still don’t get whether it is the uploader or the developer that is generally responsible for if a copyright is violated from a model or audio uploaded. If an audio is uploaded to the roblox website by somebody, not labeled as copyrighted, and then a developer uses it in their game, is the developer made responsible even though they don’t really have access to knowledge of if the audio is copyrighted/its source (especially if the audio name on roblox isn’t the original audios name)? Does it change for audio versus decals versus models?
Secondly, if the developer were to be at fault, and if it were a case of audio, if the dev were to supply a music list in their game that gave links to the music Ids, would that protect them from being struck because there isn’t any reason that the striker wouldn’t instead communicate to the uploader or roblox itself about the upload?
I’m not trying to say that adding something saying what music is would make you invulnerable to copyright, though some composers say “you can use my music/content as long as you give credit and the name of the song”. I know there will (probably) still be someone at fault, and what i’m asking is whether it would be you, the user of the audio, or the person who originally uploaded it to roblox.
My understanding, from the announcements made at the time of the licence with APM and all the copyright stuff:
If the audio is free to take / public domain on Roblox then it’s the uploaders fault if it is not supposed to be there. They are stating that the audio is licenced to be used by anyone on the platform when they choose to make it free.
As the developer, the primary check to see if you can play audio that isn’t uploaded by yourself is whether it’s free to take or not. If you play audio that is not free to take, then it’s your fault if it infringes copyright.
Therefore, if you’re making a radio, you should have the free to take check run every time your game plays the audio to ensure the status hasn’t changed.
Well, it depends on what you are making. Roblox allows creations of items in companies, as long as the name isn’t directly taken from a certain item in the company. So what I mean is that if you make a NASA spaceship, then you should name it something else, because ROBLOX is aware of the fact that you copied the name of that item. It’s like jailbreak; they recreated the batmobile and named it something else. Same applies to every other thing on Roblox. There are users out there who didn’t responsibility for the copyright issues, and as a result their account got terminated and Roblox possibly could’ve gotten sued for it. And yes, this actually happened.
For audio, copyright is a big issue because you have stolen and downloaded files, and when they are published, Roblox will most likely know if it is copyrighted. I’d suggest not to download files and find other ways to upload the audio instead of inserting the file. For decals, it doesn’t apply to audio. You can download a file from Google, but the content should be appropriate for all users, and they won’t care if you do that, especially with the fact that most developers including me use these images to make logos or for other reasons like implementing them into models or games. So it’s essential to remember these when uploading audio or any models.
I was looking for a method to have scripts check if something is onsale (what I was about to ask for in my previous deleted post), and I found that this method works to check if something is public domain, thought it’d be useful to other people:
if game:GetService(‘MarketplaceService’):GetProductInfo(id).IsPublicDomain==false then return end, id being what your argument is for the id.
I’m going to leave this marked as solved for now, if anyone can confirm some of the stuff @BanTech said with experience then that would be very helpful (not saying anything is wrong, just I can’t find any announcements giving any clear answers on whether free to take audios are safe and copyright strikes on here aren’t the sort of thing that there is any sort of “forgiveness” for yet)
edit: Apparently the script i mentioned in here was incorrect, should be fixed now
Check out the description of “Allow Copying” in asset configuration settings. By ticking that, the asset creator explicitly allows everyone on roblox to use it without restrictions, so you are good.