The current issue arises as such; creators on the site are uploading their design for shirts, pants and t-shirts constantly. A person (or persons) will see this if it does well, and copy the clothing in its entirety, for a minimum price, in order to outsell/outperform the original for pure profit.
As Tix has been removed, this means only Robux can be spent on clothing/accesories, meaning people are literally paying money for a stolen product. People put time into this, only to be outsold by someone taking the exact copy of their work
If they have a base of fans, they can also get away with something like this;
As much as a developer spends their time on the site making games, clothes/accesory designers spend time on theirs in an effort to enhance the game/create an income on-site.
To further legitimise this practice by allowing them a nomination to the Bloxy Awards seems against everything Roblox stands for.
As developers, we didn’t stand for games being copied, we made an outcry and got results.
We need to have that solidarity for creators of all kinds, otherwise whats the point?
I absolutely support this. The theft of another creator’s content is absolutely unacceptable in all cases.
I would recommend that it should be a terminable offense (is that a word? I think it is) if the copier is found to be undeniably guilty. There’s no room for that kind of behavior on the platform.
Support. I don’t make clothing myself - but I find it hard to believe that they can neglect what has become such a large part of the Roblox Community, it should be treated in the same way as stolen games.
Support. I find it hard to comprehend that when you search for clothing, you have thousands of group clothing that are all carbon copies of each other, and no action was taken.
100% support. We need to be taking ALL of development/creation theft seriously. These bot groups and groups that are running profiting off of stolen game and stolen clothes should be shut down and harsher penalties for those caught stealing other peoples work. It’s bad for the community and has been an issue for years.
Problem: Even if this is deemed ‘against the rules’, it is hard to judge exactly what a copied asset is until someone looks into it. If too much time is taken to identify something as “copied”, some users may have already purchased the stolen assets. That would be a problem if the stolen asset is removed, because users would essentially have lost robux over something that is not necessarily their fault.
A grace period seems like the better solution in this case - once the money has reached the thief, they can further distribute it to someone else. So much like developer products seems good.
You covered the moral standpoint quite well. I’d support a policy change.
It’s also worth mentioning that copied clothing also hinders users from customizing their avatars. I even made a thread about this some time back: Better Searching for Clothing
A change in policy, a system to directly prevent/delete copied clothing, and an increase in moderation against copied clothing could be helpful, but there are other things that can be done. Some of the ideas I suggested in the above thread would be beneficial in reducing clothing copiers. For example…
Create a filter specifically for clothing items, that prevents users from using too many pre-defined tags in a single description. As an alternative, perhaps create a built in tag system for better clothing searches.
Create a Roblox endorsement system, where an endorsed user or group will give their clothing a greater priority of being shown when searching (like endorsed models). Thus legit clothing makers will get more publicity and players know they are buying from somebody who makes their own clothing.
When a group is deleted, also delete all of the clothing made by the group (remove the title/description, and take it off sale). This way groups that mass spam copied clothing are quickly taken care of and won’t show up in searches anymore.
The middle suggestion in particular would be a great solution to copied clothing, in my opinion.
Don’t get me wrong I think this is a good idea but even a grace period seems like it would confuse a lot of users who wake up one morning with their outfit taken from them. Maybe if a message were sent explaining their refund and why the clothing was removed would help, but I feel like this would bring a bad user experience. hmm.
Being a clothing designer myself, It’s extremely frustrating to search up one of my outfits just to find pages of it copied. Designers ARE developers too, I understand it’d be difficult to distinct which outfit was copied and giving punishments, but there needs to be a better solution than to just let it happen.
support! I can’t even find decent clothing anymore without it being 15 to 20 pages of the same shirt but all different groups. it is honestly annoying & also more annoying for the original creator being discredited of their work by some random group.
Definitely support! There are a few problems with enforcing this of course, but I do think they are something that can be solved!
The first and most obvious question is that if this rule is implemented how can Roblox actually moderate it. I would guess thousands of shirts/pants are uploaded daily. In order for a human moderation team to properly do their job they would need to have the entirety of the Roblox catalog memorized to know what was cloned and who was the original creator, etc. So that’s a non-option.
You’d have a similar problem using computers too because there’s just no feasible efficient way you could have a computer accurately check against every single item in the catalog for every single upload.
I do however propose a solution (which I’m sure has flaws so please point them out).
Instate a CAPTCHA when uploading clothing. This will ensure that if clothing copying is happening it is a user manually doing it.
Grace period in which the item shows up on the market but cannot be bought (This isn’t mandatory, but depending how diligent the original creator is it may give less incentive to copy).
Create a new system that allows clothing creators to report what they believe to be a copied version of their clothing. It will work as follows:
The creator submits both the copied shirt and their original creation
A computer checks if the original was uploaded before the copy. If so it continues.
The computer then compares how similar the two images are. This is really the crux of this solution, but I’m sure with a few different algorithms and some statistical tests Roblox could figure out an algorithm that can pretty accurately compare the two images. To be honest even if it was an exact image match algorithm at least it would force the thief to put some effort into changing the image and that would probably be deterrent enough for the mass majority.
If it passes the shirt/pant is removed from the market (or the item is forced off sale, which is prob easier so oblivious users don’t lose their items).
The thief is given a strike and when they have a certain number they are terminated. (strikes only apply on items copied after rule instated?)
In a similar sense it may be worth having a cool-down period if creators spam the features on shirts/pants that didn’t pass to avoid abuse.
Yeah, so i doubt this would be the perfect solution, but at least it allows creators to have some power in their hands. Any thoughts? Other ideas?
Simple example where I took two hoodies from Skyped’s picture:
Yes, they already have a system that automatically accepts a uploaded asset if it has the same pixels.
They should then simply stop any asset with the same pixels being uploaded by anyone but the first creator.
Like you mentioned this would be enough to deter the majority and also make the botting process a lot slower, they would then have to program the bot to add a pink dot in the corner of the template for example)
Additionally, if the copied item of clothing has been sold, the original owner recieves the amount of robux generated from it, either from direct robux, or by the user having limiteds sold.
A lot of these stolen shirts are either uploaded to groups or on proxy accounts. The R$ is then transferred to the main account or laundered. This makes it really hard to trace and even if it could, it becomes a problem of abuse.
The thief could offer a really good trade deal to their target (who is oblivious to the fact they are accepting stolen R$ or laundered limiteds). Or they could transfer group funds to someone they want to target in their group. This makes it look like the target is the thief, but in reality is someone who thinks they just got the best trade deal or a benevolent group owner!
