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.
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I thought there already was one for clothing! 
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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…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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They could just apply the Pending Sales system to clothing as well.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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:
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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)
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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.
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I think it’s better to just take the R$ from the clothing thief. Sale of limiteds is a complex task.
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I don’t think you can really do either.
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!
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Just coming back and bumping this to support it. I had no idea how much of a problem this was until recently.
I’m always flustered when someone steals my game, which is a difficult task, and is impossible with the right tactics. But if I were a clothing designer, this would make me hopeless, I might stop making clothing.
I think the “merit system” (similar to models) sounds like it could work. Does anyone know how well that’s worked for models (original vs copied)? I’m unsure how well it’d work when there’s actual money involved. Skids are innovative.
There’s also gotta be a way to undo the damage that these bot groups have done, right? The groups are terminated and the owner madeoff with the loot, but now users are stuck with thousands of pages of the exact same item.
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I think this already is against the rules:
The problem is probably the scale at which it happens. Roblox’s options are to check for exact matches which can by bypassed by changing a pixel, or checking for a % match which would involve comparing the asset to tons of others on the site (requires too many resources). If you report the clothing, can prove you’re the original owner, and Report Abuse works, the copy should be taken down like in the linked tweet.
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Hey… so its just around 4 months now and the copied clothing item, the one linked at the end of the initial post, has remained up on the site.
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It’s been seven months now, and nothing has been said or done - even to the links in the thread! Navigating the catalog is impossible today, and it seems that the blatant mistreatment given to this issue has started to pay off:
- Clothing botters realized that the search algorithm prioritizes word hit count over actual relevance, and more discoveries might be made;
- The tags are constantly updated to reflect the most popular search terms (in some way?);
- There are over TWO MILLION pages of copied clothing, which are potentially occupying disk space that could be used for other asset types and data! Would we really need the transition to int64 if this issue had been mitigated sooner?
This has completely blown out of proportions, and it can’t stay the way it is. It is killing a whole segment of creators while enriching burglars. I would say it is at least disrespectful to the artists’ intellectual properties, not to say it is exterminating them.
Artists are not DevExing out of their work, but botters apparently are? If not through the official process, they are via the limited black market which moves thousands of dollars every year in cover, possibly influencing the whole platform which could give some nasty headaches to the company as it happened to VALVE with the whole gambling incident last year.
I acknowledge that there are open job listings for engineers specialized in dealing with botting, but this is something that only recently has started affecting major websites and still has to come a long way before we start graduating people in this regard - here, the situation needs to be fixed in an immediate manner.
There are plenty of threads with possible solutions. This one, for example, has some, and searching “clothing” in the Developer Forum search bar will yield multiple hits from many different members of the community: some influential and respected, others not so big but with great ideas.
As EgoMoose said in his post, the process doesn’t need to be perfect, but good enough to discourage shady members from spending their resources pursuing this goal. You don’t need to wait for people specifically graduated in the area to deal with the problem, but instead, good ideas need to be applied.
Thanks for reading this post. I apologize for any grammar mistakes.
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Shirts and pants should get their own asset Id just like gamepasses did so that they can be managed easier.
Then just delete all the shirts and pants and restart with a better system 
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It is possible to detect highly similar images without expensively comparing one to millions of others.
A perceptual hash could be generated and stored with every clothing asset, and a select query could be run whenever a new clothing asset is being created to determine if that article has already been uploaded. The hash should only look at the visible parts of the template (hardwiring the template to the system unfortunately), and the resulting image only needs to be scaled down enough to mitigate pixel changes, minimizing inaccurate predictions. This would still allow color shifts and modifications through, unfortunately. Assets detected as being reuploaded too many times should be flagged to at least never show up in search.
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Can’t changing the image threshold make all the colors either black or white. That would fix the color changing issue.
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This is still a major issue, clothing creators are artists too, and at the very least we should have the right to take down stolen clothing if no other solution is available
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