For some background knowledge, the account TooGloomy (originally named sealman4319) was made on March 22nd of 2009. Originally having been made by my brother, he passed the account into my hands in July of 2014 once I stumbled upon an advertisement about ROBLOX on a formerly popular web-based gaming site.
The past 11 months, I have been in constant contact with Roblox regarding the account, but have only been receiving 1 of these 2 messages each time before my ticket became closed.
“Your account was terminated based on our repeat infringer policy, which is explained in our Terms of Use. Roblox respects the intellectual property rights of others and asks that our developers do the same by ensuring that they have permission from the owner for any copyrighted or trademarked content that you did not create or do not own.”
“We’re sorry but we’re unable to provide you with any further information or response regarding this inquiry. We encourage you to review the previous information sent to you as we have provided you with all that we can at this time.”
Over 50+ emails were sent regarding the account’s termination in hopes of an appeal being approved.
Now, for the primary reason of making this document, I need any help that is possible from anyone that is willing to help, TooGloomy was banned due to an issue on Roblox’s end.
On September 26th of 2022, I received a notification that a DMCA takedown request was issued onto my account and have since been given a strike because of it.
Although I was confused as to why an asset that was uploaded half~ a decade ago was struck with a DMCA, I accepted the terms of service and reactivated my account, believing that this strike meant that all the offending content was removed.
On October 22nd of 2022, I logged into my account to see that I had been banned temporarily for copyright infringement. Confused, I immediately emailed Roblox using the support form requesting that the offending items on my account were removed to avoid any sort of future moderation/termination of my account. This is where issues arise.
Now, after sending an appeal in, I was certain I was in the clear and could log into my account in a few days and be worry-free of anymore copyright infringement, as I had no plans on uploading content of any kind.
The appeal was sent in on October 23rd. I believed my account would be safe as I received a follow-up email telling me that the email is being forwarded to a specialist.
On November 10th of 2022, my account was closed due to copyrighted content and my email was responded to a month AFTER the deletion of my account, basically telling me that I was rightfully terminated… despite the email having been sent in regards to getting certain assets deleted.
Here are the most important parts to note;
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I emailed requesting for the removal of the content 3 weeks~ before I was terminated, however never received a response until over a month after I was terminated, in which they only told me I was terminated for copyright infringement.
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These assets were around half a decade old, and to my knowledge, were never put onsale on the platform. They sat in my inventory for the entire time they existed.
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Roblox doesn’t allow you to delete or archive your own creations, had this been an option, I would have been able to delete all of the copyrighted content on my account completely avoiding any of this.
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For the most crucial piece of evidence, Roblox confirms on their DevForums that DMCA strikes will be granted a 45-Day grace period to assist with the removal of any content. September 26th 2022 → October 22nd 2022 = 27 days | October 22nd 2022 → November 10th 2022 = 20 days, I was not given the 45-Day grace period as promised.
TL;DR: I lost an account holding over a decades worth of combined memories because Roblox failed to respond to my emails and failed to hold up their promise of a “grace period”. Lots of issues that could’ve been completely avoided with proper communication from Roblox.