Question About A Trademark Strike

Help and Feedback Platform Usage Support
#1

Hello,

I’m writing this is say I received a Trademark Strike on an item I had already archived and I’m unsure if this would be equivalent to a DMCA strike that results in a termination if I receive 3 in total

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My concern here is something that I uploaded in 2018 that was archived had received a strike, I’ve gone ahead and contacted Roblox with a list of assets I think would be infringing on copyright, like many others I’ve uploaded adidas and Nike stuff years ago, which I’ve since learned from.

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So, is this basically just letting me know the asset was removed or is this a strike? If so, why would I be getting a strike if it was archived prior to the strike, by all means I want these deleted

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How to Archive Avatar Items
#2

I’m not quite sure either. You can try to contact Support to clarify your question.

Before you archive these assets yourself or request for these assets to be deleted, you can try renaming the ingringing content to something random (like a period) to prevent it from being flagged by AI Moderation.

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#3

Probably what the person above me said, AI moderation, basically detected keywords by AI, if it was archived, it would not be visually visible to anyone besides those who own the asset, so a chance is some AI scanned a bunch of item names and detected “pikachu” as infringing.

If it was a DMCA, you would’ve got a message mentioning it was such, I asked a similar question before involving audio

To simplify, DMCA strikes are direct take-downs from IP holder and are taken seriously, meanwhile moderation sometimes auto-detects copyrighted content and deletes it on it’s own without giving a strike and instead a warning or a community guidelines message

are you sure it was really archived? or could it have been simply off-sale?

The post about the archive system mentions this

“but your decision to archive the item will be considered when applying any account penalties related to the IP report.”

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Ability to Archive Clothing Assets
#5

Thank’s for the reply, I really appreciate the help.

Regarding the violation, all I received was an email saying you violated tos, when I appealed it changed to intellectual property right, since it was probably flagged for the name like you said, however it was for a user + adidas logo

I feel like it’s just telling me not to do it, since there was no warning or ban to click, it was simply telling me it was delete

Do you recommend I should also be changing the name of any development images, or I can leave those be? I’ve gone ahead and changed, off saled, and archived all the infringing content by renaming them to “.” (All Classic 2D Clothing Types)

To Summarize: My concern is, do I still need to contact support to remove the images themselves that Roblox stores on the development items tab or change their name, I have a bunch of them, in my case the good news is I never actually got any sales on these assets.

I’m a bit worried now since I contacted support about items that are already unlisted, so maybe they can fully delete them.

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#6

If you had no mentions of DMCA whatsoever, it’s likely automated and yes I think any copyrighted/trademarked names should be changed.

I think the copyright_agent email is not in service anymore, unfortunately, I am annoyed by that too

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#7

Hi there,

Actually, yes, the Copyright Agent email does work. Use copyright_agent@roblox.com.
Make a list of items you want archived and send them over.

It may take time for them to reply.

If you have already made a request for an asset to be archived and it got taken down for copyright, email the copyright agent again with the asset ID and the moderation ID that you received.

For my experience they said no consequences will be applied, after I followed all the steps beforehand, but it is still muddled and a little confusing.

Yes. Big companies use keywords to detect their IP, whether the actional asset is actually the IP or not. For example the International Olympic Committee will take down anything titled or named “Olympic” even if the asset is not the olympic rings or any IOC image. Dis-name the assets if you can.

Roblox only fully deletes an asset if it has been moderated. Archiving is designed to unlist items from the catalog. It balances it out by making the asset invisible to users who do not own it while still having it available for those who bought it with robux, while giving the creator some peace-of-mind that they understood they made a mistake and aim to fix it.

Just keep in mind that the Roblox Copyright Agent is very opaque and does not answer questions fully. I am just sharing knowledge I have assembled together from my own experience and from the experience of others.

One last thing:

I noticed the assets removed were Pikachu shirts.
If you search up “Pikachu” in the catalog under classic shirts there is only a handful left.
There probably used to be hundreds of pages full. It was a mass purge all in one swoop.

3 Likes
#8

Yep, it seems your intuition was correct

please see below

https://www.reddit.com/r/ROBLOXBans/comments/1i8h2jm/so_roblox_out_of_the_blue_decided_to_remove_a/?rdt=57283

The Problem: Yes I agree with it being deleted by all means

The Concern: Do these follow the 3 strike rule?

Biggest Concern: what do I do about assets in this category, every file uploaded/template is also is stored in the following section, here is a reference for example

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So what do I do about archiving these/actions to take, can I also be receiving a violation again for the same asset if the bot finds it in the template section as well, or is it basically bound?

I have items in the past that were uploaded via group that are now abandoned, but yet I still have the templates stored, not the clothing, I may be beating around the bush here, however I will once again express my uneasiness in if the assets in this section are also treated as a risk, since they cannot be archived.

I’ve always been successful in contacting support, however this time I have yet to receive an email from any of the 3 in over 2 days

If anyone knows about the developmental section, or has any additional correspondent, please enlighten me

1 Like
#9

I don’t know about the underlying asset for classic clothing.
According to the FAQs when the Archive feature was announced, the underlying image asset will “continue to exist, and the archived avatar item can still be inserted via Studio if the assetID is known.”

That fact may be concerning, but if Roblox is true to their word that if a marketplace asset is archived then no consequences will be placed on your account, then it shouldn’t matter.

The only thing is there doesn’t seem to be a total 100% clarity on anything and everyone has reason to distrust Roblox considering how many times they do mess up and how long it took for an archive feature for avatar items to be available for people to use.

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#10

I don’t think trademark violations terminate your account after 3 strikes and only IP Violations. I could be completely wrong but i believe trademark is not a request from the copyright holder

I got no information on this but i saw many people have multiplie deleted assets and they werent terminated yet

Also after looking it seems like that archived assets can still get moderated which is stupid

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#11

yeah, it sucks unfortunately, which primarily reason for me posting, I had received this trademark violation on an item that had already been archived for months, with 0 sales and off sale since at least 2018.

When I tried to appeal it, I got slapped with an intellectual property violation, despite the trademark violation.

So, at this point in time it’s safe to say that the ai moderation bot bypassing the unlisted/archives and will still moderate it even if it’s archived, however I can’t say whether or not it’s only via item descriptions.

Technically my situation counts as Roblox taking moderation action themselves on my already unlisted assets, it would be a dif story if this was just off sale, but the fact of the matter is not only did I get the trademark violation on the asset that was archived, it was also upgraded to an IP because I appealed with something along the lines of this counting as a moderation action against my account.

Lots of people on January 23rd got these violations between 3 - 6 pm est.

Side Note: I heard people say it’s not even safe to appeal though the help/violations page, as they upgrade the consequences, and change the moderation reason whenever you reply to them, then they block you from appealing again on that action.

I get moderation has it’s up’s and downs, in the past moderation in terms of me reaching out to them as gone smoothly, however for the first time ever I can say that I’m feeling that many of us are being lied to about this feature, or maybe the ai bot’s aren’t updated yet to function properly with unlisted items.

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#12

Email the Copyright Agent directly.
I think the appeal is geared toward restoring the asset. That’s not the goal. The goal is to make sure an archived asset doesn’t count toward genuine moderation.

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#13

I think what is being said here that the asset will be taken down, but won’t result in any consequences since its archived. The part “will be considered” leaves a bit of ambiguity that is concerning.

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#14

Do you know roughly how long the agent takes to respond, it’s almost been 48 hours with no reply to say it’s still in queue

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#15

Depends on the email.

For any general request to have assets archived the response could take days to months.

For this particular issue with the Pikachu stuff its been a few hours.

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#16

Makes sense,

Mine was regarding multiple, idk how I would cancel a support ticket though, the one I sent off to normal support I won’t be needing

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#17

Start a new one. Once its sent, its sent. You’re always free to just send a new one.
The worst they can do is just reply with a canned response.

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#18

I want to note I’ve seen DMCAs and non-DMCA related reports be called IP Violations

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#19

If this is the case, only a human/company can issue this, and it would mean that the ai bot is just flagging the name as the trigger word

So, I think we should be ok for this one, I don’t know about your situation, but the “pikachu” one was a mass moderation wave, all users effected also had the same couple of issues,
Here is a brief summary:

1: Getting an Email by Roblox saying you violated TOS “does not mention anything about DMCA or future consequences”

2: In the violation/appeals tab it will include the “asset id, it will not delete the unlisted item at all, the item will still exist, you will just be prompted with a violation of either intellectual property or trademark violation

3: The Ai will think that the asset isn’t already archive and reunlist the item, which may actually be a bug, the asset I removed didn’t have its thumbnail or anything deleted, it was reenlisted by the ai moderation after already being unlisted (the ai already deleting assets/moderating them twice may still be an issue)

4: If you tell the ai to keep the item moderated but remove the moderation you will have yours upgraded from trademark violation to a IP

5: The bot doesn’t delete the item it says broke community guidelines it rearchives it, the name wasn’t even hash tagged after it was moderated

What steps for Roblox to take?

The Simple Solution: Instead of unlisting, we should have an option that would allow us to select whether or not we want to download our archived asset onto our computer, and that all archived assets would not only be unlisted it would be wiped off the platform, with the exception that you can opt in per asset archived if you want to download it’s file to your computer before it being permanently deleted.

Questions people might ask: But what if I get compromised, for that maybe someone else has a good idea for what Roblox could do to prevent people from abusing this feature if they get compromised

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#20

This will most likely be my last post on this thread

Here is my conclusion:

Roblox appears to be doing trademark / ip infringement violation wave with it’s ai past few days, make sure if you have any assets named “pikachu” or a brand like “coca-cola” etc, you need to change the name to “.” ASAP. Even if archived you can get flagged by ai bot if the name isn’t changed, and that the bot can always re moderate it since the ai is reunlisting the item, instead of fully deleting it.

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#21

This has been pretty much done for a couple of years, a friend had copyrighted audio that was private and it was taken down despite the private status and gibberish titles, it’s all automated, DMCA’s are human-made and taken seriously which is why it’s a strike system

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