I am currently one of several developers for a a group of ~2000 members. The group is, for all intents and purposes, the Galactic Clone Army from Star Wars, without the Jedi component. The majority of all our content is derived from the Clone Wars TV series. All of our models, places, and decals, ect. have been hand made from scratch via unions, terrain tools etc. provided by roblox studio and various external design programs for audio and graphics. The group itself has been around since about 2012.
After the recent IP 3 strike policy post I now have five fellow developers who are currently best described as headless chickens, running around in pure and utter terror; as if Cthulhu himself just turned Earth into an Orwellian-Mc Escher dystopia; with the belief that the entire group and everything they have developed for the past few years will be deleted.
Which brings my main question: Do we need to worry about loosing the entire group and years of development work because of this?
So, we haven’t gotten a definite solution to this, however due to EU Article 13, the entire group has decided to make a gradual shift away from being a star wars fan group to a general sci-fi themed group. In that respect I’m marking this issue as solved, simply by averting the entire issue all together.
I don’t think so because you’re not using it for business. As long as you aren’t using the name for marketing or other forms of self-gain, it’s not an IP infringement. That’s like having the username PokemonFan27 on Playstation or Xbox. You can’t get in trouble for using it as a user, but if you start a YouTube channel under the moniker PokemonFan27 and start selling shirts with your face/name on it, then you would run into legal issues.
As for games on Roblox, that’s a different story. I do believe FishEye18 and his friends are relatively safe from DMCA’s. It’s not sure-fire and by no way official confirmation of security but there are many Star Wars-related groups and games on Roblox, and many of them are quite large.
There haven’t been any significant take-downs of popular Star Wars games or groups in the last several years. Granted, it could just be that the games flew under the radar of Disney’s legal department (Disney owns Star Wars), but if Fish’s group/game is anything smaller than a front-page hit, it likely won’t attract the notice of Disney, and thus won’t be sanctioned. As I mentioned earlier, I’m not a legal expert and my opinion is not fact. Assuming that an event will not occur simply based on the lack of observations of said event occurring in the past is naive.
If Fish’s team decides to go out and make their own thing, good for them. If they decide to stick to Star Wars-based content, there are steps they can take to reduce the likelihood of a DMCA complaint (such as modifying the content’s appearance in game).