Remove Account Bans on Copyright Violations

I just got a copyright strike on my account for an asset which I do not know the contents of because it was automatically deleted by Roblox; the issue - is that I am unable to remove any more assets that may be within the realm of copyright violation BECAUSE I do not have access to them as I am banned.

These assets were uploaded many years ago. I want the ability to archive/delete these assets so that I can avoid these strikes and unwarranted termination; BUT, I cannot because I am banned.

I would appreciate the removal of these bans so it can give me the chance to remove copyrighted contents and so that it doesn’t disrupt my workflow.

76 Likes

There’s a grace period after your ban ends where you won’t get another strike:

So this is not an issue. You just work with them to get all the old copyrighted content removed from your account and it shouldn’t happen again (assuming you now properly respect the rights of other copyright holders).

6 Likes

This is still an issue - no other platform removes your ability to access the contents which was copyrighted and more importantly other contents which may infringe the copyright of others. Although, this is a side-topic of the original post and not the main point of interest.

Grace period or not removing your access to all (or most - specifically the inventory APIs) APIs is not fit for the type of action that has taken place.

17 Likes

Roblox deletes this for you, you shouldn’t need to take any further action.

You can do this after your ban ends? Not sure what the issue is here.

There definitely should be a punishment on copyright violation, it’s against the law and against the TOS. If your feature request is that you want to be able to access and delete your content when you are banned/terminated, you should phrase your feature request accordingly or file a new one and be more specific about that.

6 Likes

The punishment is the strike: that itself is more powerful than the ban. To me there’s no warning whatsoever.

It is absolutely suitable to produce another feature request specifically for the issue of accessing contents and working with them - so I’ll follow up on that.

Not going to continue the banter on whether this makes sense - that is up to the inherited subjectiveness of the topic.

22 Likes

I agree with this. As an older user, you can have some audio you uploaded as a child with no clue that it’s copyrighted. Then all of a sudden, 5 years down the line, your account randomly gets a strike/ban because of said audio. The issue is there’s no warning when you may receive the strike - which can be avoided ahead of time if you were given a warning on which audios are infringing copyright.

There definitely needs to be some sort of warning (not a random ban of your account) so you can prevent a strike on your account for something you uploaded years prior.

31 Likes

I would like to pitch in here: my case is very minor since I can reopen/resend my ticket but it still presents a problem nonetheless. When I can, I try to take down my own content that may potentially violate IP from my profile that I uploaded some years back not knowing better.

Roblox has (or had) a content removal line at ip_content_removal@roblox.com in which you could send in potentially infringing content to be removed from your profile with no ban risk. It’s still fairly unknown and new but I sent an email pretty much right as it opened (the email is dated March 22nd, 2019, 4:24 PM EST). I filed content that I reuploaded from other Roblox users and other media venues.

Here’s the problem though: 2 years, 3 months, 1 week and 3 days later none of the assets I’ve sent in for deletion have been removed which still make me liable to a strike which can be permanently damaging to my career. I’d prefer that assets uploaded from when I didn’t know better and even tried to get removed not affect my career going forward; and I try to be aware of violations where possible as well as go through proper licensing procedures to obtain assets I want to upload and use.

I get the stance offered earlier that you can just work with Roblox after the grace period or not upload anything that you don’t know the licensing circumstances of, something I’ve told others before as well, but what about people like me who never had access to this information in… say, early Roblox days? Something I did in the past or an unknown violation can permanently impair me on the platform, there’s not even an expiry on them unlike various other platforms that also issue copyright strikes but take down your content for you (e.g. YouTube).

A heads up would be great. I’m not looking forward to the day where I get my first strike (which will happen, just not sure when) because I never got a warning, some past content I uploaded slipped by me, the nature of copyright changed for a certain asset or my request to remove IP infringing content from my account never got answered (and I’m afraid a repeat email would be considered spam and the ticket would be closed as a result).

26 Likes

Especially because they don’t even give us the ability to permanently delete assets whatsoever. At one point in time, I believe they had some sort of customer support pipeline that we could use to ask that they delete the assets, but that’s tedious, unintuitive, not scalable at all, not displayed prominently, and I’m not sure that it’s even still a thing.

14 Likes

Im scared Roblox are going to copyright strike me for music I’m the legal owner of.

But yea, locking off access to the Inventory API is a very weird choice considering the user may want to see it to remove other copyrighted assets.

11 Likes

I’m not sure what’s going on with the ip_content_removal line but support has been responsive to my emails albeit poorly. When faced with such a high priority issue, there should be some signal and understanding from support. When support isn’t properly processing my requests, not only am I at risk from prior mistakes but also because of support’s unwillingness to cooperate.

I recently contacted support to reopen my ticket but they couldn’t find that so asked for the ticket id again (which I already provided) or a list of assets I wanted taken down alternatively. I provided the list of assets I wanted taken down but Roblox told me that they can’t - rather won’t - cooperate because I can archive some of the assets myself. This is incredibly stupid - just because a few assets can be archived, they deny my whole request rather than processing the ones that can’t be.

I’ve had email chains like this frequently with support because they aren’t processing my requests properly. For an unrelated issue, I had up to 14 emails for a problem I couldn’t resolve on my own before they closed the ticket and were unwilling to cooperate.

If support is unwilling to cooperate for issues we can’t rectify, then we should not be paying such a harsh price - bans for copyright violations need to disappear or there needs to be a sounder solution to dealing with copyright infringement on the platform, especially since it’s being taken more seriously than many years back. Developer accounts are valuable and I don’t want someone effortlessly pulling the trigger on my account for a pure mistake I made when I knew no better.

There’s no respect to developers from the product and customer support teams and you can’t get anything done reasonably without an inside contact. These two teams in particular are incredibly disrespectful to the community and have been the cause of my many stress-filled moments being a Roblox developer. I want to work with them in good faith to resolve issues I can’t, but they don’t want to work with me. Crazy how that is.

36 Likes

Got this message today about a Free to use sound I uploaded in September of 2017… yet they show NO information of what it even is. Why is this such an issue… I can only assume what it is because I only have 10 sounds uploaded to my account and they are all free to use background music…

12 Likes