Does anybody know what recourse a developer has have when a single company makes repetitive fraudulent/false DMCA takedowns against an account?
I have some clothing assets from an old long-forgotten group which I am no longer able to access. Can’t seem to archive the items or even find more of them, they didn’t appear in my inventory the last time I checked. Unfortunately, these assets have been the target of said company for a while now because the titles share a name with the company (completely unrelated). In their notice they make claims that I am producing and selling counterfeit clothing.
I have successfully fought one of these takedowns previously to have the strike removed from my account. I don’t care if the items are restored are not, I’m more concerned about my account getting terminated from these false claims. Today my account has once again been moderated and assigned a DMCA strike, this time because the same company is trying to take down even more items.
Obviously, I am going to be disputing this recent takedown, but what can be done to prevent this from happening again in the future? I no longer own the group that is selling any of these items, and I’m not able to see any of these items in my inventory to archive them as Roblox suggests. I have already successfully demonstrated that these items do not infringe on their copyright once.
I don’t know what to do short of having a lawyer send a cease and desist to this company, which is not something a Roblox developer should ever have to do to prevent their account from being jeopardized. It’s probably not even worth the time and money. I can’t even work on any of my projects for 3 more days because of the punitive approach Roblox takes with alleged infringement.
Despite the DMCA message from Roblox stating to archive content that may be copyrighted, there is no option to do so and they know about it. You have no way of stopping the claims whatsoever.
Your best option is to either just keep sending counterclaims back over and over, or lawyering up and doing a whole cease and desist and seeing if you can get them to pay most of to all of your legal costs in the lawsuit. (You are technically losing money because of these fradulent claims)
I don’t even know how you got even one counterclaim to work because I’ve had a handful of claims from Nike, some of which were fradulent/fake claims (claiming content that had nothing Nike related in it, nor any company underneath Nike), and trying to counterclaim those false claims were outright ignored (not even mis-handled as most legal tickets are, it was just plain old ignored with zero response)
That’s unfortunate, but I figured that was going to be the case. Support seems to be anything but helpful in DMCA cases.
I was only able to get a counter claim to work after seeking legal advice with regards to the DMCA. They rejected me 2-3 times before that.
That’s not really something a Roblox developer or content creator should have to worry about, but here we are. I understand their legal obligations, but there are many examples of other platforms that handle alleged copyright infringement way better than Roblox does.