I agree with what you’re saying as a short-term solution
I’m not a lawyer, but an “elaborate plan”-type solution like what @Anaminus is proposing would let creators legally upload content licensed for only a single end product–that includes most sounds from marketplaces like AudioJungle or PremiumBeat. Uploading that sort of audio to Roblox is a license violation, as there’s a good chance that the sound will be used in another game.
In a nutshell: We can’t have nice things because other people might take our nice things, which violates the licenses we have with the people who make our nice things. Implementing a reasonable audio protection policy would solve that.
To be honest I thought it was already long gone. It always seemed like an accidental leftover from the catalog, because it doesn’t do much in the library besides make it easier to use assets people probably don’t want you using.
I don’t feel like a thief if I search the library for a water splash sound effect and use it because I don’t want to find it somewhere else and spend robux to upload it.
I’ve expressed my feelings about asset protection many times before, but this is getting out of hand.
It seems as if asset protection isn’t being taken seriously at all.
See that checkbox? Why does it even exist? I mean really, asset stealing has become so easy and casual that it doesn’t even come off as stealing. I wouldn’t be surprised if more than half the people stealing assets don’t even know they’re stealing an asset.
(gif example using a free asset, click to view)
Stealing an asset is as easy as clicking on what you want and grabbing the content(not sure if this is a R+ feature or not).Stealing something shouldn’t be as easy as “find on website, copy ID, insert into studio, call it mine”.
Excuse my language, but this is absolute bullshit. @SmoothBlockModel expresses my stance perfectly:
Private assets shouldn’t be stored in a public place period.
The “show unavailable items” checkbox shouldn’t even exist in the Develop tab.
The idea isn’t to make stealing an asset impossible(which is nearly impossible in itself), it’s to make asset stealing impractical.
This needs to be enforced, as I said before it’s almost as if no one gives a shit. If people had a reason to be afraid of stealing an asset, I doubt we’d see as many people doing it as we do now.
All in all, I’m tired of hearing excuses. The last thing I need is to spend hours and hours working on an asset, having someone click 3 times to steal it, call it their own, then have me accused of stealing my own asset just because they released a game using said asset before I did.
(excuse my rant, this is just a very serious issue in my eyes)
Since ROBLOX altered their ToS, we still keep ownership of our intelectual content.
Unless I’m wrong, that includes meshes, pictures, audio, code, … almost everything we upload.
That should give us the ability to tell ROBLOX “this is stolen from me, take it down”.
It would be especially nice if the money earned from the stolen asset is given to the rightful owner:
I can’t say “you stole this” if I ever made it free
A nice addition would be that we can give a license for a certain price.
If the buyer doesn’t fulfil the requirements, we can report it and get that full price, as if the asset is stolen. (if he doesn’t (fully) pay for it, he/she did basically steal it anyway)
If you stole e.g. a song from me and I report it, your place gets placed under review.
If the song plays a big part in the game, 30% of the past revenue goes to me, 5% if it wasn’t that important. (Customer Service / Asset Moderators would determine that, acting as a neutral third party) (could be any value between 5% and 30%, or even different limits than those)
Only after the asset is removed from the game, can it be taken out of “under review”
If it’s a group game and group funds don’t suffy for the past X% revenue, the group owner contributes.
If the place/group owner doesn’t have enough, 50% of all his future revenue will pay for these “debts”.
If you have several debts (hmm, suspicious), it’s still 50%, which will be divided by amount in debt.
There’s always the risk of the user just making a new account, but at that point, we reached the limit.
This’ll make ROBLOX seem more profesional, while also lowering thefts.
(there’ll always be someone stealing something, stopping everything is impossible)
If a game doesn’t get reported (by the owner of the stolen asset), nothing happens.
This gives new people the ability to make small games (for friends) using private decals/music etc.
If your place becomes popular or just attracts the asset owner’s attention, and he reports… then it happens.
sitting in a boring lecture, I have plenty of time to write stuff like this
Unlisted: doesn’t appear anywhere, but can be used in-game (and thus still stolen) For modulescripts, this would actually still show them, but copylocked, for require(assetid)
Private: doesn’t appear anywhere, only the owner (or group asset editors) can use it in-game For modulescripts, this would hide it, it’ll only be require(assetid)-able inside “owned” places (being by the asset owner / by the group the modulescript is uploaded to, maybe asset editors too?)
(“doesn’t appear anywhere” obviously doesn’t apply for the owner or, for groups, group asset editors)
Would solve the “stolen during testing” issue, and it being unlisted is also a very nice bonus.
Might require an easy way of selecting several assets at once and switching the mode. (or an overview of all assets linked to an universe, where there’s a “switch all” option for the mode)
People are not going to want to pour hours of their time into unique and awesome assets if they can just be stolen by someone in a matter of seconds. If we really are serious about ROBLOX wanting to start producing high quality games then ROBLOX should take steps to preventing this sort of thing. Just like no one would want to make a game if their game could be easily stolen and then republished, assets should be the same. If an asset is not copylocked, it’s like that purposefully. Copylocked means copylocked. It means I do not want people having it. Easy methods of obtaining these assets should be patched up. Look at what happened to deadzonezack. ROBLOX failed to prevent his game from spreading and he got up, left, and found major success elsewhere.
I’m going to throw my two cents in here, without looking much at previous posts, so I apologize if this has already been stated.
The way I see it, there are 2 primary problems with how ROBLOX is handling assets.
1: Users can use the catalog to search for items that aren’t marked as free, and best of all, they can filter it down to a specific user.
2: AssetId is based on an incremental counter rather than a random number generator. Tom Scott made a video that covers why this is a problem:
Isn’t most of this fixed by the ability to upload assets such as images directly to the game? I mean, all we need is an ability to do that for audio and it seems like nobody can easily take your stuff?
This is to avoid the race condition that other users can take assets before they are made private.
We could have a period of time where all existing assets were marked as “free, non-takeable” by default. Concurrently, we would allow assets to be used according to the existing rules. Assets marked as “private, old” would generate warnings to the users and optionally developers. Phase 2 would promote “free, non-takeable” to “free, takeable” and would disallow “private, old” assets from being used by other users. During both phases, users would be able to upload new assets as “free, takeable” or “private, new”.
It may also be useful for devs to know what assets they actually use that are non-taken. This would allow them to quickly determine which assets they need to work around because they are now private, as well as which ones they need to take in order to avoid problems that could occur if the original dev decides to pull a “left pad”.
Well anything important was already told here .i can truly only agree to most solutions .
Including that the “show unavailable items” button shouldn’t exists at all .
We seriously need far more protection of our Assets since the amount of asset thievery is just silly.
