welp, back to the classic new tab on browser and play song while playing games
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Why are we never linked what section of the terms this breaks?
It’d be helpful to us to know exactly where in the Terms it was and possibly how long it has been implemented.
We’re left to assume which term is being referred to.
Which I'm assuming it's these
-
UGC Representations and Warranties; Rights in UGC.
(a)You are solely responsible for your UGC and you represent and warrant that:
(b)You are the creator and owner of, or have the necessary licenses, rights, consents, and permissions, to use and to authorize us to exploit the license that you grant to us hereunder; and
(c)Your UGC, and the use of your UGC as contemplated by these Terms, does not and will not: (i) infringe, violate, or misappropriate any third-party right, including any copyright, trademark, patent, trade secret, moral right, privacy right, right of publicity, or any other intellectual property or proprietary right; (ii) slander, defame, libel, or invade the right of privacy, publicity or other property rights of any other person; (iii) require Roblox to obtain any further licenses from or pay royalties or compensation or other amounts or provide any attribution to any third parties; (iv) result in a breach of contract between you and a third party; or (v) cause us to violate any law or regulation.
(d)You must not Provide any UGC if you are not the owner of or are not fully authorized to grant rights in all of the elements of the UGC you intend to Provide. In addition, if you only own the rights in and to a sound recording, but not to the underlying musical works embodied in such sound recordings, then you must not Provide such sound recordings unless you have all necessary rights, authorizations and permissions with respect to such embedded musical works that grant you sufficient rights to grant the licenses to Roblox under these Terms. You agree to pay all monies owing to any person as a result of Providing your UGC.
But, because we aren’t told specifically, I’m not positive.
There’s so much in the terms that it isn’t exactly easy to quickly sift through to find something specific relating to certain topics.
More ontopic to the music;
The library of music is wonderful for devs to not worry about copyright, but it is kinda daunting to search through, any future plans to make it easier to sift through specific genre’s and possibly artist?
And as it’s been mentioned before, this really will make Radio Gamepasses not worth it to the user. Regardless of the developer (and the implementation of the songs provided.) People buy these gamepasses to play whatever they want, and specifically their favourite songs or just troll songs, not to play a specific list of songs set by the developer.
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Section 3 (“Music Incorporated in Your UGC”) has the new information that is also provided in this thread. Section 5 is indeed related to whenever anyone refers to the fact that you may only upload and use properly licensed music on Roblox. Anything else that you are missing specifically?
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Two questions:
- Are us developers liable for when a player plays copyrighted assets in-game (Akin to the same punishment/moderation for what users used to make in a personal server)? Specifically, what happens when a player plays a copyrighted sound in-game w/a tool we provide (E.g. A boombox)? Are we required to proactively moderate against copyrighted sound usage in our game by the players?
- Does the limit w/250 copyrighted sounds in a game apply to what can be present in the game at any given moment, or only when the game is published (E.g. Sounds in an active server). Reason I ask this is because it’s easy for us (The developers) to limit the amount of sounds we use when a game at the time of publish, but if users use a tool like a boombox, it can potentially exceed the maximum allowed sounds. In our game specifically, we allow users to save/retrieve sound ID’s, but they can only play one at a time.
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I think Buildthomas answered question 2 in this reply:
(emphasis mine)
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You need to ensure that this is not possible. You can do this by not allowing players to play any audio that is not labelled as “Free” in the library (check with GetProductInfo) and making sure that your players can only play from a fixed subset of max 250 songs from the APM collection that you can select yourself.
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Can you provide a code snippet ala Anaminus’s that determines this “Free” state? I don’t know MarketPlaceService well and the “Free” label seems ambiguous: title, description, free-to-take, a new metadata tag for this purpose, etc.
If you’re referring to the existing free-to-take/public domain/free model/whatever, that will interfere with non-APM songs on roblox that have been made free (although many of these I foresee being removed as they are copyrighted)
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So just so I’m understanding this correctly, when it comes to player played sounds, just make sure they’re free to take. If they are free to take, they also can’t be from the APM library? This seems like it’d involve making a lot of unnecessary calls to GetProductInfo.
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Honestly, this could be handled in a better way.
AAA games use copyrighted music all the time, but they give credit where it is due. As long as there is no money being derived from the audio itself, and credit is given, it falls under the fair usage act.
Instead of just purging radios and the audio asset library, enforce a credit system. Youtube does this. Don’t allow revenue to be generated from the audio. Revenue generated by the game itself is not related to the audio. Require that any copyrighted music used in game is credited under a “Credits” tab on a game’s page or something similar. Even better, do what youtube does - automatically add the audio credit under the “credits” page on the game’s page.
Seriously, do not remove the ability to play any audio in-game. Players love playing music over radios in game. Not from presets, they want a specific song.
A youtube-like approach would be a lot better than just blatantly purging the audio pages. Allow developers to upload licences proving that they can use audio, etc.
This next part is probably irrelevant, but I find a lot of music I like through Roblox. A lot of the audio I have in my inventory serves as ‘bookmarks’ to songs I like listening to on youtube. A good portion of music I listen to nowadays is music I initially discovered on Roblox. Had it not been for Roblox, I wouldn’t have found these songs and bought them for my personal music library. Purging the library will destroy this for everyone.
TL;DR : As long as a game isn’t making money from audio itself, the use of said audio shouldn’t be restricted.
EDIT : Will update this post with more feedback as it comes to mind.
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Developers are able to contact roblox and provide license information via e-mail. Info about this is at the top of the thread.
RE: your edit: players are still allowed to play audio in games. The only restrictions are being set on the APM audio.
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So wait, you gotta contact Roblox for every individual song?
Surely you’d think Resh’s idea is a lot more efficient.
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I am referring to the “IsForSale” “IsPublicDomain” key. For sounds this is set to true when the user checks this box: (this was formerly the “Copylocked” button)
I agree this should be implemented in a less messy/confusing way.
This can be done in one GetProductInfo call, see Anaminus’ snippet above (only needs to be adjusted to filter out non-free assets as well with the same result from the GetProductInfo call).
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That’s really helpful, thanks!
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I don’t see anything in the instructions about emailing that limit it to one e-mail per song.
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It’s still more of a hassle than it should be
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I doubt an automated system would work because as soon as someone finds a way to trick the automated system into falsely-approving a song, the method will spread and illegal copies of other audio will be uploaded.
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I think you should be using IsPublicDomain instead. IsForSale only returns true if you can actually buy the asset with Robux, not get it for free.
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Thanks for the correction! That does indeed seem right.
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I don’t know how efficient it would be but couldn’t they have moderators that would check the audio off as good to go?
Anything’s better than having to personally email Roblox to get your audio approved for use. That should all be done on site, without having to contact them via email externally.
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I don’t see why this is an issue. You registered your account to an e-mail, correct? At least with an e-mail, you can get a return e-mail with the status of your license acceptance. Currently Roblox moderation has very little in the way of feedback.
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