Summary
We’re making a very unique UEFN collectable card game / visual novel hybrid. We hope to have hundreds of flavor-text based playing cards to build the world lore in our games over our episodic series.
We have been plagued by false flagging for ‘IP infringement’ on our 100% original content assets continually over the years (please see card back asset in question). After successfully appealing it via our sanctions and appeals page the first two times, we continued to get warnings but the asset no longer appears on the sanctions page. We couldn’t clear the flags because the page was bugged out - subsequent notifications of the IP infringement on the asset could not be acted upon. Dozens of e-mails to Epic over A YEAR has yielded results from ‘nothing we can do’ to ‘try changing your asset’. One of my points to Epic over the years of ‘even if we could act upon the IP infringement flag, someone is just going to smash the upheld button at some point and we’re boned.’ Well that just happened.
This morning we finally managed after a series of changes we finally had the warning appear again in our appeals and sanction page so we could appeal it. Except upon review the sanction was upheld for ‘IP infringement’. Due to ‘Nintendo Property’. I have included the asset in question as it is clearly not infringing anything.
We’ve got hundreds of these cards for our game, and we’re in the part of the development cycle where money is being spent on the MVP and our release. My team and I are ridiculously stressed out by this - it has destroyed [at least my] morale, in large part as there seems to be no recourse to this recurring error.
We were lucky enough to get an Epic Megagrant for our series. I have poured my life savings into this project and are finally nearing release - I am piling up debt to start the marketing cycle that is tied to release dates and while I can axe this asset from the game (even though it reveals an important story beat for one of our characters), having this happen near publication time will deep six my studio.
I am really hoping for some guidance and assistance here - what can we do to avoid this in the future? Who can we speak to with knowledge on how to navigate this?
Please select what you are reporting on:
Unreal Editor for Fortnite
What Type of Bug are you experiencing?
AI
Steps to Reproduce
We are getting false flagged for IP infringement repeatedly on our assets for no apparent reason - most of the time the sanctions and appeals page is bugged so we can’t seek an appeal; when it does appear, it appears so frequently someone at some point smashes the ‘uphold sanction’ button (like this last round) even though we are not infringing anything.
Expected Result
Be able to reasonably act upon an IP infringement claim, have recourse if we’re being false-flagged for IP infringement on assets that there should be no debate on if they are infringing or not.
Observed Result
Being false-flagged for IP infringement on assets that should not be.
Platform(s)
All
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Additional Notes
Please note IP infringement for ‘Nintendo Property’.