Ai False Flagging - Major Issue Jeapordizing our Release

[Castlenock1 (Castlenock)]

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

Upload an image

Additional Notes

Please note IP infringement for ‘Nintendo Property’.

[Jimbohalo10]

The company name is owned by Nintendo

see also

Trifecta Game Mechanics - Search Images

“Trifecta” is a word owned by Nintendo and therefore IP

Under England UK , Europe and possibly USA law

You have used 90% of a restricted/reserved word Adding an “s” to does not stop the breach of IP

To find this in Windows 11 MS Edge right click the card image and do “Visual Search” and Bing found this first time as a similar match.

Therefore you CANNOT Release this and the AI has CORRECTLY flagged a breach of IP.

[Castlenock1 (Castlenock)]

I appreciate the response @Jimbohalo10 but with all due respect that absolutely does not qualify as a breach of IP. Nintendo has no claim over a common word of ‘Trifecta’ - the only way it could make a claim is by utilizing the word Trifecta in direct reference to a game studio in the context of the game, which we are by no means doing.

I did, in fact, ask a lawyer friend to look at this a while ago they saw no issue with it. Plus we’ve actually trademarked the name of the game series and are very familiar with trademark process and legal surroundings regarding naming conventions. We hold the trademark for our gaming title in three USPTO sectors and went through a ton of research on the matter.

I should also note that we changed the title of this playing card to ‘Lorem Ipsem’ and this same asset was still flagged.

The theory that emerged this morning after a Reddit post is the name ‘Digby’ is used in the game Animal Crossing (which I have never played nor was aware of). That is the only element we didn’t iterate on in this card when trying to squash the warnings and something we are going to actively try and change but there are two very important things to note that underlines this is a serious issue:

1. Digby is not trademarked by Nintendo - neither directly according to the USPTO and the global trademark services such as WIPO, WUIPO, and JIPO (Japan’s IPO). Like ‘Trifecta’, ‘Digby’ cannot be trademarked by proxy or infringed upon unless there is a direct reference to a ‘Digby’ in Nintendo’s Animal Crossing IP. As you can see, we are not doing that.
   1a. If I am correct and it is the name ‘Digby’ that is triggering this IP infringement, and that is a false flag even if that name exists as a character in the Nintendo owned franchise of ‘Animal Crossing’ than this round where the sanction was upheld will further entrench that false flag into Epic’s systems - and why this is problematic for all creators going forward. We do not get details on exactly what was infringed so the most we can do is guess - and we will never guess correctly if the infringement is incorrect from the start.
2. Our appeals rightfully overturned the sanctions the first few times we could act upon it. Over a dozen Epic support people over a year did not flag this as IP infringement (as it is not) in their evaluation of the problem. As we mentioned in our support tickets, even when we could act upon subsequent warnings, our concern was only that it was a matter of time before someone didn’t overturn it. The system allows for no recourse if a sanction is upheld, but it does not account for the amount of times the appeal was overturned due to sound or correct reasoning. It only takes one false flag to be marked incorrectly with no recourse.
   2a. The root of the issue here is Ai hallucination - your response that we were in violation by using the common word ‘Trifecta’ underlines how important it is to have human eyes with knowledge of IP infringement be the ones making the call if something is infringing or not, because common word usage is at the core of trademark infringement and commonly confused. In our appeal to the community we have been told that the infringing bit was ‘killing’ (confusing it with language use), ‘seafoam’ (islands in Pokemon), and others. All of those aspects (again, including ‘Trifecta’) in this asset where changed trying to figure out the issue but we never considered ‘Digby’ being root of the cause until this morning. We’re more than happy to change that name because luckily we can still do so at this point but it doesn’t remove the fact that this is a serious issue that needs addressing.
   2b. I queried x4 LLMs on this matter once ‘Digby’ was brought up as a possibility. The query ‘Does Nintendo own any rights over the name ‘Digby’’ came back with two false flags saying it does - Deepseek 3.2 and ChatGPT 4.x. ChatGPT 5.x and Claude were clear saying they had no claim over the name ‘Digby’ and mentioned some of the points I made above about proper usage. Our argument is that Ai false-flagged IP infringement - something we are still confident of - I want to stress how important it is that when such an argument is presented, that if the person who sustained the infringement today when it finally re-appeared on our sanctions and appeal page to act upon, that they must not rely on the same sort of tools that we are complaining are acting incorrectly.

I also want to say that you are the only person in the past year of trying to sort this out, something that has involved over a dozen people from support in Epic, that has come forward with an answer they think is definitive. …and with respect, I am confident that answer is not correct - Nintendo does not hold sway over the word ‘Trifecta’ in a video game, book, printed media or otherwise. So my argument to you is that this issue is not nearly as clear cut as it seems. I did not know that there was such a studio (or a character named ‘Digby’) until today - and trademark and infringement law is written specifically to protect usage of common words as long as they don’t directly reference a particular entity. For example, if a card uses the word ‘Dog’ in the title, we should have zero fear of having ‘Naughty Dog’ studios claim IP infringement.

This has and is causing us considerable issues - being unable to clear this for a year and having a sanction upheld has shaken me quite a bit; for one, I think I remember reading somewhere that there is a three strikes rule on IP infringement, and when we upload our full card set are we to worry about strike two or strike three, the last of which prevents us from publishing on UEFN?

EDIT: corrected ‘first few appeals were overturned’ to 'Our appeals rightfully overturned the sanctions the first few times"

[Jimbohalo10]

well just indie dev trying to avoid you getting a problem. Good Luck, but these Forums are for Creators to discuss problems with Creative and UEFN so doubt whether you will get any response.

Please remember that the new rules for thumbnail images and Discovery have been launched and please read them

at

New Content Pre-Checks and Discover Filtering for Fortnite Islands

and

Big Changes for Discover in Fortnite

[Castlenock1 (Castlenock)]

Thanks @Jimbohalo10 , but I’m a little confused with the ‘but these forums are for creators to discuss problems with … UEFN’.

We’re developing in UEFN and this issue is a rather substantial problem for us in the present and in the future. As I mentioned in detail, this is an issue we’ve been trying to solve for a year and while we appreciate Epic’s help, their support has admitted that they at times don’t know a way forward on these issues.

Also, this has nothing to do with thumbnails and discovery - these are game assets that are being flagged by the UEFN Ai systems well before we have even generated an island code. That’s why we’re fine with changing the name ‘Digby’ if that is indeed the root cause, because we haven’t filmed metahuman mocap yet with a character uttering the name and it can still be changed.

…but that doesn’t prevent the issue from happening in the future with other cards and assets nor does it get us off of the ‘3 strike’ rule I’m worried about.

[GraemeBB (Graeme)]

I’ll reiterate the point about what these forums are for, and it’s bugs in UEFN and Fortnite. Your issue of IP infringement isn’t something the developers get involved in and you likely have to find a contact at Epic that deals directly with legal items. There’s nothing wrong with UEFN nor Fortnite in this post and you may be using valuable time in the wrong place.

As for getting your account banned with too many infringements, this is a very valid concern and I would advise treading carefully as you’ll lose your whole game. I highly recommend you to back up all of your files as once your map is banned you won’t even be able to open it in UEFN.

Anyways, good luck, hopefully you can get it resolved. It seems the easiest route is to change names of things and not fight “the system” as Fortnite is a little kids game and they’re unlikely to read any of that anyways. I’m old and I wouldn’t read it… for whatever that is worth

[Castlenock1 (Castlenock)]

Thanks @GraemeBB - much appreciated. I did try and think of another place to put this post but ‘Issues and Bug Reporting’ seemed the best. There IS [multiple] UEFN bugs intertwined in all of this but it’s really hard to pull them out of the narrative and not see this just as a dev complaining about an IP infringement decision. But I don’t know how to simplify that narrative even after wrestling with it for close to a year.

That and a few round with Epic support said to post it here because they didn’t know a way forward, but to be frank they were just trying to offload the problem I think.

What is scary is that all of my ramblings above is still just theory - if we had any idea that we would be running into an IP issue regardless if we thought we were in the right or not we wouldn’t post the asset in question. …it just means we have no idea how to avoid the second and third infringement and having years of development hang on that sword of Damocles is making things seem very impossible moving forward.

EDIT: Also, I should note that we are wide eyed on knowing no one is going to read this stuff on a platform like UEFN, at least not for a very long time, and that is O.K. I’m old as well and also quite eccentric so while it may be dumb I’m blowing my life savings on this series knowing no one will read it, it’s still the heart of what we’re trying to make. Changing the reading bits means we have no game.

In our defense, however, I think that same mentality is why we got an Epic Megagrant to do these games, in that we know we’ll take the hit on having to bring in a new sort of player over a much longer period of time.

EXTRA EDIT: While I classify this as an issue under ‘issues and bugs’ over all, the bugs specifically I talk about are the IP infringements not showing up in the appeals and sanction page for over a year. Even after changing projects and the asset multiple times. How it finally re-landed on the page this morning after a year of back and forth no one knows. That we successfully appealed this multiple times KNOWING that at some point the sanction would be upheld is another bug IMO, as no matter how solid the asset in question is, someone at some point is going to make the wrong call if the Ai can’t learn why it was successfully appealed and re-flags the issue into oblivian.

[GraemeBB (Graeme)]

All I meant is that there has to be a way to get that wording to be something different and not to worry too much about it being perfect for Fortnite.

Congrats on getting the grant btw, we have one too and I agree that it’s the pitch you put in that got you there and not wanting to waver from that makes sense.

I too hope that Fortnite can grow up to be a more involved and intricate gaming environment, but at this point it’s filled with kids that want brainrot and simple mechanics (while not being simple to make…) We’ll see what they do in time kind of thing, change are happening and the megagrants are definitely pointing to them hoping to keep bringing in higher level gaming.

[Ghost_Rush]

Hello, While we do try our best to offer solutions for all questions posted here, these forums are focused providing Fortnite developers assistance with using our tools to build their islands. For support related to specifically moderation issues, please go to https://www.epicgames.com/help/en-US/creator-programs-c-202300000001640. At the bottom of the page, you’ll find a “Contact Us” button if you do not find an answer there. Please check this page for information on sanctions and appeals.

[Bug-Reporter]

FORT-1093762 has been ‘Closed’. The issue reported is not caused by a bug in the tool.