Are you doing anything about all the theft and copyright infringment?

What’s EVEN WORSE is UE Marketplace users had good content (that was moderated) and they had a good permissive license to use that content, and now everything we purchased over the past decade on UE Marketplace we have now lost and has been “converted” to crappy licenses instead of “Professional” licenses, we now have “standard” crap so we lost all our assets / professional licenses that we previously had and paid for, and now we lost our professional /studio licenses and instead of a crappy “standard” license and are forced to “re-buy” all our assets / licenses on FAB (for over $100K licensing) and it makes everyone stay away from FAB and stay away from FAB licensing.

Every single “standard” license should be good for $10 Million in annual revenue and should be a “professional” license. The term “standard” should be changed to “professional” and the annual revenue should be increased to $10 Mil per year.

Then create a “studio license” (and charge people more for a “studio” license). For studios with more than 20 employees. That way indie’s and individuals can stick with “professional” licenses, and studios can pay more for a “studio” license. but this current nonsense is a complete licensing nightmare, and everyone that purchased assets / licenses from UE Marketplace got completely screwed with this whole “FAB” migration, and we should get the highest license available (Studio License) AUTOMATICALLY on any and all assets purchased in the UE Marketplace, and not crappy “standard” garbage license (a downgrade). We should automatically get a “Studio License” for all assets that we were purchased in the UE Marketplace (a “Studio License” in FAB), and bring back the UE Marketplace where UE Developers want to focus on just looking at UE assets and environments and don’t want this “hodge podge” mess (FAB) that is kinda like a Sketchup (instead of a Unreal Engine specific UE Marketplace). Unity still has their Unity Store (specific for Unity) and EPIC was foolish for DESTROYING the UE Marketplace and trying to combine / merge everything into this “FAB” mess / catastrophe and also screwing over all the UE Marketplace customers that purchased assets (under the old simple permissive UE Marketplace License) and got screwed by this new “FAB” license models and we should have a “UE Marketplace License” option so that we can retain our old UE Marketplace Licenses, instead of this garbage “Standard” crap license.

We basically lost ALL our assets and purchases in the UE Marketplace during this FAB migration, and our licenses have been converted to “standard” which is useless to us, and we can’t use “Standard” licenses. This has been a nightmare, and a licensing nightmare, and another reason to NEVER USE FAB.

Bring back the old UE Marketplace, and this whole FAB nonsense is ridiculous. Make them two separate Marketplaces, and allow sellers (and buyers) to still buy and sell on the UE Marketplace (under the old UE Marketplace license) and allow us to keep our old UE Marketplace assets, and keep the old UE Marketplace storefront. It was much easier to buy and sell under the old UE Marketplace and to have the ratings (from customers) and to have comments / reviews by customers. With no comments and no reviews, and we can’t even discuss problems about assets (or warn buyers) it makes it scary to even purchase an asset on FAB when a seller has abandoned the assets.

I don’t think Epic understood or perhaps still doesn’t understand that it is NOT a retail market

It is a professional market, licensing should reflect that in the same they never have had and still don’t have the means to cover ongoing development and support.

They expect everything on the market to be a 1 time purchase and to get life time updates and support with no concept of a maintenance plan, major update path or similar. UE Marketplace was never sustainable and FAB suffers from those very same issues.

This post however was about the immediate show-stopping problem of theft and copyright infringement. It should have never been a problem, I am NOT excusing the very poor behaviour of merging in the flood of crap. Them having a response and a voiced plan is however “good enough” … “for now” … if we don’t see real action soon though we will have to pull our tools off the store.

Aside from that there is no way for us to properly support our tools on FAB so even if they act on the theft and copyright infringement issues we likely still won’t be on FAB come 1st JAN simply because there is no way for us to offer the updates that should be life now for the current host of tools.

Epic in all its lack of wisdom thinks either every major update should be full-priced for everyone or that every tool should be free for life updates. The problem is Epic thinks FAB is for pictures and models, static content that doesn’t have on going costs in development and support which is insane to me from a company who by the way makes virtually of its revenue from software and the on going nature of it.

@Unreal_Josh You really do have a major problem on your hands with FAB
One that means it just cant survive a generation … hope you get that sorted ASAP Epic has already blown that first impressions opportunity it would be a shame to evaporate the remaining chances it has.

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+1
I think this was not a problem on the old MarketPlace, atleast I never noticed any obvious stolen content, pokemon, spiderman, ai-generated crap, etc there…
I wonder what happened to quality control when FAB was launched.

This topic is very closely related to this other one:

It was present but not to this volume

The issue is FAB is not just Unreal Marketplace
They blindly merged in frankly a lot of trash from Sketch and a couple other “shops”

Those resources where notorious for containing a lot of crap rips from games, and so on … they should have NEVER merged that mess in especially not without vetting each and every item they planned on brining in

But we live in an era where companies are shoveling crap and then shrugging when it all blows up in there face.

Doing something fast, but wrong … is not doing anything

Take your time and do a quality job … or dont do it at all

Saddly that is not where we are in the world at the moment, its not just Epic but that is the issue here. Someone wanted to Go GO GO … and did so without any checks and balances and here we are. We have an inferior store, bloated with shuvleware and trash a fair bit of which is outright stolen or copyright infringement that is going to get someone in real trouble sooner or later

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Agree… Its pathological…A disease. Management always rushing things and always letting customers / employees suffer (the never ending search for ever more capitalist efficiencies at any cost). Its costing lives too ironically (HELLthcare CEO). Don’t have a magic solution. But this kind of sick-for-money business school philosophy has reached a peak. Sure crush everybody so long as Wall-Street is happy. Doesn’t look like its going to lead to a French Revolution. But its definitely at a tipping point though… The planet is cooking away…

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:slight_smile: The French do love to revolt but their issue was/is the opposite

They have a really split government (3 way split) at the moment so they can’t agree on a budget each side is just being a [To Spicy for Epic Forums] refusing to agree with the other 2 on ANYTHING. The result is no budget which means services and social suffers.

The PM tried to force a solution which I mean sort of worked, the 3 idiot groups that refused to agree on anything … did agree on smacking him hard LOL so at least they agreed on something lol.

Here in Ireland, we have yet a different issue, multiple fiscal crises, housing, utility, medical, etc. all boiling down to insufficient resources/funds yet at the same time the country has a HUGE surplus but the way our gov works its just sitting there doing nothing. And of course, when they finally do manage to free things up they will do so in the least efficient manner possible with the maximum amount of greed and corruption to ensure that only a tiny fraction of the good that could be done is done.

These are all small fish though when you consider the multiple hugely impacting conflicts running at the moment. Because people are so short-sighted at the moment owing to the turbulent state of each gov in its own way the proper attention isn’t being paid to these global impacts so that will come to bite us all in the [Wow Epic Forums clutching some pearls] soon enough.

That said all of that is huge geopolitical issues that we cant really do much about here.

What we can do though is insist that Epic gets its act together

That Epic puts forth real effort to clean up FAB

and importantly that Epic is making it a critical priority to do that while also bringing features into FAB that are REQUIRED for us to actually use FAB things like a Major Update option or Subscription option, etc.

So while the world may be burning the issues we are all panicked about most are not as bad as they seem and things we are discounting like the war in Ukraine, Syria, Lebanon, etc. are all far more important to each of us than we want to admit right now.

But Epic and at least our little company Heathen … cant do anything about that … we can however hold apply what little pressure we are worth to Epic and I hope you will join us in that so we can at least try and get FAB to a workable state.

^This^… Seriously the only ones who can afford homes / healthcare now in Ireland are data-centers. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: That is, if you’re lucky enough to even find a home. Because you have to play casino-like games hoping that buildings don’t FAIL fire / pyrite / mica building standards. :scream:

Why? Well govt politicians are very busy helping the people. Their people… You know the elite / the super-rich… Big Tech execs with special secret tax arrangements (just like their multinational firms). Why? Because they’re special. Ireland even fights the EU so the mega-rich don’t have to pay back taxes. Turns out silicon-valley firms don’t even pay data-protection fines (not really despite the headlines).

So yes Ireland cares about its people. As long as its people are nurses and teachers - Bankers, Builders, US corporations. So visit Ireland - its FAB… :rofl: … Now as to how to actually fix FAB? Pagination, AI filters, installing Plugins without engine-version checks would help. :wink:

Well, the most that we can do is report stuff and hope that the relevant team is up to date with their pop culture references. They said that they’ve took down the two Vulture Droid props that I found, but at least one of them is still up.

And I hope that Ireland (or wherever else that you guys lives) doesn’t get burnt to the ground through the actions of your politicians

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(post deleted by author)

@Unreal_Josh Here are some search results as of today. This is not acceptable, and only cheapens the work of actual Unreal Marketplace creators.

All assets/Fab as a whole needs to be manually curated, there’s just no way around it.

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I second this. Make everyone go through QA once again with a manual overview or just send a 2 strike notice to each account doing that, being the first contact the 1st one already. That sheer amount of junk on the marketplace makes harder to vouch for the beforehand quality assets that made UEM special.

While I’m not entirely sure about the sports cars, but has anyone made any noticeable progress on reporting stuff? Because one of the listings that I’d reported is still up, despite them saying that they’ve sanctioned that account

@Unreal_Josh I will add to this: I am curious why no check has been done for major game titles yet? It has been months. This is the absolute bare minimum.

This is less than 2 minutes of work: I use the keywords of major game titles like “Skyrim” and “Witcher” and easily find tons of asset copies and rips. It is totally unacceptable, the lack of bare minimum effort being taken here really shows a bad look and sends message that Epic is consciously choosing to ignore this problem.

It is a really bad look.

Here are some simple keyword searches that your team should have already done weeks ago if they had been doing the bare minimum:

Skyrim:

https://www.fab.com/listings/3b6dc42d-2a63-4463-9476-f0f700a77bc6
https://www.fab.com/listings/9ead1919-626d-4b8c-b45d-196596685f21
https://www.fab.com/listings/bc9f4248-14e0-48b6-8f5b-899a2f6b4116

Witcher:
https://www.fab.com/listings/8d18efcb-5ebb-4c06-85e6-fe1989dc0254
https://www.fab.com/listings/a49e82ed-25af-4545-9f9c-ff376ac9d3cb

Pokemon:
https://www.fab.com/listings/9986b8b7-9cd7-48be-9b78-af6c7f088e24
https://www.fab.com/listings/c2f2e8dd-60dc-4060-a5db-5f519b1d7f8a
https://www.fab.com/listings/ca564f72-5d99-4a2c-8558-c6c3df23ff1b
https://www.fab.com/listings/c6fe5583-175b-4050-b9b9-9550458ce896
https://www.fab.com/listings/beb90317-88df-4c1a-92ab-fd5fe4880aa4
https://www.fab.com/listings/0792c0a8-eeed-4f7e-a543-bc6999c66b3f
https://www.fab.com/listings/5f7b1f0f-3a1c-499b-81fa-52a50fb68269
https://www.fab.com/listings/ecfc0509-80c4-452d-8d3d-993c20a93e84
https://www.fab.com/listings/d372182d-05b6-4bd5-8343-313020e81807
https://www.fab.com/listings/d518ba93-48a3-470b-aa0e-0c8f8c17b120

Genshin Impact:
https://www.fab.com/listings/aa90fdfd-92ac-46ba-ad84-16b084c91c3f
https://www.fab.com/listings/d88e1a35-20e1-4ea0-b4c0-4958a9086cb8

Plus some random ones I found while checking the above keywords -

Muppets:
https://www.fab.com/listings/930e3d26-d3ad-4aa3-908d-8646060a5c93

Motorhead Album cover???
https://www.fab.com/listings/5811bd75-5109-472f-a88a-f24873342b6b

The Matrix:
https://www.fab.com/listings/5caf16ec-c0c7-4f3a-a13e-516580166ab4

To say you need to step up your efforts on this is the understatement of the century.

This is a very simple step that would show a lot of good will to the community, and that you are actually taking this problem seriously.

6 Likes

I’ve reported the first one an while ago and they told me that it was delisted…Except that it’s still up.