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

ScamBot45 · December 29, 2024, 1:50am

Trying, but it takes weeks for results to actually happen via reporting on Fab

While I’ve never really posted anything on there or actually paid for anything, an exodus of sellers would be the right call. But I doubt if it’ll have any meaningful impact on Epic’s behavior

Loden-Heathen · December 29, 2024, 11:08am

We moved 1 of our assets Toolkit for Steamworks and we had intended to move all our assets over.

But

As we have been talking about here the FAB store is an out right problem actor in the industry so no we wont be moving more over and unless they do a big ban wave in the next 3 days we will be delisting Jan 1

@Unreal_Josh
As your the only one to respond I will ping you, here is what we would have to see to stay

Obviously, we need to see actual action not words to resolve the egregious levels of blatant theft and copyright all over the store
We would need to see an actual statement from Epic not just a staff member saying the right words making the effort to clean up FAB a clearly stated objective that the wider community can expect to hold you to not simply the squeaky wheels here in this and similar threads

SO that is just for us to keep what we have here, note FAB beyond this MAJOR issue is still not fit for purpose.

There is no way for us to offer updates, new versions, bundled packages, maintenance and support options or really anything that is required to run an actual business. FAB is a little more “Adobe Stock” for stolen video game-related content at the moment. It needs actual support and tools for technology more like a partner program where we can offer services (support, maintenance) where we can offer paid updates, bundle deals, etc.

Your competitors … all of them … big and small … have these features the fact that you have not only none of these built in but also no facility to handle this ad-hoc tells us this is nothing more than a half-arsed prototype that is the target of a lot of bad actors and frankly we do not want to be associated with that sort of poor quality and behaviour.

We do love the idea of FAB and have been calling for a global game industry-centric site where small tools devs can offer there services and wares, where content creators can show there work, offer there packages and be connected with for deeper engagement. You see these sorts of things for other tech and creative industries game has nothing at least nothign that is accessible at the indie small studio level. Sure some of the groups and publishers have this but there is no reason FAB couldn’t be at least a big part of this.

At the moment though FAB fails as even a basic store and we honestly do not recommend any publisher or developer make use of it in its current state. It is a liability to use things on this store as there is no assurance what you buy is legitimately licensed, there is no facility through the intermediary of the store to get support, resolve disagreements or issues, avail of services, maintenance, etc.

To put it much more simply there is no reason given FABs functionality and structure for it to exist beyond as an advertisement and frankly, since its flooded with garbage now it fails at that to.

You have a real opportunity as a platform to really be something great that could both make Epic a ton of money and draw more indie and small studio teams to Epic’s ecosystem but at the moment its so not useful its an active risk to use it. We will remain active in the community, we will continue to offer suggestions, and ideas we are even happy to help with more than 2 decades of experience as partners with major entities like Microsoft and well over a decade as small-scale tools developers supporting thousands of indie and small studio teams publishing hundreds of games we are a small fish … the exact kind of fish you really need to learn how to serve if you want FAB to be of value.

Wish the FAB team all the best
Wish the product hadn’t been released as it is

ScamBot45 · December 29, 2024, 5:49pm

I’ve filed an ticket last night(?) in order to report one of products that Krab found and got redirected to this thread, again

Loden-Heathen · December 29, 2024, 8:28pm

Ya Epic frankly isn’t very good at doing this

Turns out having more money than god is not all that is required to do something well … or even competently lol

Krabworks · December 30, 2024, 2:45pm

Redirected how? like “please see this thread where the issue you reported was pointed out?”

Loden-Heathen · December 30, 2024, 4:28pm

They have asked us to report such issues via support

Support doesn’t do anything but direct people to this thread which tells them they acknowledge the issue and follow-up questions on that is where Epic is telling us to again submit a support case because the form doesn’t work, DMCA isn’t appropriate unless your the rights holder

SO they have created a circular that doesn’t result in anything other than a lot of link clicking

ScamBot45 · December 30, 2024, 11:08pm

They’ve specifically sent me to one of Unreal Josh’s post within this thread. You guys know which one is it.

It’s kind of disappointing, but I’m extremely glad that it’s something that I’m not directly responsible for

Krabworks · December 31, 2024, 6:54pm

incredible lol

not sure why this thread is marked as resolved, nothing about this is resolved

Unreal_Josh · December 31, 2024, 8:40pm

Hi everyone. Thank you for sharing your feedback here, we really do appreciate your help in making Fab better.

To answer the main question from this thread: yes, we continue to remove hundreds of listings from sale because they are in violation of our Content Guidelines. We are improving our solutions to better identify and better prevent infringing content at the time of publish or update. We will take enforcement action if a publisher is reported and has violated our rules.

We’re also reaching out directly to educate sellers who are in breach of the Fab Distribution Agreement so they understand why their products are violative and ineligible for distribution on Fab, and so they can avoid repeat violations. Unfortunately, some sellers are submitting the product again, either as a new listing or an update, and we’re working on better technical solutions to prevent this from happening.

As for the issues with support, there was a breakdown in the process and that’s not the way these cases should have been handled. Apologies for the confusion, I’ve made sure our team knows not to direct people back to the forums after we’ve received a report.

Thanks,
Josh

hadenep · January 1, 2025, 1:26pm

Thanks for the update Josh.

Any communication from Epic on this matter lets us know that you are working on this problem, so please keep posting updates.

Lazercar241 · January 1, 2025, 9:01pm

The problem here is that epic combined two marketplaces that were very dissimilar. Sketchfab was a much freer marketplace in terms of licensing and copyright issues which made it a good choice for small artists and hobbyists to make their name. Unreal marketplace was much more moderated in terms of copyright. This forum thread shows the issues. Buyers from unreal marketplace dont like the more chaotic smaller artist friendly nature of sketchfabs content, and sketchfab users dont like the strict guidelines from the unreal marketplace. I, myself come from the sketchfab side. I create 3d models of cars and sell them as a hobby (all under non commercial licenses). I had been a part of Sketchfab since 2018 and it had been my largest selling platform. Now when Fab came along, I migrated all my models and it was fine, until epic started removing my models due to this copyright concern. They have every right to do so and moderate their marketplace how they like. The problem I have with this is they effectively just removed sketchfab and re-released an unreal marketplace calling it a combination, when it clearly is not a combination of sketchfab and unreal marketplace. Even with permission from the company to sell a model of their design, fab does not allow this (such as turbosquid who has a licensing agreement with Ford to let artists sell ford products). As a small artist, this has damaged my hobby greatly as I have been forced out of sale on sketchfab and none of my models can be sold on fab. I have now switched to gumroad store.

Krabworks · January 2, 2025, 4:58pm

And yet FAB is still approving new ones.

New Pokemon assets literally added to FAB yesterday:

https://www.fab.com/listings/f7cfdbb8-5dd2-4ba4-aaec-fdd1f5fa6f21
https://www.fab.com/listings/f5daf985-2665-4305-9f22-75e7d71af7b3
https://www.fab.com/listings/36168cff-60c9-4536-9f1f-3f1d763eef1f
https://www.fab.com/listings/308142d8-e3e8-4c49-92df-35db91616e8e

You need to FIX the approval process. Nobody is checking. If they were this wouldn’t still be happening. Half of the ones I reported above a week ago are still listed.

The fact that re-submissions of IP infringing content are making it back onto the market again a second time shows that there is insufficient review of new submissions for IP infringement.

Creating a loop of submit-report-ban-resubmit is not a solution to this problem.

eatmylazer · January 2, 2025, 6:02pm

Having a AI dealing with submissions is just dumb. If you guys are expanding the marketplace you need additional staff to back it up, not less ppl. The UE marketplace had some really rigorous quality standards, now there is basically none.

If the team can’t clean up house, at least stop accepting new entries until this issue is fixed. What is the point in we continuously reporting stolen stuff here if there are 3 more tomorrow?

ScamBot45 · January 2, 2025, 9:42pm

Speaking of which, does it actually matters if the price is free? Because thats been an recurring trend

hadenep · January 2, 2025, 10:05pm

free or not, it is still a copyright violation if you use it in commercial game, so it does matter.

the main issue currently is that developers dont know if they legally can or cant use an asset from fab on commercial projects.

sketchfab was more for hobbyists, and EpicMarketplace was more professional, and now that these 2 stores have been combined, the result is a dumpsterfire.

Lazercar241 · January 2, 2025, 11:37pm

Not only was Sketchfab more for hobbyists, Sketchfab catered to a more general audience, not just game developers. Sketchfab had models for archviz artists, general rendering artists, look development artists, hobbyists, and models for all different 3d softwares. Not only was sketchfab a place to sell models, it was a place to showcase models. While Unreal marketplace was mostly a marketplace catered towards game developers as it worked closely with unreal engine.

I know for a fact, none of the models I create are designed for game developers. I create all my models for rendering/marketing purposes. Combining these two very different marketplaces was a horrible idea. Game devs dont want non-game ready copyrighted content in their marketplace, and the rest of 3d artists dont want purely game ready copyright free content. So how are they going to resolve this? Someone is going to have to compromise.

Coming from the more rendering based side of things, I like having branded models on these marketplaces. What rendering artist wants to put a render of some non-distinct copyright free car model on their portfolio? I understand the issue with commercial usage of these types of models, but this is why we have licenses dedicated to non-commercial usage. Not everyone who uses Fab is a game dev.

Krabworks · January 3, 2025, 11:39am

Yes honestly the best solution here would be a walk-back of merging dissimilar markets with totally different needs.

Unfortunately I don’t think that will happen.

Thankfully looks like the 4 new Pokemon listings were removed So thanks for that. Half of the ones in the long list from my earlier post are still up though.

here’s an updated list with more:

https://www.fab.com/listings/0dc05899-a240-4fe7-9ad0-fd33121aaab8

https://www.fab.com/listings/110e43f0-8573-42d5-9792-455b390a3a4e
https://www.fab.com/listings/e31f7234-13c8-40ba-9504-e96d50d02aa6
https://www.fab.com/listings/3b699844-d7ff-4b9c-891d-569320ff2186
https://www.fab.com/listings/273d4d27-df1d-42f6-b162-c85e8ee01421

Took about 5 mins to find these while having coffee this morning, again highlighting the low burden of effort required to fix this. Not to mention hundreds and hundreds of AI junk assets that ruin the store which Epic is just allowing to proliferate out of control:

Yet another reason why two stores was better: Sketchfab let all this junk in, while Epic Marketplace had standards. Now FAB is just The Pirate Bay and there’s no alternative.

ScamBot45 · January 3, 2025, 7:49pm

That block list can’t come soon enough.

And next time, can you provide an quick summary of those listings? At least that way the rest of us can be an little bit faster with reporting stuff.

Krabworks · January 3, 2025, 11:15pm

Sure thing

Loden-Heathen · January 4, 2025, 2:55pm

Game cant compromise is the issue

A small studio, solo indie, etc.
MUST be able to trust that the content licensed in the marketplace that insists its there for them to license content from … is safe and fit for use in the development of commercially published games.

If its AI AI-generated that makes it invalid for publishing on Steam
If its licensed content that is again a no-go permission to use and sale licensed content such as you modeling a can of Coke even if you have permission from the company to do so does not extend that permission to say me to sale a game using that content
Then there is the blatantly stolen stuff … it is theft when you rip a model from something without the express permission of the owner and then resale it … and there is/was a LOT of that going on in Sketch

Fact of the matter is that sort of “marketplace” was always a gray market and was NEVER appropriate for professional work. It should not have and cannot be effectively merged in with professional assets and tools.

I would argue that Sketchfab shouldn’t have allowed it either it is problematic at best
Rather your doing arc vis, YouTube shorts, games, whatever … IP ownership, trademark and copyright in the general should have always been “the” cornerstone of any content store.

without that its only a matter of time either you stagnate and die off, or you grow, pull down the wrath (as YouTube did years back) and are forced to do a sudden and expensive change.