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

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.

Krabworks · January 7, 2025, 4:39pm

Unfortunately yes. Still waiting for action on this.

If they want to allow a sketchy side-show with legally-questionable assets then it should be a separate market to separate developers from hobbyists making 3D prints.

Hey wait a second, that’s how it used to work…

ScamBot45 · January 8, 2025, 8:16am

Well, to be fair, I haven’t seen an lot of AI generated icons, this week.

But most of the stuff that I found after taking an break appears to be something that was manually made (like a nude model of an licensed character)

a-sennov · January 8, 2025, 9:59am

Yesterday: https://www.fab.com/listings/f7ef0ce8-3179-4a1f-9809-7f8485e1a6a1 (and I’m only looking into UE content).