If you've ever uploaded music to Roblox, there is a fair chance that your songs have been given this fate.
I know I have, the illustration above was modeled off a reupload of the song in Half-Life where you first enter the HEV suit that was taken down.
Well, just Roblox's luck, as the National Music Publishers' Association has sued Roblox for allowing songs from the likes of deadmau5 onto the platform, and more importantly, charging Robux, Roblox's main currency, to upload songs, in addition to adding boomboxes to play songs uploaded to Roblox. According to an executive at the NMPA,
David Israelite said:[Roblox has] made hundreds of millions of dollars by requiring users to pay every time they upload music onto the platform – taking advantage of young people’s lack of understanding about copyright – and then they take virtually no action to prevent repeat infringement or alert users to the risks they are taking.
Way before this lawsuit, Tommy Tallarico successfully got Roblox to remove the famous "uuhhh.wav" death sound as it was created for a game he made before Roblox was founded. Tommy would later settle with Roblox, allowing them to put uuhhh.wav back, however as a paid asset you had to purchase to use in games.
I took a look for myself, and the multiple Boomboxes (Golden, Dual Golden, 3.0, Jank, Dubstep) have all been taken off Roblox's Catalog.
However, there are still multiple ways to play music, most notably game passes that give players a boombox when they join:
(left to right) Having bought it before deletion, Roblox Audio Visualisers, Game Passes (PBCC pictured), and Catalog Heaven
And to make matter worse, Roblox has been in a very long game of whack and mole with bypassed audios. These audios normally are used to get around the current copyright system, and most of them are not swear-free. These songs increase the volume/gain of the song as well as putting a loud watermark at the start (a highlight I've noticed is anime crying, of course very loud and bassy) Here are just a few examples:
Surprisingly, this isn't a sticking point for NMPA, perhaps they haven't had the experience with Roblox that I've had. What do you think could happen from this case?
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