I do recommend anyone that may have ripped avatars to send a DMCA notice to Discord about this server (you can do that here), and their website host provider as well.
Edit: Shown in the expand, the provider and registrant is going through cloudflare. You can issue a DMCA to Cloudflare here.
Without getting thier own avatars ripped I suspect they can’t file a dmca takedown, but they can always send an email.
Maybe the default robot is owned by VRChat?
Upload some copies of the robot, get them logged and ripped, then can use those IDs later…
Related thought: has Leonard French covered anything like this? Copyright attorney YouTuber, would be interesting to hear from a lawyer type perspective…
If they want to remove it from here, they certainly can. I think people should be aware of the options they have for DMCA and abuse reports since it should help a little in numbers.
Tupper and the other devs have said that encryption will do little to nothing. It’s literally like trying to solve media piracy, which Netflix even tried with hardware keys, but those get ripped all the time and then so does Netflix content. There are plenty of ways to improve it, but the dev time required to solve it with little gain makes no sense, especially at the size of VRChat.
The alternative that Tupper half-jokingly mentioned was using Stadia/Xbox Cloud where the game is rendered in the cloud and sent to your headset, since there would be no way for anyone to access the game itself, but that probably would not be a good experience.
A thing I’ve been wondering about is whether VRChat keeps a log of who’s in which instances at any given time, and if they’d be able to correlate that data to rips on ripper.store to determine who the people running the ripping scripts are, in order to ban them from VRChat. It would potentially be really effective for finding people who hop between large public instances to find avatars to rip (which seems to be the general MO of most people uploading there). Especially during larger events like Furality and the like.
Ignoring problem doesn’t solve it. Rippers do not gonna starve without attention.
It’s constantly hurting creators and scare away people from join in public instances with their unique avis and make everyone look blank and repetative witch also hurts non creator expirience as well.
Instead of don't feed the troll the way better response is made more self moderation tools (like reverse safety feature, to not load avatar for non-friend user until you enable it for them), or disrupt ripper store legally cause their business is literary thievery, so at least you can shut down site with enough dmca.
Your avatar is your copyright, and you are the one responsible for upholding this copyright, but under US law, this is actually straightforward:
Download this: https://www.minclaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Sample-DMCA-Takedown-Notice.pdf -take this file, fill out the 4 relevant field, send it to copyright@badsite . Store the email. If they fail to take action within 2 weeks, that gives us (the users) claim to file a lawsuit about this. If they systematically fail to do so, that gives us claim for a class action.
(Edit: not lawyer, not your lawyer, but did this a bunch of times against youtube, and other platforms, who 100% complied. There are legal balls that can get rolling on this, but step 0 is you have to try asking them nicely)
I agree. They need to stop this contest before more avatars get stolen. Avatar creators work hard to make these avatars for fellow YouTubers. I covered this as well here
This is not right. VRChat needs to fix this before adding any new features
Vroid has an interesting protection system but it doesn’t prevent rippers from existing, the big problem is that the Avatar itself is not sold on Booth or other sites but the entire avatar source file, this means that whoever has this file can say that purchased without purchasing or even creating a new avatar from these files or modifying them to the point where it is imperceptible that they are the owner, the big problem is the way in which these avatars are uploaded
