Aurich Lawson | Roblox | Shark Fin Studios
A lawsuit filed by the Roblox Corporation, the operator of one of the most popular online games in the West, concluded last week with a rare order from a US District Court—that a defendant must be permanently banned from an online video game and its associated services.
The dubious honor goes to Benjamin Robert Simon, better known to the Roblox community as Ruben Sim, who had previously received an IP-based Roblox ban after allegedly violating the game’s terms of service. Simon operates a Roblox gameplay and criticism YouTube channel, which currently has 849,000 subscribers.
$150,000, not $1.6 million
The judgment, which came as a stipulated order agreed upon by both the plaintiff and defendant, also requires Simon to pay $150,000 to Roblox. Exactly how that number breaks down based on the suit’s allegations is unclear, but the original suit says that Simon posted a threat in October 2021 that apparently targeted that year’s Roblox Developers Conference. The tweet included a threatening statement without a clear indication of either satire or comedy and said, “San Francisco Police are currently searching for notorious Islamic Extremist [name redacted]. If you see this individual at RDC please call 911 immediately.” The post included a hyperlink to a video titled “SOMEONE BLOW UP ROBLOX NOW,” which had been deleted from YouTube in 2015 but was temporarily re-uploaded, and that video (now once again offline) included direct threats to the Roblox Corporation.
The September 2021 lawsuit (PDF) alleges that this post—along with a follow-up post saying, “Don’t come to RDC tomorrow”—contributed to the company putting the event into “a temporary lockdown while local police and private security conducted a search to secure the facility.” The lawsuit also alleged that this disruption cost Roblox Corporation “over $50,000.”
The January 14 judgment (PDF), which Ars Technica has reviewed, does not include a line-by-line accounting of Roblox Corporation’s many allegations about Simon’s activities related to Roblox, and the only other claim with a firm number attached references Simon’s alleged repeated efforts to evade Roblox’s bans, use the service, and share videos of his exploits. Roblox Corporation says that it spent “over $100,000” to “investigate and block” Simon’s repeated ban evasions. The final judgment is far less than the $1.6 million Roblox Corporation originally sought.
No legal precedent established
The suit says that Simon “repeatedly posts libelous statements about Roblox’s founder and CEO, attributing false statements and conduct to the CEO that Defendant Simon knows to be false and which he makes with intent to cause injury to the reputation of the CEO and of Roblox.” This, among many other allegations, might have been explored further with screenshots or archived social media posts had the suit gone to trial, though in the end, both parties agreed to the terms of the US District Court’s judgment.
In the case of some allegations, Roblox Corporation’s lawsuit includes extensive chat logs that were hosted by Simon’s YouTube channel as proof of his history with ban evasion and violations of Roblox‘s terms of service. Other allegations, including the ones about Roblox‘s CEO and about graphic imagery allegedly uploaded by Simon to Roblox‘s servers, are not accompanied by text or image evidence in the suit’s initial filing. Simon has agreed to delete any social media content that violates the terms of the court order. The original lawsuit sought the total deletion of Simon’s social media accounts and presence, but the final court order includes no such demand.
As a stipulated order agreed upon by both parties, this lawsuit’s conclusion does not establish a legal precedent for users who violate an online service’s terms of service, get banned, and evade that ban in one way or another to return to the game or app in question.
