> We received a similar notice from the same company in 2023 and successfully appealed against it. This company also filed a similar notice this year against an indie game with similar voxel art style by the name of Allumeria.
They'll backtrack and apologize - again.
At some point, the pathway for Microsoft to regain some of the goodwill associated with Minecraft is to fire the senior lawyer most responsible for sending out these notices.
> At some point, the pathway for Microsoft to regain some of the goodwill associated with Minecraft is to fire the senior lawyer most responsible for sending out these notices.
Why would anyone with brain give them any good will for that? I might believe them if they would give Luanti 2x the damages and gave in writing that they will pay 10x damages the next time this happens.
I'm confused why the DMCA sender, Tracer AI, claims Vanuatu jurisdiction in the linked DMCA claim[0]. In separate recent claims, they have claimed US jurisdiction[1]. Is this possibly fraud?
I mean there definitely are penalties, but they only exist if you actually go to court. DMCA essentially serves as game of chicken with no one actually wanting to go to court.
Penalties and counter-suits require intentional misrepresentation by the claimant, which is so painfully unprovable that the existence of penalties for malicious claims may as well not exist. I mean I suppose it can stop some rando guy from sending out claims for lols, but stuff like what Microsoft and a number of other corps do is extremely predictable and certainly malicious in nature.
Fun part is that US legislative branch did not have much say in creation of DMCA.
US executive branch back then was just lobbied by major copyright holders and they literally bypassed much of legislation process around congress by creating and signing international agreements instead.
By the time DMCA landed in congress there was very little that could be changed because US already had to honour intetnational agreements it's already created and signed.
technically the DMCA notice is from Tracer, some AI copyright troll acting at the behest of Microsoft. Not that it actually matters, just expect to see Microsoft hide behind this fact as a way to deflect blame.
Except, of course, Luanti holds copyright over their own assets and app. Copyright is not something you get when you file paperwork with the government, it is automatic for creative works.
DMCA is punitive to platforms who do not correctly adjudicate the law and self enforce, which is why they err on the side of the claimant rather than the accused (or the side more likely to defend their copyright in court).
So, the law doesn't really favor copyright holders, it favors extremely conservative and risk averse behavior from large platforms, regardless of who would actually win a dispute over copyright.
Doubt it. Microsoft probably just sees "voxel game" and files the claim, because they don't lose anything if it fails.
From the article:
>Luanti’s Android app is currently not available on the due to a baseless DMCA notice filed on behalf of Microsoft by Tracer.AI, alleging that Luanti infringes Minecraft’s copyright.
>Luanti is a voxel game-creation platform where anyone can make, share, discover, and play blocky games.
(edit: oh, sorry, i thought you were doubting the quoted text, but you were actually using it as evidence to support your argument. my bad. if you delete your reply, maybe i can delete this comment too)
my old comment for reference:
you doubt what? the claim they are filing is that luanti violates the copyright. that's the point of filing a DMCA notice. that means they are alleging that luanti infringes minecraft’s copyright. what else could it be?
Yeah; notice that "on behalf of": Microsoft isn't even the one filing this, they've outsourced their enforcement and may not even have known about this before it blew up.
interesting interpretation. most other articles on the topic have a different interpretation. if the AI can not be the author, then who can? is writing the prompt enough to establish being the creator? i think we need a few more cases to get an answer to that.
Most pirated game assets or code is usually naive contamination from market place re-sellers that don't have a legal right to the kit-bashing content.
Very common to find pitch shifted audio getting resold on Unity store or web, images/3D with intact watermarks/meta-data, and scraped shader code. If you are credulous enough to buy files from a shady online seller, the copyright/trademark liability almost always falls on the person that publishes the IP. You can do everything above board, and still get sued as other license holders may register the asset signature with anti-piracy/YT bots.
For example, you could buy BBC/NBC/Sony libraries off ebay/web for a few bucks, but they will 100% still sue you into bankruptcy if you ever publish content with their media IP.
"AI" vector search can produce similar results of existing scraped works, and almost every LLM knows Disney Mickey Mouse. How LLM are trained means isomorphic plagiarism will occur regardless of data granularity. Just like how mp3 were a lousy highly compressed version of CD audio, the output does not have to be a verbatim copy to trip copyright and trademark IP laws.
Isomorphic plagiarism becomes less obfuscated when compiled into standard executable code. However, some firms actually used human session chat admins for data labeling/edits.
People may still lose even if they are right. If you resell something you didn't actually make yourself or purchased royalty free perpetual rights from the authorized holder, than the liability still falls on you when content rights change.
This is why fun indie games sometimes disappear. Some may not like these rules, but most play by them to survive as a business. =3
Minecraft looks very similar to original Wolfenstien or Ultima Online. Probably a bunch of earlier games that used blocks of simple textures. It's not an original art style, and it's not gonna stand up in any fair court. Notch never claimed that he invented the graphical style of Minecraft. He deliberately used low complexity graphics for ease-of-use and the ability to create large, performant maps.
In general DMCA notices are actually very cheap to fight. You just submit a counter notice. The lawsuit that can follow (but very unlikely here) can be expensive to fight.
Someone should copyright the American flag and popular advertised variants of blue/white/red and something alike and start DMCA'ing politicians, maybe that would wake them up to how bad the law is?
That's not how you get copyright, the creator of a work automatically gets the copyright. You can sue someone for violating your copyright, but if you tried to claim copyright of the US flag your case would get thrown out immediately.
If there are no consequences for filing a false DMCA takedown, what stops people or companies filing them all the time to take apps from Apple or Microsoft offline?
You will notice that DMCA claims are often against smaller parties. You rarely see those DMCA claiming companies go after somebody like Microsoft because those companies can fight back.
Its a system that mostly benefits large companies. Just about everybody else hates the system.
I don't know, if Google offers a service and a contract via license and you pay the service which is the developer fee, then Google violates their own contract, isn't that fraud committed upon the client who in this case is the app developer?
I, personally, don't feel that "making money by doing business in a particular market" should be a right it is illegal to waive.
If it were inalienable, things like regional distribution agreements would be void, since you could sign away your ability to sell in a certain country and then compete with your distributor anyway.
Let's keep some perspective here - there is no "inalienable right to sell apps to smartphone users via a private commercial storefront".
> Let's keep some perspective here - there is no "inalienable right to sell apps to smartphone users via a private commercial storefront".
This is unacceptable in a world where governments and businesses are increasingly gating services behind those same marketplaces.
Something’s got to give here. We can’t allow people to create a captive, gatekept marketplace and then create/allow significant pressure that herds people into that same marketplace.
IMO, break up all the gatekeepers using antitrust and require that critical infrastructure and businesses (government, banking, utilities, payments, etc) allow alternate access paths that don’t require a smartphone.
Imagine the landlord of a library were to close the store just because someone complained that the library was selling stolen books. Would you consider this acceptable?
And we are talking about a landlord that basically own the city here.
I don't know in this particular case of Luanti, but this could be people's livelihood we are talking about, there should be some sort of legal due process.
I think this take holds up very poorly when the reality boils down to:
"Government policy and critical services have made it so there are functionally two markets for mobile software, each owned by the manufacturers and developers of the mobile OS and hardware"
This isn't like physical sales, where I can open up a store anywhere. This also isn't like classic software sales for windows/mac desktops, where I can sell you a program from any website or physical store.
---
Functionally - this is like these private companies revoking your business license at their whim. I don't find it a tenable position.
All rights should be inalienable, simply because if they are not then all corporations will put "you waive all your rights" into their standard legal boilerplate.
The consequences do not matter. Voiding regional distribution agreements is a small price to pay for actually having rights.
If all rights were inalienable, an employment contract would not mean I need to pay my employee, because I would have an inalienable right to keep my own property (cash).
Also nobody would offer the contract in the first place because the employee would keep their inalienable right to choose how they spend their own time (not working).
EVERY contract is about giving something up in exchange for getting something. In most legal systems a contract is void if either party gives nothing. So in a world where nothing can be signed away, no contracts exist at all.
These de-facto monopolies such as "Google Play", must be
forced open by governments. It can not be that they continue
to turn a blind eye to these vile, ruthless and - most
importantly - extremely evil action by the giant that was
formerly known as Google (now known as adMonster).
What should be forced is allowing device owners to install software without the say of Google or Apple. This has been possible on Android for ages, but Google recently decided that they need to collect the ID of any dev that wants to build an apk, independent of distributing it through Google's own store.
Google and Apple can have whatever app storefronts they want, but they shouldn't have a say in what software I can run.
the DMCA would still apply. they could file a DMCA against f-droid too. while f-droid is more likely to fight back, if the DMCA is upheld, they would have to comply.
you are not wrong, and that's why apple is being forced to allow alternative app stores. forcing them to abandon checks is not what the majority would want. instead eventually there should be ab appstore choice just like the browser choice that was pushed for some time.
The problem with DMCA claims is that there are no consequences on misuse.
It places all the work on the affected parties to prove their innocence.
And suing the fake claim, is years of work and cost. This is why companies like Tracer.AI, ... get away with it. And how the system even gets misused to remove competitors or flat out blackmail.
Even worse is when we have hosting companies in Europe, who simply take American DMCA claims for granted because investigating them costs time and money.
The entire system is broken (by design?).
/Edit: what is with the downvotes? Did i write something that is incorrect?
> The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots.
Irrelevant to the DMCA claim.
> It's a clone, and not a subtle one either.
You are incorrect. Luanti is not a minecraft clone. It's more akin to Godot. I can import Minecraft assets into Godot, but it does not make Godot a copyright violator because of my actions.
Being block based doesn't mean it is using Minecraft assets. Minecraft does not own the idea of having a block based world, and there are quite a few popular (and many unpopular) block-based games. If you played Minecraft you should be able to tell that none of the assets are Minecraft assets.
Unfortunately (or fortunately, juries are generally a good thing), it's a jury of randos that will be shown the screenshots and asked to make a determination.
The things/concepts that those screenshots have that infiniminer (a voxel game made before minecraft) doesn't is... grass, trees, glass. I hate to bring it to you, but minecraft didn't invent those. And it certainly didn't invent the concept of a voxel world (not that it could even copyright that if it did).
Never mind that the things in those in-game screenshots aren't even in the play store app, they're separately downloadable things.
That's...straight-up false. Unless you have some source for this, you're just lying here.
Yes, it's inspired by Minecraft. The screenshots are of voxel-based survival crafter games you can build with their platform. The textures are not Minecraft textures. They are similar in style, sure, but that's not remotely the same thing. You can't copyright a general visual style, nor can you copyright a game genre.
To call this anything but "baseless" would be hilarious.
Well no, Minecraft was already wildly popular while it was in beta. Luanti was explicitly inspired by Minecraft, as stated in the article it was named Minetest up until a few years ago.
They'll backtrack and apologize - again.
At some point, the pathway for Microsoft to regain some of the goodwill associated with Minecraft is to fire the senior lawyer most responsible for sending out these notices.
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