I know this isn't the point but this post is a master class in how to inform readers when you expect people from outside your community to read it.
It explains what every element is, concisely but clearly. I now know exactly what Luanti is, who all the actors are in this conflict, and what the conflict is about. It clearly conveys the who, what, when, where and why of the situation.
Also, DMCA is a damned mess, with the worst people in the world profiting from it and bullying small creators. There really should be better mechanisms to defend oneself from spurious claims.
This isn't DMCA. The DMCA process provides for immediate restoration of contested content upon issuance of a counter notice. At that point the internet service is absolved of any responsibility until a court orders the removal. Google has never implemented that process.
This is DMCA. DMCA does not absolve hosts if they "receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity". So if google hosts an app and makes money off of that app, they can't claim safe harbor if that app is infringing. Hence, under the DMCA, they need to take down the app as soon as they have even a suggestion that it might infringe somebody's copyright, and not put it back up until they are certain it doesn't.
A major problem with closed mobile platforms is that if you have an App Store monopoly, why do you need to care? It's why all the app stores are absolute trash.
Not sure how Apple handles DMCA but I know they're known for capricious arbitrary actions and being impossible to talk to. Their search and navigation is also total trash.
That hasn’t been my experience. The first couple of layers are sort of “inflexible bureaucrat,” but it doesn’t take long to get to an actual human, with authority to act. In my experience, I’m usually on the phone with someone, within a day or so.
And that's because the DMCA lets Google exploit its position. It's still a DMCA problem until the DMCA is either repealed or fixed to produce a comprehensively good situation.
Google made an arrangement to keep YouTube afloat. The copyright cartels can't use their automated libel machines if the fraudulently accused have the means to exercise their full rights. That would incur untenable operational expenses when people are permitted a low friction path to nullify the takedowns and then advance to the courts if the libeler wants carry on with their lies.
With intentional bias built into the system, Google gets favorable treatment on remuneration for the commercial copyrighted content that they host. The fix is a revision that revokes safe harbor protection when an accused party is disenfranchised by omission of the counter notice process.
> Also, DMCA is a damned mess, with the worst people in the world profiting from it and bullying small creators. There really should be better mechanisms to defend oneself from spurious claims.
Im pretty sure this is by design. The big players need to stifle small creators to maintain monopolies, google helps them do this because they benefit in some way.
One of the issues is that these aren't proper DMCA claims, instead Google/Youtube do a weird pseudo-DMCA thing where they just agree to take down your content and make you argue about it.
But the DMCA allows immediate countersuit for false notice with damages. If Google/Youtube actually just forwarded strict DMCA notices and no longer did takedowns once you counter-claimed, you could sue the trolls and collect damages. At that point it's just a free lunch for some bored lawyers willing to publish public domain works, covers, etc that are protected.
One of the loopholes of the counter-claim, is that you accept whatever random jurisdiction of the original claimer as your jurisdiction, pulling you usually into US Sphere.
It's a rigged game, its better not to engage with.
the specific laws and consequences from ai:
> Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3)(D), for a DMCA counter-notice to be legally valid, the person filing it must explicitly state in writing that they consent to the jurisdiction of a US Federal District Court.
> If you live in the US, you consent to the federal court in your local district.
> If you live outside the US, you must consent to the judicial district where the service provider (YouTube/Google) is located—which means the Northern District of California.
> For a creator living in Europe, Asia, or South America, filing a counter-notice means signing a document that legally exposes them to a federal copyright lawsuit in California. Even if the creator is 100% in the right (e.g., they used public domain footage or have clear Fair Use), the sheer financial threat of having to hire a US federal defense attorney to fight a lawsuit in California is often enough to make them abandon the dispute.
Yes. However, there are a lot of attorneys who do not want to take on the risk of representing a small client[0] and advise them to just settle - that's why copyright trolling works.
In addition, some platforms have their own parallel dispute resolution processes that have to be navigated first before you can make a formal DMCA complaint or counter-complaint. The reason for this is because those platforms have a lot of user piracy, and having their own system to ID and takedown work their users are reuploading makes it easier for them to negotiate their own licenses to the work. These systems are unregulated and often biased in favor of the legacy media companies who are selling them these rights in ways the DMCA process isn't.
The average attorney is not an expert platform Kremlinologist, and law schools don't teach how to fight YouTube Content ID - mainly because the things that actually work against Content ID are things that would get you punished harder in a real court of law.
Finally, the actual case we're talking about - Luanti - is a lot more involved than typical piracy cases or DMCA abuse cases. They are, after all, trying to make a game engine for Minecraft-like voxel games, and the screenshots they're showing off of those games are not entirely dissimilar to Minecraft. This is not "Luanti is an infringing copy of Minecraft", but "There is enough similarity to survive a motion to dismiss and require an actual trial". At which point the actual cost to defend goes from 4-5 figures to 6-7.
[0] The massive payments attorneys get for representation are priced into the cost of education and testing required to become a licensed attorney. As a result, every minute you spend representing someone who can't afford you is time not being spent paying back student loans.
> 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.
Minecraft does indeed have a lot of knockoffs that sometimes even use official imagery (e.g. the creeper). It seems Microsoft is using this AI tool to automatically detect these and submit DMCA requests
If anything, this problem would be fixed by hiring MORE lawyers. Not firing them.
They're likely using this copyright tool as it's cheaper than paying lawyers to scour the internet for infringing content. They're probably right, as long as the externalities of the AI tool's false positives fall on others, like the Allumeria and Luanti devs. There really should be a system to push the burden back on Microsoft - they can save the lawyer costs, but then they are as responsible for the AI decisions as they are for a human employee's actions.
They can do both, hire more lawyers to review and fire the lawyer who presided over bullshit claims (because I'm sure this isn't the only one). firing a lawyer makes news in the legal world and makes other lawyers more risk-averse.
Google should also be sued for violating its DMCA obligations, specifically
Section 512(g)(2)(c) of the DMCA requires that providers “[replace] the removed material and [cease] disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice”. Google’s failure to adhere to the deadlines specified by the DMCA raises questions regarding its approach toward handling DMCA counter-notices.
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?
The answer here is simple: If you submit a content strike you must provide a bond. If the content strike is reversed the bond is used to pay damages. The argument of 'people must review' is really just an argument of cost. The amount of content on the web makes it impractical to pay that upfront but a bond makes it manageable.
It is not a legal process. It is Google's process designed to minimize their involvement to the maximum degree possible.
When some random person copyright strikes your YT account you have no rights because it isn't based on the law. Its the equivalent of someone going to the manager of Starbucks and falsely saying you are harassing them, then the manager tells you to leave or they'll call the police. One private party told another private party you are a bad person and the private party in control punished you.
If memory serves the whole system came about way back because the big media companies and record companies got together to sue YT after google acquired them. So you might say the system was designed to let purported copyright holders act arbitrarily on purpose.
In the Starbucks example wouldn't there theoretically be a defamation claim against the person who lied about you - just with absurdly small damages that aren't worth pursuing.
Looks like some interest in this idea so I will refine it a little. The core question is about the bond value. There are some competing things here: A small time creator should be able to defend themselves against DMCA attacks on them (they get a bond on a reversed claim) and still be able to send notices against others without undue cost. Similarly, big content creators should be able to defend their work. I think the answer here is that the bond goes up the more content strikes you submit. Small creators essentially operate for free with just a few sent out, large troll farms have to post very big bonds. This works for small creators, they could receive big bonds if someone like MS incorrectly smacks them. Of course the bond rate could also go up by number of successful reversals too but that would just lead to account churn.
The essential idea here is that there is a real cost per DMCA notice that turns into a reward for those incorrectly accused. As the total number of DMCA notices go up the more bond money is floating around ready to pay those harmed by the system. DMCA takedown agents now have a real incentive to get it right. The better they are the more money they save. The trick is to set the bond high enough to turn it into a real value prop. The only thing missing, I think, is the upward pressure on the base bond. I think that should be set by the global ratio of successful to reversed takedowns. If the industry is spamming the bond goes up and payments go up. If the industry is policing itself the bond goes down.
The answer is not simple. Your solution means small creators are even more disfavored than they already are by trolls stealing their work; trolls are already heavily favoured because small creators must dox themselves to file a claim, and now you're adding in payment burdens too. Any amount large enough for a corporation to care about at all will be too large for an independent creator. Now not only trolls but corporations have an incentive to steal from small creators, because small creators will not be able to defend their copyright, essentially granting it to the corp for free.
The actual answer is to tear the entire fucking system down because it only exists to serve megacorporations, and start fresh, but there's nothing simple about that.
Just make the bond a % of the entity's revenue. Like that (apocryphal?) story about how Nokia CEO got speeding ticket of several million dollars in Finland, due to the ticket being a % of income.
Although I suppose a fixed % would limit how many claims you can file, which might be an issue for megacorporations who actually deal with lots of infringement -- although it would definitely reduce spurious claims.
Hmm, maybe coming up with a good law is actually hard.
Just a token fee like $5 would discourage spamming claims, though it does make fighting against re-uploads of the same content harder (the power balance isn't too bad for the play store where there is an entry fee for publishers as well).
The GP is not saying the small entity pays the bond. The GP is saying the big entity that wants the content taken down (in this case Microsoft and TracerAI) pays the bond, and forfeits it if a counter notice is issued.
Big companies regularly rip off small creators. Even if the copyright theft is incredibly obvious, a big company has the funds to drag out the legal proceedings for years. Do you have that kind of money?
You do understand that corporations aren't the only entities who produce content and file copyright claims, right? Independent artists, authors, developers, etc. all need to be able to file claims too, and they're already much more vulnerable. I hate the current copyright regime as much as anyone, but the solution can't be one that makes it even less helpful for independent creatives and even more abusable by corporations.
It is not that society needs to be prisoner of small creators, every time there is some regulation the small creator and hobbyist come to the rescue cmon
So society should be a prisoner to corporations instead, giving them even more power because you didn't think through how your brilliant new regulation could be misused by malicious actors? Cmon, indeed.
The subsection requires that the person "knowingly materially misrepresent [...] that material or activity is infringing". Proving that the misrepresentation was made knowingly can be extremely difficult.
Yeah how are we ever gonna possibly prove that against an AI-powered tool. It's the same with why police so readily embraced bad AI tech. It's all about shifting the liability and diffusing individual responsibility
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.
My cynical view is that the half-measure (punishments for impersonation rather than spurious claims) just prevents well-intentioned protestors from highlighting the insanity of the whole system.
DMCA seems like an ideal place to have the winner pay all parties' attorney's fees, plus damages. It's usually pretty objective and easy to see whether something infringes.
In this case, you know who claimed it. In most cases, you don't, because Google does not verify identity.
It's currently the rage in blackhat SEO: just say you're John Doe from Doeville and competitorsite.com is infringing on your copyright. Google will remove that specific URL from the SERPs and there's a 50/50 chance whether the target gets a notification from google or not.
If they do, they can counter claim directly and it takes 12-48 hours to be reinstated.
If they don't, they have to figure out what's going on by using the Lumen Database (the only way to receive that information because Google is horribly bad at basic legal matters) and finding the notice, which will contain the exact URL (because fun fact: the claim and counter-claim are case-sensitive, the removal-from-serp is case-insensitive), and then do manual counter-claim, and it takes anywhere from 3 to 30 days.
During that time, your competitor will just be gone from the SERPs.
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.
Correction: half of the pictures are not from mods, but from Luanti games; Luanti is a platform for voxel games.
And there's no screenshot of the two Luanti games that come the closest to Minecraft, both in terms of looks and gameplay. None of them are included in the standard Luanti distribution.
One can download games and mods from ContentDB (or directly from Luanti itself); ContentDB administrators are looking closely at the content users submit, from experience they will refuse your submission if everything is not properly licensed, even when the asserts are obviously FOSS (creators often include each other's stuff). They even were cautious about generative AI because the copyright assignment was unclear for them. They also have a DMCA page [1].
Long story short, Luanti is a respectable platform. They respect copyright and licensing (even for FOSS code and assets, unlike some private organizations). They also organize game jams and promote original content.
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.
Also Luanti probably could doge all this if they just ditched all the blatant minecraft clone mods. A mining game with blocks is totally fine. If you look back at infiniminer, it's clearly a different vibe of the same concept.
You're confusing copyright with patents, and you cannot patent a game design. Well, you couldn't. I'm not sure about these days. In any case, this isn't a patent claim. It's a copyright claim, and copyright protects expression, not the idea.
That'll all become glaringly obvious when this is reinstated, because the copyright claim is bogus.
The design or gameplay isn't the issue, the aesthetic is clearly Minecraft.
You can't take Minecraft assets, mix the pixels around a little bit, and then be legally free and clear. If the public looks at pictures of your game, and they say "100% it's Minecraft", you're gonna have a bad time.
I'll be honest, you sound like someone's grandma who calls every game console a "Nintendo" and every game character "Mario". So what if the general public can't tell the difference between Samus and Mario? That doesn't mean we ban Metroid.
They're the same genre, but obviously not the same game. Is only one voxel sandbox game allowed to exist in the world? What's next, only one platformer can exist? Only one action movie is allowed to exist? Only one power metal band in the world?
What are you talking about? There are no Minecraft assets in that screenshot, even with "pixels mixed around". I play both games and can tell you that screenshot is easily distinguished from Minecraft.
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.
Obviously, taking a photo requires much more than clicking a button. Even if you simply pointed and shot, the timing can be special. Copyright requires some creativity, if the creation process is completely mechanical you may not be able to copyright the end result.
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
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.
Where do you read that description? Luanti has been around for many years (previously called Minetest). It's entirely built from scratch and a true FLOSS project.
It's also not really a "game" so much as a "game engine" so it's not even a direct competitor to Mojang
This is in the source article of this post:
"While Luanti is popular as an open-source alternative to Minecraft (as its roots are in blocky sandbox games), it also lowers barriers to bringing creative ideas to life."
The situation is absurd. The fact that an AI bot from Tracer.AI filed a complaint without any real review just because Luanti uses a similar visual style to Minecraft, and Google just accepted it and removed the app is a problem of automation without oversight
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.
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.
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.
A clone isn't the benchmark for breaking the law though, substantial similarity is.
There are a gazillion cases that establish this, and the reason why you can't just paint spiderman green and start selling t-shirts with "spyderman" on them.
Green Spiderman would be copying of protected elements - like Spiderman's outline. Style and general ideas are not protected by copyright. Substantial similarity comes in as a test for whether copying of those protected elements occurred, to avoid an otherwise disprovable "I didn't copy, I just drew Spiderman's exact outline by complete coincidence" defense, but is irrelevant if the what's supposedly been copied isn't protected by copyright in the first place.
The most prominent object in that scene is the low poly airship. Minecraft does not have vehicles, does not have objects with components with such a small thickness as the railings, does not have angles like the bow of the ship or the ropes.
It looks more like a Runescape asset than a Minecraft one, for example:
And you would bet your life savings that the general public, including a jury, would know that? They would look at Minecraft and say it's a clearly different game?
"Obviously the real Spiderman has an "i" and not a "y" in its spelling!!1!"
Explain that to a jury in front of a judge and Disney lawyers and see how your legal theory goes over...
Do you think that the way a jury trial works is that they call the jury into the room, show them a few screenshots, and then immediately say "right, time to give your verdict!"?
If this were ever to go to a jury trial, both sides would get to present their evidence, which includes explanations of how Luanti is different from Minecraft.
If you were correct, then basically every accusation of substantial similarity would be upheld in court because apparently juries are morons and they don't get given the full facts.
However, you also have failed to provide any support for your assumption that this would go to a jury trial; the article doesn't mention any kind of trial. DMCA notices are adjudicated by the platform owner, with very little transparency, and certainly no jury of peers. If it doesn't get resolved by the counter-notice, then maybe Luanti will sue (Microsoft? Google? Tracer.AI? all of the above? who knows!), and maybe it would go before a jury. But given how lawsuits in the US go these days, that's pretty unlikely. Odds are if there is a lawsuit, it will be settled before a jury ever gets selected.
Any voxel game looks like this... Look at Veloren. Another open source voxel game that doesn't even have mining or anything in common w MC. Still has that look
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.
I know this isn't the point but this post is a master class in how to inform readers when you expect people from outside your community to read it.
It explains what every element is, concisely but clearly. I now know exactly what Luanti is, who all the actors are in this conflict, and what the conflict is about. It clearly conveys the who, what, when, where and why of the situation.
Also, DMCA is a damned mess, with the worst people in the world profiting from it and bullying small creators. There really should be better mechanisms to defend oneself from spurious claims.
This isn't DMCA. The DMCA process provides for immediate restoration of contested content upon issuance of a counter notice. At that point the internet service is absolved of any responsibility until a court orders the removal. Google has never implemented that process.
This is DMCA. DMCA does not absolve hosts if they "receive a financial benefit directly attributable to the infringing activity". So if google hosts an app and makes money off of that app, they can't claim safe harbor if that app is infringing. Hence, under the DMCA, they need to take down the app as soon as they have even a suggestion that it might infringe somebody's copyright, and not put it back up until they are certain it doesn't.
Yes, Google is really bad at this. For all the problems with Amazon, they're actually much better at actually following DMCA
A major problem with closed mobile platforms is that if you have an App Store monopoly, why do you need to care? It's why all the app stores are absolute trash.
Not sure how Apple handles DMCA but I know they're known for capricious arbitrary actions and being impossible to talk to. Their search and navigation is also total trash.
> being impossible to talk to
That hasn’t been my experience. The first couple of layers are sort of “inflexible bureaucrat,” but it doesn’t take long to get to an actual human, with authority to act. In my experience, I’m usually on the phone with someone, within a day or so.
And that's because the DMCA lets Google exploit its position. It's still a DMCA problem until the DMCA is either repealed or fixed to produce a comprehensively good situation.
Google made an arrangement to keep YouTube afloat. The copyright cartels can't use their automated libel machines if the fraudulently accused have the means to exercise their full rights. That would incur untenable operational expenses when people are permitted a low friction path to nullify the takedowns and then advance to the courts if the libeler wants carry on with their lies.
With intentional bias built into the system, Google gets favorable treatment on remuneration for the commercial copyrighted content that they host. The fix is a revision that revokes safe harbor protection when an accused party is disenfranchised by omission of the counter notice process.
It's not immediate restoration, there's a delay.
> Also, DMCA is a damned mess, with the worst people in the world profiting from it and bullying small creators. There really should be better mechanisms to defend oneself from spurious claims.
Im pretty sure this is by design. The big players need to stifle small creators to maintain monopolies, google helps them do this because they benefit in some way.
One of the issues is that these aren't proper DMCA claims, instead Google/Youtube do a weird pseudo-DMCA thing where they just agree to take down your content and make you argue about it.
But the DMCA allows immediate countersuit for false notice with damages. If Google/Youtube actually just forwarded strict DMCA notices and no longer did takedowns once you counter-claimed, you could sue the trolls and collect damages. At that point it's just a free lunch for some bored lawyers willing to publish public domain works, covers, etc that are protected.
One of the loopholes of the counter-claim, is that you accept whatever random jurisdiction of the original claimer as your jurisdiction, pulling you usually into US Sphere.
It's a rigged game, its better not to engage with.
the specific laws and consequences from ai:
> Under 17 U.S.C. § 512(g)(3)(D), for a DMCA counter-notice to be legally valid, the person filing it must explicitly state in writing that they consent to the jurisdiction of a US Federal District Court.
> If you live in the US, you consent to the federal court in your local district.
> If you live outside the US, you must consent to the judicial district where the service provider (YouTube/Google) is located—which means the Northern District of California.
> For a creator living in Europe, Asia, or South America, filing a counter-notice means signing a document that legally exposes them to a federal copyright lawsuit in California. Even if the creator is 100% in the right (e.g., they used public domain footage or have clear Fair Use), the sheer financial threat of having to hire a US federal defense attorney to fight a lawsuit in California is often enough to make them abandon the dispute.
It isn't necessary that everyone play the game, it only takes one attorney group to create a sufficient hazard to these troll firms.
Yes it is absolutely a dumb game and an unfair process, but playing dumb games and using unfair tactics to inflict pain go both ways.
Yes. However, there are a lot of attorneys who do not want to take on the risk of representing a small client[0] and advise them to just settle - that's why copyright trolling works.
In addition, some platforms have their own parallel dispute resolution processes that have to be navigated first before you can make a formal DMCA complaint or counter-complaint. The reason for this is because those platforms have a lot of user piracy, and having their own system to ID and takedown work their users are reuploading makes it easier for them to negotiate their own licenses to the work. These systems are unregulated and often biased in favor of the legacy media companies who are selling them these rights in ways the DMCA process isn't.
The average attorney is not an expert platform Kremlinologist, and law schools don't teach how to fight YouTube Content ID - mainly because the things that actually work against Content ID are things that would get you punished harder in a real court of law.
Finally, the actual case we're talking about - Luanti - is a lot more involved than typical piracy cases or DMCA abuse cases. They are, after all, trying to make a game engine for Minecraft-like voxel games, and the screenshots they're showing off of those games are not entirely dissimilar to Minecraft. This is not "Luanti is an infringing copy of Minecraft", but "There is enough similarity to survive a motion to dismiss and require an actual trial". At which point the actual cost to defend goes from 4-5 figures to 6-7.
[0] The massive payments attorneys get for representation are priced into the cost of education and testing required to become a licensed attorney. As a result, every minute you spend representing someone who can't afford you is time not being spent paying back student loans.
It's funny I've even seen landing pages / product launches that violate this.
Trending on HN: Blog post: Sneed now helps with your blargs
Then I go to their homepage and it's like https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/3219377-curtains-for-zoosha
At last! My blargs have been in disarray for ages.
It sounds like someone hasn't yet invested in a turbo encabulator.
> 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.
Hey, it looks like this is a ripe opportunity for countersuit, because it's bad faith.
I am not a lawyer, but this seems like harassment on a matter that has been previously settled.
Well, Microsoft is busy firing real game developers. No chance.
Unless corpo heads are prosecuted for copyright infringement(false DMCA claim IS copyright infringement) and jailed or sentenced to death, no change.
> 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.
Well they said it was filed by Tracer.AI
Minecraft does indeed have a lot of knockoffs that sometimes even use official imagery (e.g. the creeper). It seems Microsoft is using this AI tool to automatically detect these and submit DMCA requests
If anything, this problem would be fixed by hiring MORE lawyers. Not firing them.
They're likely using this copyright tool as it's cheaper than paying lawyers to scour the internet for infringing content. They're probably right, as long as the externalities of the AI tool's false positives fall on others, like the Allumeria and Luanti devs. There really should be a system to push the burden back on Microsoft - they can save the lawyer costs, but then they are as responsible for the AI decisions as they are for a human employee's actions.
They can do both, hire more lawyers to review and fire the lawyer who presided over bullshit claims (because I'm sure this isn't the only one). firing a lawyer makes news in the legal world and makes other lawyers more risk-averse.
Google should also be sued for violating its DMCA obligations, specifically
Section 512(g)(2)(c) of the DMCA requires that providers “[replace] the removed material and [cease] disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice”. Google’s failure to adhere to the deadlines specified by the DMCA raises questions regarding its approach toward handling DMCA counter-notices.
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?
[0] https://lumendatabase.org/notices/93778051
[1] https://lumendatabase.org/notices/80387573
This is starting to establish a bad actor pattern.
The answer here is simple: If you submit a content strike you must provide a bond. If the content strike is reversed the bond is used to pay damages. The argument of 'people must review' is really just an argument of cost. The amount of content on the web makes it impractical to pay that upfront but a bond makes it manageable.
It is not a legal process. It is Google's process designed to minimize their involvement to the maximum degree possible.
When some random person copyright strikes your YT account you have no rights because it isn't based on the law. Its the equivalent of someone going to the manager of Starbucks and falsely saying you are harassing them, then the manager tells you to leave or they'll call the police. One private party told another private party you are a bad person and the private party in control punished you.
If memory serves the whole system came about way back because the big media companies and record companies got together to sue YT after google acquired them. So you might say the system was designed to let purported copyright holders act arbitrarily on purpose.
In the Starbucks example wouldn't there theoretically be a defamation claim against the person who lied about you - just with absurdly small damages that aren't worth pursuing.
Looks like some interest in this idea so I will refine it a little. The core question is about the bond value. There are some competing things here: A small time creator should be able to defend themselves against DMCA attacks on them (they get a bond on a reversed claim) and still be able to send notices against others without undue cost. Similarly, big content creators should be able to defend their work. I think the answer here is that the bond goes up the more content strikes you submit. Small creators essentially operate for free with just a few sent out, large troll farms have to post very big bonds. This works for small creators, they could receive big bonds if someone like MS incorrectly smacks them. Of course the bond rate could also go up by number of successful reversals too but that would just lead to account churn.
The essential idea here is that there is a real cost per DMCA notice that turns into a reward for those incorrectly accused. As the total number of DMCA notices go up the more bond money is floating around ready to pay those harmed by the system. DMCA takedown agents now have a real incentive to get it right. The better they are the more money they save. The trick is to set the bond high enough to turn it into a real value prop. The only thing missing, I think, is the upward pressure on the base bond. I think that should be set by the global ratio of successful to reversed takedowns. If the industry is spamming the bond goes up and payments go up. If the industry is policing itself the bond goes down.
The answer is not simple. Your solution means small creators are even more disfavored than they already are by trolls stealing their work; trolls are already heavily favoured because small creators must dox themselves to file a claim, and now you're adding in payment burdens too. Any amount large enough for a corporation to care about at all will be too large for an independent creator. Now not only trolls but corporations have an incentive to steal from small creators, because small creators will not be able to defend their copyright, essentially granting it to the corp for free.
The actual answer is to tear the entire fucking system down because it only exists to serve megacorporations, and start fresh, but there's nothing simple about that.
Just make the bond a % of the entity's revenue. Like that (apocryphal?) story about how Nokia CEO got speeding ticket of several million dollars in Finland, due to the ticket being a % of income.
Although I suppose a fixed % would limit how many claims you can file, which might be an issue for megacorporations who actually deal with lots of infringement -- although it would definitely reduce spurious claims.
Hmm, maybe coming up with a good law is actually hard.
Not quite a million USD, but ~$120k
https://abcnews.com/ABCNews/finnish-businessman-handed-12100...
Just a token fee like $5 would discourage spamming claims, though it does make fighting against re-uploads of the same content harder (the power balance isn't too bad for the play store where there is an entry fee for publishers as well).
The GP is not saying the small entity pays the bond. The GP is saying the big entity that wants the content taken down (in this case Microsoft and TracerAI) pays the bond, and forfeits it if a counter notice is issued.
Big companies regularly rip off small creators. Even if the copyright theft is incredibly obvious, a big company has the funds to drag out the legal proceedings for years. Do you have that kind of money?
You do understand that corporations aren't the only entities who produce content and file copyright claims, right? Independent artists, authors, developers, etc. all need to be able to file claims too, and they're already much more vulnerable. I hate the current copyright regime as much as anyone, but the solution can't be one that makes it even less helpful for independent creatives and even more abusable by corporations.
It is not that society needs to be prisoner of small creators, every time there is some regulation the small creator and hobbyist come to the rescue cmon
So society should be a prisoner to corporations instead, giving them even more power because you didn't think through how your brilliant new regulation could be misused by malicious actors? Cmon, indeed.
"Let's ensure big corporations can freely abuse small creators more than they are doing now."
There needs to be some sort of penalty for filing frivolous DMCA notices.
There is. 17 U.S.C. 512(f) explicitly provides penalties. The problem is that this subsection is so rarely enforced it might as well not exist.
The subsection requires that the person "knowingly materially misrepresent [...] that material or activity is infringing". Proving that the misrepresentation was made knowingly can be extremely difficult.
Yeah how are we ever gonna possibly prove that against an AI-powered tool. It's the same with why police so readily embraced bad AI tech. It's all about shifting the liability and diffusing individual responsibility
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.
My cynical view is that the half-measure (punishments for impersonation rather than spurious claims) just prevents well-intentioned protestors from highlighting the insanity of the whole system.
DMCA seems like an ideal place to have the winner pay all parties' attorney's fees, plus damages. It's usually pretty objective and easy to see whether something infringes.
In this case, you know who claimed it. In most cases, you don't, because Google does not verify identity.
It's currently the rage in blackhat SEO: just say you're John Doe from Doeville and competitorsite.com is infringing on your copyright. Google will remove that specific URL from the SERPs and there's a 50/50 chance whether the target gets a notification from google or not.
If they do, they can counter claim directly and it takes 12-48 hours to be reinstated.
If they don't, they have to figure out what's going on by using the Lumen Database (the only way to receive that information because Google is horribly bad at basic legal matters) and finding the notice, which will contain the exact URL (because fun fact: the claim and counter-claim are case-sensitive, the removal-from-serp is case-insensitive), and then do manual counter-claim, and it takes anywhere from 3 to 30 days.
During that time, your competitor will just be gone from the SERPs.
Could the sequence of events be:
1) open source project publishes source
2) AI scrapes source
3) AI generates code for proprietary game similar to that of the source
4) AI tool scans jar files and finds similar code, triggers copyright violation
It's very unlikely. The DMCA notification is from Microsoft, who owns Minecraft.
The sequence of events is:
1) US votes a law that is hilariously favourable to copyright holders
2) Copyright holders abuse it for a while with non-AI bots
3) Copyright holders abuse it with AI-bots
4) Copyright holders will continue to abuse it until the law is amended.
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.
Louis Rossman have a video on it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-j89LJysY
Didn't the international agreements require ratification from legislative?
Yes, but as told by DMCA creator quoted in video congress cant amend them much unlike any other law.
Congress could obviously not pass ratificarion, but you know how its usually going.
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.
It favours large copyright holders, with deep pockets and ranks of lawyers on retainer, over small copyright holders.
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?
I see the quotes are misleading. I doubt the parent's suggestion and was providing the article quotes as justification. I've edited it now.
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.
Here's another arm using Luanti as a test bed: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.03482v1
I'd imagine Microsoft gave them pretty clear instructions to not let them know officially when they're bullying other companies on Microsoft's behalf.
It probably just looks at pictures
If you look at the screenshots of the game in question, it's pretty obvious what is going on
https://www.luanti.org/en/#gallery
Even though those are mods, it's a bad look to be holding those up as reference game images.
Correction: half of the pictures are not from mods, but from Luanti games; Luanti is a platform for voxel games.
And there's no screenshot of the two Luanti games that come the closest to Minecraft, both in terms of looks and gameplay. None of them are included in the standard Luanti distribution.
One can download games and mods from ContentDB (or directly from Luanti itself); ContentDB administrators are looking closely at the content users submit, from experience they will refuse your submission if everything is not properly licensed, even when the asserts are obviously FOSS (creators often include each other's stuff). They even were cautious about generative AI because the copyright assignment was unclear for them. They also have a DMCA page [1].
Long story short, Luanti is a respectable platform. They respect copyright and licensing (even for FOSS code and assets, unlike some private organizations). They also organize game jams and promote original content.
[1] https://content.luanti.org/copyright_dmca/
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.
Meh. Luanti is nearly as old as minecraft itself. You could say just as well that they copied the style of infiniminer.
If your whole shtick is creating blocky games with retro-easy-to-recreate 8x8 or 16x16 textures it's not really weird people easily imitate it.
https://web.archive.org/web/20060117081147/http://www.blockl...
Um, why? Because they both have blocks? Is Microsoft the only company allowed to use cubes now?
Even if they were similar, artistic style is not protected under copyright.
But the IP is, and it's jury that would likely decide.
So with a straight face, you think a jury wouldn't call this Minecraft?
https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg
Also Luanti probably could doge all this if they just ditched all the blatant minecraft clone mods. A mining game with blocks is totally fine. If you look back at infiniminer, it's clearly a different vibe of the same concept.
You're confusing copyright with patents, and you cannot patent a game design. Well, you couldn't. I'm not sure about these days. In any case, this isn't a patent claim. It's a copyright claim, and copyright protects expression, not the idea.
That'll all become glaringly obvious when this is reinstated, because the copyright claim is bogus.
The design or gameplay isn't the issue, the aesthetic is clearly Minecraft.
You can't take Minecraft assets, mix the pixels around a little bit, and then be legally free and clear. If the public looks at pictures of your game, and they say "100% it's Minecraft", you're gonna have a bad time.
I'll be honest, you sound like someone's grandma who calls every game console a "Nintendo" and every game character "Mario". So what if the general public can't tell the difference between Samus and Mario? That doesn't mean we ban Metroid.
They're the same genre, but obviously not the same game. Is only one voxel sandbox game allowed to exist in the world? What's next, only one platformer can exist? Only one action movie is allowed to exist? Only one power metal band in the world?
Again, aesthetic is not copyrightable.
What are you talking about? There are no Minecraft assets in that screenshot, even with "pixels mixed around". I play both games and can tell you that screenshot is easily distinguished from Minecraft.
Could be, but unfortunately (3) can generate the code but it is not copyrightable (Thaler v. Perlmutter)
No, that isn't what that case ruled at all. It ruled that the program generating the code cannot be the author.
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.
Clicking a button is enough to become an "author" of the photo, and writing a prompt requires more skill.
Obviously, taking a photo requires much more than clicking a button. Even if you simply pointed and shot, the timing can be special. Copyright requires some creativity, if the creation process is completely mechanical you may not be able to copyright the end result.
A company does NOT have rights to copy/mimic other works without legal license outside fair use like satire.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-sel...
The owner of the Camera in this case lost copyright ownership claim, as did the rights-group representing the monkey. =3
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1iLPxwgV4E
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
It's just the usual corporate censorship via "good faith" DMCA notices that nobody but other corporations can afford to actually fight.
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.
They created the perfect mafia system here. It is fascinating to see how easily democracies can be undermined.
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.
You have to register copyright to claim statutory damages. You can claim actual damages (lost sales) but statutory damages are where the money is at.
> Someone should copyright the American flag
You're someone
The game's own website describes it as an "open source alternative to Minecraft".
Frivolous or not, MS has financial incentive to try to keep this game offline. I think this is going as intended from MS's POV.
Where do you read that description? Luanti has been around for many years (previously called Minetest). It's entirely built from scratch and a true FLOSS project.
It's also not really a "game" so much as a "game engine" so it's not even a direct competitor to Mojang
This is in the source article of this post: "While Luanti is popular as an open-source alternative to Minecraft (as its roots are in blocky sandbox games), it also lowers barriers to bringing creative ideas to life."
I think you are hallucinating that quote.
This is the reason anti-SLAPP statutes exist in many jurisdictions.
The situation is absurd. The fact that an AI bot from Tracer.AI filed a complaint without any real review just because Luanti uses a similar visual style to Minecraft, and Google just accepted it and removed the app is a problem of automation without oversight
Following that logic, A server containing a replica of Darth Vader and Millennium Falcon should be reason enough to ban Minecraft everywhere.
Luanti is available on Obtainium: https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/apps?categoryMode=inclusiv...
The only sustainable solution to these kinds of problems is to diversify away from Google Play Store.
They should file a monopoly lawsuit against Microsoft. They are weaponizing their size to take down a competitor.
How do the lawyers filing these bogus claims not end up in prison? How is it not fraud?
Wondering if someone can bring a class action lawsuit against tracer.ai and/or their clients.
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.
Apple and Microsoft have speed-dial access to the relevant legal departments to get their apps put back online
oh this is minetest, i thought it was that residential proxy company at first glance
One can still install Luanti from F-Droid.
It's great little tool to teach coding.
Concise and useful, rare combo
There is no cost to Tracer.ai for false positives.
There is a cost to them for false negatives, if only just lost revenue.
The beatings will persist until morale improves.
Sue them for tortious interference
I suspect the TOS say google can remove or deny apps for any reason. If in the EU, there might be a DMA claim though.
Sue Microsft, not Google. It was Microsoft who filed the DMCA notice, Microsft is the responsible party.
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?
Can a TOS waive any rights? Surely there are some unalienable rights.
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.
It really feels like middle-ages kind of justice.
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.
at the same time google is moving to forbid other app stores so...
The TOS isn't a defense against purposely trying to ruin someone else's business by lying
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?
Outsider here.
The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots. It's a clone, and not a subtle one either.
To call this "Baseless" is hilarious.
Also outsider (like it matters).
> 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.
> To call this "Baseless" is hilarious.
I would say it's justified.
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.
> The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots.
They're not. It's a voxel game engine with an open source history dating back a year (October 2010) before Minecraft 1.0 was released (November 2011).
There are plenty of games for Luanti that have different textures and objectives.
It's all open source. Download it and try some of the different games.
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.
https://www.luanti.org/en/#gallery
What percentage of the population would see those screenshots and say "Definitely Luanti" 0.00001%? 0.001%?
If they put them side by side with the closest minecraft equivalent? Hopefully a few.
If it was a clone, surely the images would be the same.
A clone isn't the benchmark for breaking the law though, substantial similarity is.
There are a gazillion cases that establish this, and the reason why you can't just paint spiderman green and start selling t-shirts with "spyderman" on them.
Green Spiderman would be copying of protected elements - like Spiderman's outline. Style and general ideas are not protected by copyright. Substantial similarity comes in as a test for whether copying of those protected elements occurred, to avoid an otherwise disprovable "I didn't copy, I just drew Spiderman's exact outline by complete coincidence" defense, but is irrelevant if the what's supposedly been copied isn't protected by copyright in the first place.
Usually the benchmark is "would a person reasonably confuse this for being the IP of another company"
https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg
C'mon...
The most prominent object in that scene is the low poly airship. Minecraft does not have vehicles, does not have objects with components with such a small thickness as the railings, does not have angles like the bow of the ship or the ropes.
It looks more like a Runescape asset than a Minecraft one, for example:
https://runescape.wiki/images/thumb/The_Adventurous.png/1200...
And you would bet your life savings that the general public, including a jury, would know that? They would look at Minecraft and say it's a clearly different game?
"Obviously the real Spiderman has an "i" and not a "y" in its spelling!!1!"
Explain that to a jury in front of a judge and Disney lawyers and see how your legal theory goes over...
Do you think that the way a jury trial works is that they call the jury into the room, show them a few screenshots, and then immediately say "right, time to give your verdict!"?
If this were ever to go to a jury trial, both sides would get to present their evidence, which includes explanations of how Luanti is different from Minecraft.
If you were correct, then basically every accusation of substantial similarity would be upheld in court because apparently juries are morons and they don't get given the full facts.
However, you also have failed to provide any support for your assumption that this would go to a jury trial; the article doesn't mention any kind of trial. DMCA notices are adjudicated by the platform owner, with very little transparency, and certainly no jury of peers. If it doesn't get resolved by the counter-notice, then maybe Luanti will sue (Microsoft? Google? Tracer.AI? all of the above? who knows!), and maybe it would go before a jury. But given how lawsuits in the US go these days, that's pretty unlikely. Odds are if there is a lawsuit, it will be settled before a jury ever gets selected.
Conversely you can't say you own all green blocks that represent grass and all brown blocks that represent tree trunks.
> The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots.
They are literally not Minecraft screenshots. Your statement is a lie.
Cloning games is not copyright infringement. Think what that would mean for a popular infiniminer clone
They are not any more Minecraft screenshots than Minecraft screenshots are Roblox screenshots.
Objectively, you're wrong.
Objectively, that's subjective.
Any voxel game looks like this... Look at Veloren. Another open source voxel game that doesn't even have mining or anything in common w MC. Still has that look
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.
> Yes, it's inspired by Minecraft.
More likely that Minecraft was inspired by Luanti since Luanti was released first. (at least, formally released)
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.
Do you understand what the difference between "creation" and "release" is? And which one actually involves inspiration...?