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  • Hacker News
  • Following that logic, A server containing a replica of Darth Vader and Millennium Falcon should be reason enough to ban Minecraft everywhere.
    by wafflemaker
  • 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.

    by mortsnort
  • This is the reason anti-SLAPP statutes exist in many jurisdictions.
    by sterlind
  • I think you are hallucinating that quote.
    by astrobe_
  • 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

    by culi
  • 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?
    by testing22321
  • Apple and Microsoft have speed-dial access to the relevant legal departments to get their apps put back online
    by kg
  • 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.

    by benjiro29
  • 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.

    by kdhskdh
  • Also F-Droid apparently: https://f-droid.org/en/packages/net.minetest.minetest/

    And installing it from there instead of the play store actually gives you some assurance that it isn't full of spyware or will be full of spyware in the next silent update.

    by account42
  • 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?
    by whizzter
  • > Someone should copyright the American flag

    You're someone

    by VWWHFSfQ
  • 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.
    by Hasnep
  • It's just the usual corporate censorship via "good faith" DMCA notices that nobody but other corporations can afford to actually fight.
    by matheusmoreira
  • They created the perfect mafia system here. It is fascinating to see how easily democracies can be undermined.
    by shevy-java
  • 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.
    by Ohentis
  • 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

    by mysterydip
  • 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

    by Joel_Mckay
  • Could be, but unfortunately (3) can generate the code but it is not copyrightable (Thaler v. Perlmutter)
    by clort
  • 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.

    by WarmWash
  • It probably just looks at pictures
    by puskavi
  • 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.

    by duskdozer
  • 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.

    by astrobe_
  • There needs to be some sort of penalty for filing frivolous DMCA notices.
    by hexator
  • 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.
    by Ohentis
  • 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.

    by luckylion
  • 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.
    by ethin
  • 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.
    by jmward01
  • "Let's ensure big corporations can freely abuse small creators more than they are doing now."
    by raincole
  • 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.

    by applfanboysbgon