Unomelon, the developer of Minecraft-inspired sandbox game Allumeria, says a DMCA from Microsoft, evidently related to Minecraft, got the game removed from Steam.
“The Allumeria Steam page is currently down because Microsoft has filed a false DMCA claim on it,” Unomelon said on Bluesky on Tuesday. “They sent an email earlier today claiming that this screenshot infringes on their copyright. I am taking a moment to figure out what my path is going forward, will update soon.”
The screenshot in question (above) is a simple wide shot of a forest filled with birch trees, what look to be oak trees with green and autumnal leaves, and a few pumpkins and weeds checkering the grassy dirt. There are definitely some similarities to Minecraft; if you told me this was a screenshot of a Minecraft mod, I’d probably believe you, but that’s true of many voxel-based games, including Hytale.
They have an AI tool that scrapes everything on the Internet until it finds copyright violations. The entire and only job of humans in this process is to press the big “C&D” button, so the barrier is just much too low, allowing for stuff like this to happen accidentally.
There should be a serious consequence for false DMCA claims. There has to be a deterrent. YouTube is already completely fucked by UMG. I wanna see them go out of business because of all their false claims.
The issue is with what drug R&D looks like. You invent some new compound you think will treat X because it has a similar structure to other compounds that treat X. Now you need a decade or so of trials to prove that it actually treats X, that it doesn’t have side effects too severe to stop people from taking it for X, that it doesn’t also silently cause some kind of obscure cancer, and then it might get approved (and if it doesn’t that manpower and money was wasted) and the exclusivity time granted by your patent is how you turn a net profit from the last ten years of work because it’s much easier for another company to spin up a factory making X than it is to get X approved in the first place so anyone else making the drug can charge less to cover their much lower costs in getting it to market and will eat the lunch you spent the last decade+ cooking.
Unless you intend for medical R&D to be done purely under public funding, which is an entirely different scenario than just “no patent law.”
Ok sure, we can completely fund all medical research by the public, but I’m not so sure how this would work out. This would be a bit too much communism for my taste.
At least in the US, government policy has meant that getting a drug to market is an extremely high bar. This means that funding the wrong drug can waste a billion dollars or more of time, material, trained researchers and lab space, etc.
Funding drugs by popular attention, private donation, kickstarter, or anything like that is likely to produce a bunch of scams and even more waste.
Funding drugs by having the government select which ones to study is likely to produce several gigantic financial boondoggles that are dragged on because some Senator wants the jobs wasting the money creates to remain in his state, or something.
If we want more drugs to come out, the best thing to do would be to reduce the cost of making a drug legal to sell, like by lowering the proof required for efficacy, or by alleviating the doctor shortage by permanently increasing the number of medicare funded residency slots.
Senator wants the jobs wasting the money creates to remain in his state, or something.
I guess make term limits. You can’t sit more than 2 terms. That would solve a whole shitton of other problems too, but it would make the people in the position of power actually be there for what the job is, and not what the job gives.
This is why you use distinct art in a game and not something that looks close to something a mega corp owns. Like art style ip infringement is one of the easiest legal roads a corp can take to take you down. Since art style is subjective, it doesn’t need to be an exact copy to make the claim legally valid. As long as the claimant can claim that customers have confused the infringing art with that of the ip holder. Look I’m not defending MS’ actions. If we lived in a fair and just world this wouldn’t have happened. But we don’t, we live in the world these fucks have created. So either you fight them and “die” trying when these fucks take your game down or you could have used another art style and this wouldn’t have happened in the first place and you’d use the incoming revenue on something else instead of wasting it on a legal battle. I know this sounds defeatist but it’s just not a hill that’s worth dying on especially if you are a small indie dev. It’s not even an art style that is cool looking anyway who wants to be associated with the shit Notch made.
Worth noting, that image was given as an example of how the game looks similar to Minecraft. It was not the basis of the complaint. Microsoft also claimed the gameplay is stolen as well, according to Valve. So it’s definitely not about the trees themselves.
I think this is definitely not a fight Microsoft can win (without a war of attrition I mean), and they seem to agree because they revoked the complaint by now. But there’s other blocks not featured on this image that would make a much stronger case imo. Stone bricks and planks look identical imo and definitely can be made unique looking if the dev wanted to.
Gameplay can be copied just fine, anyway. In fact, most games are just copying the gameplay of something else (not least of which are the THOUSANDS of Minecraft clones that play the same, but have their own aesthetic). This game looks exactly like Minecraft, tho, and it could very easily be confused for Minecraft. That is going to be more damning for the dev than the mechanics.
Is there a legal precedent on how copyright can be used against game clones?
I know that there is for board games, and there it says that the art and the rulebook cannot be identical, but that game rules aren’t protectable. So it’s basically the same level of protection that e.g. a painting would have.
If the same thing holds true for video games, then “The gameplay being similar” shouldn’t matter at all, and the only question is whether the art is too similar.
Considering that the art for voxel games is limited by technicalities (1m size blocks are required by the gameplay) and the low-resolution texture art style, I would naively guess that there’s not much room for differentiation and thus unless the textures are actual 1:1 copies of minecraft textures, there’s not much that can be done there either.
There aren’t a lot of ways you can draw a low-resolution square birch texture.
They aren’t? There’s nothing that requires a voxel to represent a 1m cube. They could be 0.5m cubes, or even something exotic like spheres with a calculated surface stretching over them to smooth out the result. 1m cubes are just convenient and popularized by Minecraft.
Yes, they are required by that type of gameplay. 0.5m cubes mean that mining and placing blocks takes 8x as long. That is a massive change in the gameplay.
Can you do a voxel game where mining and building is extremely fiddly and everything is much more laboursome than with 1m blocks? Sure you can. Has been done. And it sucks.
You could also do a voxel game where mining and building is not extremely fiddly and nothing is much more laboursome than with 1m blocks.
Terraria, Starbound and many other similar games manage to do it in 2D by making you mine more than one block at a time, what makes it impossible in 3D spaces?
IANAL, and this is oversimplifying. Copyright protects the creative elements of a game, including the specific way that a game is coded (so you cannot decompile a game, modify all the art assets, change the code a little, and then sell it), and possibly aspects of the gameplay required to give it a specific “feel”.
If you want a solid legal defense for cloning, you could have one team that describes the original game in a way that removes the creative elements, and a second team that works from that description to make a new work. This works for other works, too; I can write my own “book about an orphan that learns he has magical powers, goes to a school to learn to use those, and ultimately battles and defeats the powerful dark wizard that killed his parents”, but can’t sit down following the story elements of Harry Potter for my new Barry Cotter book series.
Ultimately the line is what you can convince a judge and/or jury is “different enough”.
The gameplay being too similar is a bogus argument Microsoft’s AI probably snuck in there. I mentioned it to support my point that the DMCA complaint isn’t about the birch trees specifically, but that’s definitely not an argument that would have worked out legally for Microsoft.
Patents could work out, like for Nintendo in the Palworld case. But DMCA is a copyright dispute, patent law doesn’t apply here. And who knows if they even have any relevant patents to accuse this game of violating.
I watched a video about this and the game does look strikingly similar in every biome and mechanic. There are seed-based voxel games that manage to do things differently like Valheim. However, I found it ironic that they did not sue Hytale yet.
That’s what they’re doing here. They can go after a smaller studio gain precedent then go after the larger Giants like hytail which is owned by riot. They need some legal ground first to do that.
Bruh, they’ve owned it for like a decade at this point. Even if someone was wholly unaware of Minecraft, it would be one of the first things to come up on a cursory search of the game.
Huh. I just looked it up and apparently birch was added just about a year before I started playing. Crazy how we assume everything that was in there when we started has “been there forever.”
Burn them to the ground to expose the hyper-green grass blocks below! (/s… maybe)
One of the reasons I like mushroom biomes, but also import grass into wherever I’m building in one. The grass is in fact greener where also hostile mobs don’t spawn.
Actually the developer has been pretty open that while Minecraft was their inspiration the game the reason they started working on Allumeria is because in their eyes Minecraft has almost fundamental design flaws that Mojang are unwilling to fix. And while Minecraft was part of their inspiration another part of inspiration was Terraria and to directly quote the developer:
You could say that I try and take the gameplay of Terraria and combine it with the 3d block based world of Minecraft
So I don’t think the game counts as “More Minecraft” because the developer gameplay-wise is taking a lot more inspiration from Terraria than Minecraft.
And the developer who spent time on this, should just listen to you, because you are an expert on games that people want to play. Like McDonald’s is the only restaurant you need. I hope he doesn’t listen to morons though
That’s not just similar to Minecraft - it’s nearly identical. I’m not sure that the DMCA notice isn’t justified. I don’t know the law well enough to judge where the line between legal and illegal Minecraft clones is.
Doesn’t matter. Copyright protects identity, not likeness. Valve even says in the email to the dev that Microsoft said they outright stole Minecraft’s exact assets. Because just looking the same isn’t copyright infringement.
Microsoft also complained about the gameplay being stolen too, which doesn’t fall under copyright at all.
Because it’s a voxel Birch or because you feel the texture is derivative and pixel similarities show glaring similarities leading to the belief the creation of the assets were based on MC textures?
A DCMA from a company representing Mojang got Luanti (formerly Minetest) taken down once before because they thought it infringed. After challenge it was later found it was bullshit.
It’s not just the tree - it’s the whole scene. (Complete with random pumpkins that you wouldn’t ever include unless you were deliberately copying Minecraft.) As I’ve said, I don’t know if that’s illegal but it’s certainly derivative enough that I have no sympathy for it.
Minecraft copyright doesn’t cover the entire genre of block-based sandbox pixel art games. Minecraft isn’t even the first in that genre, even if it’s the most popular by a wide margin.
Unless Microsoft can prove that one of the textures started by copying a Minecraft texture, or that substantial bits of code are copied from Minecraft, there is no claim.
There is nothing literally taken from minecraft. All the textures are original, and not even that similar to minecraft. I’ve talked with people like you before who just has no fucking clue about something that is so obvious to just about everyone else when it comes to stuff like this. It’s very clearly NOT minecraft, nothing in anything shown in the images or anywhere else from the game gives any hint at stolen models, textures etc.
There are tons of block games like this and many that look way more similar but those have never gotten a DMCA.
I’m not arguing about whether the copyright claim is legit. I’m saying that claiming the picture in the post doesn’t look like MC is a questionable opinion at best.
Which is an irrelevant point because it’s a singular image, and one that is depicting only nature which by nature (pun wasn’t intended) is generic. And to prove my point what is the first game that comes to mind when you see this image?
Hytale looks like Minecraft with a texture pack and shaders. Every Minecraft inspired block based game looks like Minecraft with a texture pack and shader.
Oh and MS just withdrew their copyright claim because it was bullshit from the start.
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It does not matter that this is a Minecraft clone, there are hundreds of them and mojang has always been fine with them.
Minecraft itself is inspired and started as a clone of infiniminer.
The general rule has always been “as long as it does not use assets or code made by mojang” its fine and they wont care or sue.
Unless this tree is using a stolen texture from the game there is nothing that makes this more illegal then the thousands of cloned already out there.
Of course a doubt microsoft would respect such, they shown their hands when they presumed ownership over the now open sourced end poem.
They have an AI tool that scrapes everything on the Internet until it finds copyright violations. The entire and only job of humans in this process is to press the big “C&D” button, so the barrier is just much too low, allowing for stuff like this to happen accidentally.
There should be a serious consequence for false DMCA claims. There has to be a deterrent. YouTube is already completely fucked by UMG. I wanna see them go out of business because of all their false claims.
Fuck copyright and patent laws and the morons/scumbags who support them.
I’m not saying it’s all sunshine and rainbows in copyright land, but you essentially can’t develop drugs without some kind of patent law.
Sure you can. People richer than us will just make less profit.
The issue is with what drug R&D looks like. You invent some new compound you think will treat X because it has a similar structure to other compounds that treat X. Now you need a decade or so of trials to prove that it actually treats X, that it doesn’t have side effects too severe to stop people from taking it for X, that it doesn’t also silently cause some kind of obscure cancer, and then it might get approved (and if it doesn’t that manpower and money was wasted) and the exclusivity time granted by your patent is how you turn a net profit from the last ten years of work because it’s much easier for another company to spin up a factory making X than it is to get X approved in the first place so anyone else making the drug can charge less to cover their much lower costs in getting it to market and will eat the lunch you spent the last decade+ cooking.
Unless you intend for medical R&D to be done purely under public funding, which is an entirely different scenario than just “no patent law.”
Why “can’t you”? Why would academic research be impossible?
Ok sure, we can completely fund all medical research by the public, but I’m not so sure how this would work out. This would be a bit too much communism for my taste.
I recommend ignoring the ideologies of communism/capitalism.
Focus on real solutions to real problems, pragmatism.
At least in the US, government policy has meant that getting a drug to market is an extremely high bar. This means that funding the wrong drug can waste a billion dollars or more of time, material, trained researchers and lab space, etc.
Funding drugs by popular attention, private donation, kickstarter, or anything like that is likely to produce a bunch of scams and even more waste.
Funding drugs by having the government select which ones to study is likely to produce several gigantic financial boondoggles that are dragged on because some Senator wants the jobs wasting the money creates to remain in his state, or something.
If we want more drugs to come out, the best thing to do would be to reduce the cost of making a drug legal to sell, like by lowering the proof required for efficacy, or by alleviating the doctor shortage by permanently increasing the number of medicare funded residency slots.
I guess make term limits. You can’t sit more than 2 terms. That would solve a whole shitton of other problems too, but it would make the people in the position of power actually be there for what the job is, and not what the job gives.
This is why you use distinct art in a game and not something that looks close to something a mega corp owns. Like art style ip infringement is one of the easiest legal roads a corp can take to take you down. Since art style is subjective, it doesn’t need to be an exact copy to make the claim legally valid. As long as the claimant can claim that customers have confused the infringing art with that of the ip holder. Look I’m not defending MS’ actions. If we lived in a fair and just world this wouldn’t have happened. But we don’t, we live in the world these fucks have created. So either you fight them and “die” trying when these fucks take your game down or you could have used another art style and this wouldn’t have happened in the first place and you’d use the incoming revenue on something else instead of wasting it on a legal battle. I know this sounds defeatist but it’s just not a hill that’s worth dying on especially if you are a small indie dev. It’s not even an art style that is cool looking anyway who wants to be associated with the shit Notch made.
Worth noting, that image was given as an example of how the game looks similar to Minecraft. It was not the basis of the complaint. Microsoft also claimed the gameplay is stolen as well, according to Valve. So it’s definitely not about the trees themselves.
This Reddit post has the actual email from Valve to the dev.
I think this is definitely not a fight Microsoft can win (without a war of attrition I mean), and they seem to agree because they revoked the complaint by now. But there’s other blocks not featured on this image that would make a much stronger case imo. Stone bricks and planks look identical imo and definitely can be made unique looking if the dev wanted to.
Gameplay can be copied just fine, anyway. In fact, most games are just copying the gameplay of something else (not least of which are the THOUSANDS of Minecraft clones that play the same, but have their own aesthetic). This game looks exactly like Minecraft, tho, and it could very easily be confused for Minecraft. That is going to be more damning for the dev than the mechanics.
Of course. I was just bringing it up as a supporting argument to why the DMCA isn’t specifically about that image or the trees on it.
But yeah, gameplay isn’t protected by copyright, so that argument from microsoft is just bogus.
Is there a legal precedent on how copyright can be used against game clones?
I know that there is for board games, and there it says that the art and the rulebook cannot be identical, but that game rules aren’t protectable. So it’s basically the same level of protection that e.g. a painting would have.
If the same thing holds true for video games, then “The gameplay being similar” shouldn’t matter at all, and the only question is whether the art is too similar.
Considering that the art for voxel games is limited by technicalities (1m size blocks are required by the gameplay) and the low-resolution texture art style, I would naively guess that there’s not much room for differentiation and thus unless the textures are actual 1:1 copies of minecraft textures, there’s not much that can be done there either.
There aren’t a lot of ways you can draw a low-resolution square birch texture.
They aren’t? There’s nothing that requires a voxel to represent a 1m cube. They could be 0.5m cubes, or even something exotic like spheres with a calculated surface stretching over them to smooth out the result. 1m cubes are just convenient and popularized by Minecraft.
Yes, they are required by that type of gameplay. 0.5m cubes mean that mining and placing blocks takes 8x as long. That is a massive change in the gameplay.
Can you do a voxel game where mining and building is extremely fiddly and everything is much more laboursome than with 1m blocks? Sure you can. Has been done. And it sucks.
You could also do a voxel game where mining and building is not extremely fiddly and nothing is much more laboursome than with 1m blocks.
Terraria, Starbound and many other similar games manage to do it in 2D by making you mine more than one block at a time, what makes it impossible in 3D spaces?
IANAL, and this is oversimplifying. Copyright protects the creative elements of a game, including the specific way that a game is coded (so you cannot decompile a game, modify all the art assets, change the code a little, and then sell it), and possibly aspects of the gameplay required to give it a specific “feel”.
If you want a solid legal defense for cloning, you could have one team that describes the original game in a way that removes the creative elements, and a second team that works from that description to make a new work. This works for other works, too; I can write my own “book about an orphan that learns he has magical powers, goes to a school to learn to use those, and ultimately battles and defeats the powerful dark wizard that killed his parents”, but can’t sit down following the story elements of Harry Potter for my new Barry Cotter book series.
Ultimately the line is what you can convince a judge and/or jury is “different enough”.
The gameplay being too similar is a bogus argument Microsoft’s AI probably snuck in there. I mentioned it to support my point that the DMCA complaint isn’t about the birch trees specifically, but that’s definitely not an argument that would have worked out legally for Microsoft.
Patents could work out, like for Nintendo in the Palworld case. But DMCA is a copyright dispute, patent law doesn’t apply here. And who knows if they even have any relevant patents to accuse this game of violating.
I watched a video about this and the game does look strikingly similar in every biome and mechanic. There are seed-based voxel games that manage to do things differently like Valheim. However, I found it ironic that they did not sue Hytale yet.
Wait until they figure out hytale released a similar looking game
That’s what they’re doing here. They can go after a smaller studio gain precedent then go after the larger Giants like hytail which is owned by riot. They need some legal ground first to do that.
riot bought hytale but then sold it, it’s no longer theirs
this is almost certainly an ai tool run amok, not a deliberate attempt to stomp on the little guy.
Oh i missed that bit of news. I’m glad the original owners have control of that!!
It really looks like Minecraft tough, you showed me those pictures and I wouldn’t have ever guessed it’s from other game than Minecraft.
Bruh, they’ve owned it for like a decade at this point. Even if someone was wholly unaware of Minecraft, it would be one of the first things to come up on a cursory search of the game.
The DMCA claim was evidently related to the Minecraft IP. It’s not suggesting that Minecraft is unrelated to Microsoft.
Sniff It smells like birch up in here.
Lol. Birch trees are the most despised tree by most Minecraft players.
Why?
The stripped log and the wood are fine, but the regular birch log is almost impossible to use in builds. It just looks bad in almost any context.
What’s wrong with birch trees?
The stripped log and the wood are fine, but the regular birch log is almost impossible to use in builds. It just looks bad in almost any context.
I am old enough to be hyped when birch trees were added. I love birch trees because that hold a core memory for me.
Huh. I just looked it up and apparently birch was added just about a year before I started playing. Crazy how we assume everything that was in there when we started has “been there forever.”
Jungle wood hater here. No reason to use it. Just leave the jungles alone!
Burn them to the ground to expose the hyper-green grass blocks below! (/s… maybe)
One of the reasons I like mushroom biomes, but also import grass into wherever I’m building in one. The grass is in fact greener where also hostile mobs don’t spawn.
Microsoft can and will suck my girldick, non-consensually if I have to
Definitely looks far too much like minecraft to seem interesting at all, regardless of legal concerns. We don’t need more minecraft.
Actually the developer has been pretty open that while Minecraft was their inspiration the game the reason they started working on Allumeria is because in their eyes Minecraft has almost fundamental design flaws that Mojang are unwilling to fix. And while Minecraft was part of their inspiration another part of inspiration was Terraria and to directly quote the developer:
So I don’t think the game counts as “More Minecraft” because the developer gameplay-wise is taking a lot more inspiration from Terraria than Minecraft.
I’ll believe it when I see it. Right now I see a minecraft clone.
And the developer who spent time on this, should just listen to you, because you are an expert on games that people want to play. Like McDonald’s is the only restaurant you need. I hope he doesn’t listen to morons though
Who needs Minecraft? Play Voxelibre instead!
https://content.luanti.org/packages/wuzzy/mineclone2/
https://www.luanti.org/en/
That’s not just similar to Minecraft - it’s nearly identical. I’m not sure that the DMCA notice isn’t justified. I don’t know the law well enough to judge where the line between legal and illegal Minecraft clones is.
Doesn’t matter. Copyright protects identity, not likeness. Valve even says in the email to the dev that Microsoft said they outright stole Minecraft’s exact assets. Because just looking the same isn’t copyright infringement.
Microsoft also complained about the gameplay being stolen too, which doesn’t fall under copyright at all.
So the DMCA definitely wasn’t justified, no.
Minecraft is an infiniminer clone, it should be shut down ASAP.
Because it’s a voxel Birch or because you feel the texture is derivative and pixel similarities show glaring similarities leading to the belief the creation of the assets were based on MC textures?
A DCMA from a company representing Mojang got Luanti (formerly Minetest) taken down once before because they thought it infringed. After challenge it was later found it was bullshit.
It’s not just the tree - it’s the whole scene. (Complete with random pumpkins that you wouldn’t ever include unless you were deliberately copying Minecraft.) As I’ve said, I don’t know if that’s illegal but it’s certainly derivative enough that I have no sympathy for it.
Minecraft copyright doesn’t cover the entire genre of block-based sandbox pixel art games. Minecraft isn’t even the first in that genre, even if it’s the most popular by a wide margin.
Unless Microsoft can prove that one of the textures started by copying a Minecraft texture, or that substantial bits of code are copied from Minecraft, there is no claim.
Indeed
And theres only so many ways to make a low pixel square look when you wanna make it look like a birch tree
Hytales birch trees are just more gray, and dont have white/black contrast
Same leaf color though
deleted by creator
Curious what your thoughts are on Vintage Story, Hytale, Castleminer Z, etc…
There is nothing literally taken from minecraft. All the textures are original, and not even that similar to minecraft. I’ve talked with people like you before who just has no fucking clue about something that is so obvious to just about everyone else when it comes to stuff like this. It’s very clearly NOT minecraft, nothing in anything shown in the images or anywhere else from the game gives any hint at stolen models, textures etc. There are tons of block games like this and many that look way more similar but those have never gotten a DMCA.
It looks like Minecraft bro turn off your reality distortion field
Did you even look into it or did you just do what the AI generating the DMCA did and looked at a singular image and decided it looks like Minecraft?
I’m not arguing about whether the copyright claim is legit. I’m saying that claiming the picture in the post doesn’t look like MC is a questionable opinion at best.
Which is an irrelevant point because it’s a singular image, and one that is depicting only nature which by nature (pun wasn’t intended) is generic. And to prove my point what is the first game that comes to mind when you see this image?
It does look like minecraft with a texture pack and shaders. Though, the trees look skinnier than normal.
Hytale looks like Minecraft with a texture pack and shaders. Every Minecraft inspired block based game looks like Minecraft with a texture pack and shader.
Oh and MS just withdrew their copyright claim because it was bullshit from the start.
Minecraft has red leaves?
The style is similar to Minecraft, the rest just happens in nature. I took a walk in my woods last fall and saw oak and birch and even… pumpkins
If the DMCA is not sent by Microsoft, it doesn’t matter. You can’t file one on behalf of someone else.