409
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.
There actually is supposed to be one, just nobody bothers to enforce it.
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.
load more comments
(3 replies)
Microsoft owns cubes and birches, didn't you know?
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!!
Fuck copyright and patent laws and the morons/scumbags who support them.
load more comments
(14 replies)
Sniff It smells like birch up in here.
all because of a screenshot of birch trees
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.
load more comments
(7 replies)
I'd like to know what Steam has to say on the matter. They are usually one of the more reasonable software companies.
view more: next ›
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
409 points (99.3% liked)
Games
23892 readers
60 users here now
Video game news oriented community. No NanoUFO is not a bot :)
Posts.
- News oriented content (general reviews, previews or retrospectives allowed).
- Broad discussion posts (preferably not only about a specific game).
- No humor/memes etc..
- No affiliate links
- No advertising.
- No clickbait, editorialized, sensational titles. State the game in question in the title. No all caps.
- No self promotion.
- No duplicate posts, newer post will be deleted unless there is more discussion in one of the posts.
- No politics.
Comments.
- No personal attacks.
- Obey instance rules.
- No low effort comments(one or two words, emoji etc..)
- Please use spoiler tags for spoilers.
My goal is just to have a community where people can go and see what new game news is out for the day and comment on it.
Other communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS