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.

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.

> 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.

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 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, 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.

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 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.

This is starting to establish a bad actor pattern.

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.

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.

"Let's ensure big corporations can freely abuse small creators more than they are doing now."

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

> Someone should copyright the American flag

You're someone

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

I think you are hallucinating that quote.

This is the reason anti-SLAPP statutes exist in many jurisdictions.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Cloning games is not copyright infringement. Think what that would mean for a popular infiniminer clone

> The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots.

They are literally not Minecraft screenshots. Your statement is a lie.

They are not any more Minecraft screenshots than Minecraft screenshots are Roblox screenshots.

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