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.
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.
Microsoft, evidently related to 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.
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.
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.
Sniff It smells like birch up in here.
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.
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.
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.
People assign words to ideas in order to communicate efficiently. I’m not from the US, I don’t suffer from hurr durr party this, party that. “Communisum” is just the term, which most accurately depicted what I meant.
Funding medical research is “too much communism”???
Ladies and Gentlemen, the human race is cooked.
Try actually reading what I wrote. But you’re right: Not reading properly anything indeed means we quite cooked.
Microsoft owns cubes and birches, didn’t you know?
I’d like to know what Steam has to say on the matter. They are usually one of the more reasonable software companies.
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.
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
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?
Minecraft has red leaves?
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.
