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.

Direct link to the Bluesky post (Skylib)

  • Linktank@lemmy.today
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    5 hours ago

    Definitely looks far too much like minecraft to seem interesting at all, regardless of legal concerns. We don’t need more minecraft.

  • Ech@lemmy.ca
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    10 hours ago

    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.

    • Rekhyt@lemmy.world
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      6 hours ago

      The DMCA claim was evidently related to the Minecraft IP. It’s not suggesting that Minecraft is unrelated to Microsoft.

  • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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    11 hours ago

    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.

    • CrypticCoffee@lemmy.ml
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      10 hours ago

      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.

      • ArbitraryValue@sh.itjust.works
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        10 hours ago

        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.

        • WolfLink@sh.itjust.works
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          5 hours ago

          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.

        • jonman364@sh.itjust.works
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          4 hours ago

          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

        • M137@lemmy.world
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          5 hours ago

          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.

            • Goodeye8@piefed.social
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              19 minutes ago

              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?

    • Bronzebeard@lemmy.zip
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      10 hours ago

      If the DMCA is not sent by Microsoft, it doesn’t matter. You can’t file one on behalf of someone else.