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Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

blog.luanti.org

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Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#91

Post by culi »

duskwuff wrote: post #88
ethin wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The subsection requires that the person " knowingly materially misrepresent [...] that material or activity is infringing". Proving that the misrepresentation was made knowingly can be extremely difficult.

Yeah how are we ever gonna possibly prove that against an AI-powered tool. It's the same with why police so readily embraced bad AI tech. It's all about shifting the liability and diffusing individual responsibility

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#92

Post by jmward01 »

The answer here is simple: If you submit a content strike you must provide a bond. If the content strike is reversed the bond is used to pay damages. The argument of 'people must review' is really just an argument of cost. The amount of content on the web makes it impractical to pay that upfront but a bond makes it manageable.

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#93

Post by culi »

mortsnort wrote: post #83

The game's own website describes it as an "open source alternative to Minecraft". Frivolous or not, MS has financial incentive to try to keep this game offline. I think this is going as intended from MS's POV.

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

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#94

Post by applfanboysbgon »

jmward01 wrote: post #92

The answer here is simple: If you submit a content strike you must provide a bond. If the content strike is reversed the bond is used to pay damages. The argument of 'people must review' is really just an argument of cost. The amount of content on the web makes it impractical to pay that upfront but a bond makes it manageable.

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.

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#95

Post by anigbrowl »

culi wrote: post #90
vintermann wrote: post #20

> We received a similar notice from the same company in 2023 and successfully appealed against it. This company also filed a similar notice this year against an indie game with similar voxel art style by the name of Allumeria. They'll backtrack and apologize - again. 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 send…

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.

They can do both, hire more lawyers to review and fire the lawyer who presided over bullshit claims (because I'm sure this isn't the only one). firing a lawyer makes news in the legal world and makes other lawyers more risk-averse.

Google should also be sued for violating its DMCA obligations, specifically

Section 512(g)(2)(c) of the DMCA requires that providers “[replace] the removed material and [cease] disabling access to it not less than 10, nor more than 14, business days following receipt of the counter notice”. Google’s failure to adhere to the deadlines specified by the DMCA raises questions regarding its approach toward handling DMCA counter-notices.

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#96

Post by astrobe_ »

WarmWash wrote: post #56
mysterydip wrote: post #8

Could the sequence of events be: 1) open source project publishes source 2) AI scrapes source 3) AI generates code for proprietary game similar to that of the source 4) AI tool scans jar files and finds similar code, triggers copyright violation

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.

Correction: half of the pictures are not from mods, but from Luanti games; Luanti is a platform for voxel games.

And there's no screenshot of the two Luanti games that come the closest to Minecraft, both in terms of looks and gameplay. None of them are included in the standard Luanti distribution.

One can download games and mods from ContentDB (or directly from Luanti itself); ContentDB administrators are looking closely at the content users submit, from experience they will refuse your submission if everything is not properly licensed, even when the asserts are obviously FOSS (creators often include each other's stuff). They even were cautious about generative AI because the copyright assignment was unclear for them. They also have a DMCA page [1].

Long story short, Luanti is a respectable platform. They respect copyright and licensing (even for FOSS code and assets, unlike some private organizations). They also organize game jams and promote original content.

[1] https://content.luanti.org/copyright_dmca/

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#97

Post by culi »

VCFundedGenYer wrote: post #36

Outsider here. The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots. It's a clone, and not a subtle one either. To call this "Baseless" is hilarious.

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

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#98

Post by anigbrowl »

Hasnep wrote: post #53
whizzter wrote: post #31

Someone should copyright the American flag and popular advertised variants of blue/white/red and something alike and start DMCA'ing politicians, maybe that would wake them up to how bad the law is?

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.

You have to register copyright to claim statutory damages. You can claim actual damages (lost sales) but statutory damages are where the money is at.

Re: Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice

#100

Post by anigbrowl »

WarmWash wrote: post #82
xboxnolifes wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they put them side by side with the closest minecraft equivalent? Hopefully a few. If it was a clone, surely the images would be the same.

A clone isn't the benchmark for breaking the law though, substantial similarity is. There are a gazillion cases that establish this, and the reason why you can't just paint spiderman green and start selling t-shirts with "spyderman" on them.

Conversely you can't say you own all green blocks that represent grass and all brown blocks that represent tree trunks.
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