Luanti removed from Google Play due to baseless AI copyright notice • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by WarmWash » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 2:35 PM UTC

hotsalad wrote: post #139

WarmWash wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The design or gameplay isn't the issue, the aesthetic is clearly Minecraft. You can't take Minecraft assets, mix the pixels around a little bit, and then be legally free and clear. If the public looks at pictures of your game, and they say "100% it's Minecraft", you're gonna have a bad time.

What are you talking about? There are no Minecraft assets in that screenshot, even with "pixels mixed around". I play both games and can tell you that screenshot is easily distinguished from Minecraft.

A jury deciding the case would exclude people who play the games or play them heavily.

IP protection is about reasonable confusion in the public. Not experts in field getting confused.

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

#152

Post by rpdillon » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 3:04 PM UTC

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.

Oh my goodness, now you're conflating copyright with trademark law. This discussion is quite muddied. There are folks that are claiming intellectual property on the gameplay (that would be a patent and you can't patent gameplay, pokemon notwithstanding). There are folks that are claiming that the actual assets are derivatives of copyrighted work. This is obviously untrue if you've been following the mine test projects for any length of time. And now you're arguing the trademark angle, which is a wholly different argument based on customer confusion.

None of these three pillars of intellectual property law are an issue for Minetest or Luanti. The engine itself is a long-standing open-source engine that they decided to build a block-based game inside of. The assets used to build that game are entirely original or licensed under an open-source license. They are not derivatives of proprietary work. The engine has been released under the names Minetest and Luanti. Neither of these are a conflicting trademark with Minecraft, and no one has claimed any customer confusion. Finally, the idea of a 3D world composed of different types of blocks that can be created and destroyed is not protected by any intellectual property.

I am not a lawyer, but I study these things. 99% probable this gets reinstated with no further action.

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

#153

Post by Ukv » Sat, Aug 29, 2026, 9:16 PM UTC

WarmWash wrote: post #113

Ukv wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Green Spiderman would be copying of protected elements - like Spiderman's outline. Style and general ideas are not protected by copyright. Substantial similarity comes in as a test for whether copying of those protected elements occurred, to avoid an otherwise disprovable "I didn't copy, I just drew Spiderman's exact outline by complete coincidence" defense, but is irrelevant if the what's supposedly been copied isn'…

Usually the benchmark is "would a person reasonably confuse this for being the IP of another company" https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg C'mon...

> Usually the benchmark is "would a person reasonably confuse this for being the IP of another company"

That's not a standard anywhere in copyright law. You may be conflating it with parts of trademark law.

> https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg

That's a screenshot of a game made within Luanti (the voxel game engine being DMCA'd). The blog post shows all the textures included with Luanti itself (https://blog.luanti.org/static/blog/2026_dmca/builtin.webp).

Even then, it doesn't appear to show anything actually copied from Minecraft that would fall under copyright protection - the assets appear to be original.