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I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

theeggandtherock.substack.com

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Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#501

Post by bee_rider »

Gigachad wrote: post #363
mananaysiempre wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code. Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.

What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work? The guy got £20,000 for some pages of babel. He should be elated.

Actually, how does this compare to, for example, architects? They must at least sometimes keep the ability to show off their designs, to build up their portfolios, right?

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#502

Post by robertlagrant »

> They were simply obeying the rules of capitalism, the rules so many of us have internalised as though they are natural law, and were trying to maximise their economic return

But later

> And I sent them a reply basically saying, Can you just treat me fairly? Do what you think is fair under these circumstances. And we’ll work something out.

What's constantly frustrating reading this sort of thing is that wanting a certain amount for work you chose to do is capitalism.

It's not the state telling you what to do and giving you an allocated house, or a lord letting you work his land, or anything like that. It's individuals and groups forming agreements that, as much as is possible, are just between them.

The problem with "fair" is it implies there's an absolute standard, and it happens to be what you want to get, not what they want to give. There's no standard, other than what minimum wage sets for salaried workers. There's just agreements.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#503

Post by yreg »

wokwokwok wrote: post #383
wikfwikf wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a) Did the author really expect that he would be getting royalties to all the Minecraft end text teatowels and fridge magnets as part of the deal? Clearly, the success of these products is largely correlated with the success of the game rather than the importance of what he wrote. b) If I had wanted to make merch with this text on it last week but had been deterred by fear of M$ lawyers, I wouldn't really feel any di…

> His claim to own the rights in the first place is totally dubious. Whether you care for him as a human or not is entirely irrelevant to the rights to his work. If there was no legal agreement, he retains the rights to it. It’s not ambiguous.

E-mail chains, or even verbal discussions are binding legal agreements as well. They are just much less clean and safe than a proper contract.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#504

Post by ralusek »

This person is absolutely delusional. They received $20k compensation for their poem, a poem which did not exist during Minecraft's original meteoric rise, and had no impact whatsoever on its trajectory. Notch was not your friend. You were overpaid for an insane poem and never were entitled to ownership of this product.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#505

Post by Karawebnetwork »

pgsandstrom wrote: post #149
rosywoozlechan wrote: post #41

That's a lot of anger, negativity and bitterness, and entitlement (one of the game's creators for writing the ending text?). Reminds me of the kid on the cover of the Nevermind album and other people that are kinda tangentially connected to something massively successful, but not connected enough to benefit materially, and they let that define who they are and ruin their lives. Could have been a neat personal story,…

Im honestly chocked that people react so negatively to this piece. Yes, the author expresses many negative and self centered emotions. He is very clear about that. It is part of the story. It is a story about being a flawed person. I sympathize with him. I loved this piece. I hope he truly did let go of all the hangups he described. And it does seem that he actually did sell the the rights of use to microsoft, making…

> Im honestly chocked that people react so negatively to this piece.

I say this with all the love in the world: it's hard for engineers to think like artists and vice-versa.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#507

Post by chrisan »

ClarityJones wrote: post #460
Benjamin_Dobell wrote: post #40

I feel for the guy, making a living off of art is difficult. However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement. > So…

> an agreed upon offer Where do you see that? I went back and re-read the section and it still seems to say that the negotiations failed and no agreement was reached.

You typically don't perform the work and take the money if you don't agree to it, or at the very least agree to future payments. If negotiations failed then it reverts back to the original offer.

At some point, contract or not, he agreed to take the money and do the work.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#508

Post by ziml77 »

ballenf wrote: post #451
superultra wrote: post #447

I work in intellectual property, though I am not a lawyer. If this person were my client I’d diplomatically tell them that they’re clean out of luck on this one. All the documents that come as a shock to the author are boiler plate NDA and work for hire arrangements, and outside of being a famous author who’s “brand” would bring something of marketing value to the table, at no point really would anyone be able to neg…

I'm going to charitably guess you didn't read most of the post. He did move on. He is at peace, finally. He's the opposite of a diva and has humbly accepted that his reward for his work doesn't take monetary form.

At peace? The fact that he wrote this long post shows that he is not at peace. And it's not like it was just a vent piece that he didn't expect to get attention, he posted a link to it on /r/minecraft.

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#509

Post by CodeArtisan »

Gatsky wrote: post #202

Well I enjoyed the piece. But it evinces a kind of derangement unique to modern life. Minecraft became so popular, and worth so much money, that the author couldn’t get over it. Another example is that guy who threw away a hard drive with his bitcoin wallet on it, now worth $200 million or something like that. He can’t move on. Last I heard he was trying to finance a plan to exhume an acre of landfill and sort throug…

Another example closer to this is The Witcher.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrzej_Sapkowski#Legal_disp...

Re: I liberate the ending to Minecraft from Microsoft and give it to you

#510

Post by Cthulhu_ »

baby wrote: post #368
bambax wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That last quote is damning. The game works well without an ending poem -- or an ending, for that matter. I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set. That said, the rant, while much too long i…

A lot of us never actually saw that ending because for the longest time minecraft didn’t have one. It came much much later and was kind of, to my understanding becaude I never finished the game, kind of a random and rushed way to add an ending to the game so that notch could not call it an alpha or something anymore and move on.

That's how I felt about it; it doesn't really feel like you're working towards this ending throughout the game, it's more an area to unlock and an objective to achieve. But it doesn't feel like the objective of the game; it doesn't feel like the game has an objective, and I don't feel like adding one finished the game. It's still a goal that players aspire to, e.g. speedrunners who can now apparently achieve it in <10 minutes with the right world seed.
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