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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

#751

Post by zimpenfish »

doodlesdev wrote: post #593
zimpenfish wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is an implied contract, yes. Which a court would probably find that Mojang have an implied license to use the poem, yes. But the terms of that license are unknown - a court may well decide that it did not apply to Microsoft since he didn't sign that contract. And it also means that he did not assign copyright to Mojang or Microsoft which removes that avenue of them claiming they can use it for free.

Ready his comment again. It does not matter because Mojang still exists, it's just a Microsoft-owned company now. The contract and everything else related to the game is still property of Mojang, nothing has been transferred.

> It does not matter because Mojang still exists

A court may well consider that becoming a wholly owned subsidiary would violate a license, despite being a distinct legal entity[1][2]. Especially when it's just an implied license with no actual agreed definition on both sides.

[1] Which is similar to what we're seeing with ARM vs Qualcomm and it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.

[2] Mojang into Microsoft sounds like "forward triangular merger" on this page: https://www.faegredrinker.com/en/insights/publications/2003/...

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

#752

Post by fastball »

neycoda wrote: post #750
Scaevolus wrote: post #205

Contracts, eh? Three people got a cut of the $2B buyout, some random contractor doing a bit of writing for the game isn't going to get anything. I made the game _playable_ for a huge number of people by optimizing the save format (MCRegion) and doing the first implementation of Unicode text, probably affecting the exponential growth rate a bit, but I understand that my contribution amounted to a few weeks of work, ex…

You don't understand art, you probably didn't finish reading what Julian wrote, you'll likely never understand what he did, and that poem probably has less meaning for you than most who would read it having never played the game.

Are you replying to the right comment? Pretty sure OP played the game, given that they worked on it.

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

#753

Post by [deleted] »

Ekaros wrote: post #352
pfoof wrote: post #241

Although 20k€ is still better deal than Sapkowski selling rights to Witcher to CDProjekt for 40k PLN (10k€)

10k€ is not bad amount of money for work that probably wouldn't not have ended up as anything big outside books. Just try to think how many other fantasy works there are that never got outside books or small derivative works. Surely he made decent chunk from increased sales of books and now the TV series.

[deleted]

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

#754

Post by pfoof »

Ekaros wrote: post #352
pfoof wrote: post #241

Although 20k€ is still better deal than Sapkowski selling rights to Witcher to CDProjekt for 40k PLN (10k€)

10k€ is not bad amount of money for work that probably wouldn't not have ended up as anything big outside books. Just try to think how many other fantasy works there are that never got outside books or small derivative works. Surely he made decent chunk from increased sales of books and now the TV series.

Yes, but he could literally take half of this in shares and be much better off now

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

#755

Post by hnbad »

FamosoRandom wrote: post #195
operator-name wrote: post #170

This has also been posted to the Minecraft subreddit, where is has received a lot of positive attention from the community: https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/zf8ye0/i_wrote_t...

This is really interesting to compare both general opinion on HN and on this subreddit. On HN, a place probably filled with technical guys, people are generaly putting themselves in dev shoes. They are accusing the author of feeling entitled to more money because he felt like he was part of the team and that he think his work is equaly important as the work of everyone else. Devs being devs generaly know that coding…

HN is also filled with more entrepreneurial guys, so viewing this purely as a financial transaction makes sense from that point of view. HN is the sidecar to a venture capital accelator, not a tech company like, say, JetBrains.

I think people (and tech people especially, but also many entrepreneurs) like to misuse "rationality vs emotion" as a false dichotomy because it allows framing yourself as "rational" and therefore "correct" and the other side as "emotional" and therefore "flawed". In reality no human being is truly rational and by contrasting ourselves with "emotional" people we just end up mistaking callousness or cynicism for rationality.

Yes, it's unreasonable to expect a corporation to consider "emotional" factors and the author acknowledges this when talking about Microsoft, but when talking about early Mojang that's not Mojang, that's Notch personally. Arguably there may have been different understandings of the relationship but it's perfectly reasonable (or "rational"?) to expect human-to-human interactions to follow different rules than business-to-business ones involving a corporation.

Everyone involved in making Minecraft happen contributed to its success, not just the core team and him as an external one-off contributor but literally even the office cleaning staff and the retail workers of the shops those people frequented and so on. It's practically fractal in that if you pick any arbitrarily distant point and consider how things would have worked out if you cut off and isolate everything on either side of it, Minecraft couldn't have happened or at least not as successfully as it did.

But this complexity is too overwhelming when you need to put a dollar amount to every contribution so it's natural to make the cut-off happen much closer and a natural fault line is employees vs external contributors or continuous contributors vs one-time contributors. But that isn't rationality. That's just the limitations of the economic system based around the exchange and control of money as capital.

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

#756

Post by hnbad »

ketzu wrote: post #377
hnbad wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about Swedish law but in German law works created outside of an employment contract do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer, so at best Mojang had a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, limited usage right for the poem for the use in Minecraft and nothing else. As I understand it, this makes his claim that Microsoft may not have the right to use it questionable but it confirms his ma…

> do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer Of course, because in germany you can not transfer your copyright at all, unless you die. ;) Without being nitpicky you are still right in the way you meant it: There is no automatic usage right afaik. (And also google results agree: eg https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht )

If you want to nitpick, Germany technically doesn't have copyright in the US sense and instead the term is usually considered equivalent to what is called Urheberrecht (author's rights), which is indeed not transferrable.

You can however grant an unlimited, transferrable, exclusive license, which for all intents and purposes is like "transferring copyright".

Your nitpick isn't entirely irrelevant though. This is why Germany does not recognize public domain dedications and why CC0 is necessary.

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

#757

Post by peterashford »

ascendantlogic wrote: post #635
shmageggy wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You really think that a poem that people have tattooed on themselves, put onto tee shirts and mugs, inspired emotional emails to the author, and so on has inspired exactly zero excess recommendations to friends, zero dinnertime discussions or social media posts that have led to purchases?

Keep in mind you're arguing with engineering types about this. Over the course of my career I've come to find that a not-insignificant % of engineers value art and artistic contributions very little or not at all.

I was thinking just this as I was reading.

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

#758

Post by peterashford »

cmeacham98 wrote: post #213
nigamanth wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, Minecraft would have still sold as much if the ending screen said "You won" or much simply "The end". But, he did still put in the effort in creating the poem. Every part of the game matters, and I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game. I understand the author being hurt as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game, he just needed the credit or any…

> I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game. He did get paid, $20000. How was Mojang supposed to know he wanted more when he accepted that payment?

He was paid to write a poem to end the game. He was not paid for all rights to that work, forever. Its reasonable to assert that if Mojang wanted contractual rights for the work, they should have provided a signed contract which explained the rights they were purchasing.

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

#759

Post by peterashford »

wikfwikf wrote: post #228
Tossrock wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most of them didn't actually read it and instead skimmed a few paragraphs, saw "$20,000", and rushed back to comment.

I read the whole thing. It was somewhat overwritten. Not my favorite ever post-hallucinogen-trip essay. I agree with other commenters that the author is greedy and petty. He accepted €20,000 for his work, a decent amount. Then he decided that he should make way more money because the game was successful. Then he tried to take advantage of the fact that he hadn't signed a contract, even though he had obviously accepte…

I must have read a different article

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

#760

Post by peterashford »

europeanguy wrote: post #443
kergonath wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I didn't say he was greedy Yes, sorry, that was in other posts and it got blurred. I did not want to put words into your mouth. > He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does He explains why he did not involve his agent, and also that he does not expect anyone to do it. Otherwise he’d have plenty of opportunities to do it. He sounds entitled in that he has we…

> he just sounds like someone hurt that the world does not work as they thought Exactly, that's another facet of his entitlement that I have deep content for. Many good people work hard to figure out how the world works. Other people have in mind how it should work and get upset when it doesn't.

Have you never learned a lesson in life?
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