There should be a serious consequence for false DMCA claims. There has to be a deterrent. YouTube is already completely fucked by UMG. I wanna see them go out of business because of all their false claims.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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There actually is supposed to be one, just nobody bothers to enforce it.
It does not matter that this is a Minecraft clone, there are hundreds of them and mojang has always been fine with them.
Minecraft itself is inspired and started as a clone of infiniminer.
The general rule has always been “as long as it does not use assets or code made by mojang” its fine and they wont care or sue.
Unless this tree is using a stolen texture from the game there is nothing that makes this more illegal then the thousands of cloned already out there.
Of course a doubt microsoft would respect such, they shown their hands when they presumed ownership over the now open sourced end poem.
They have an AI tool that scrapes everything on the Internet until it finds copyright violations. The entire and only job of humans in this process is to press the big "C&D" button, so the barrier is just much too low, allowing for stuff like this to happen accidentally.
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Microsoft owns cubes and birches, didn't you know?
Fuck copyright and patent laws and the morons/scumbags who support them.
I'm not saying it's all sunshine and rainbows in copyright land, but you essentially can't develop drugs without some kind of patent law.
Sure you can. People richer than us will just make less profit.
The issue is with what drug R&D looks like. You invent some new compound you think will treat X because it has a similar structure to other compounds that treat X. Now you need a decade or so of trials to prove that it actually treats X, that it doesn't have side effects too severe to stop people from taking it for X, that it doesn't also silently cause some kind of obscure cancer, and then it might get approved (and if it doesn't that manpower and money was wasted) and the exclusivity time granted by your patent is how you turn a net profit from the last ten years of work because it's much easier for another company to spin up a factory making X than it is to get X approved in the first place so anyone else making the drug can charge less to cover their much lower costs in getting it to market and will eat the lunch you spent the last decade+ cooking.
Unless you intend for medical R&D to be done purely under public funding, which is an entirely different scenario than just "no patent law."
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all because of a screenshot of birch trees
Worth noting, that image was given as an example of how the game looks similar to Minecraft. It was not the basis of the complaint. Microsoft also claimed the gameplay is stolen as well, according to Valve. So it's definitely not about the trees themselves.
This Reddit post has the actual email from Valve to the dev.
I think this is definitely not a fight Microsoft can win (without a war of attrition I mean), and they seem to agree because they revoked the complaint by now. But there's other blocks not featured on this image that would make a much stronger case imo. Stone bricks and planks look identical imo and definitely can be made unique looking if the dev wanted to.
Gameplay can be copied just fine, anyway. In fact, most games are just copying the gameplay of something else (not least of which are the THOUSANDS of Minecraft clones that play the same, but have their own aesthetic). This game looks exactly like Minecraft, tho, and it could very easily be confused for Minecraft. That is going to be more damning for the dev than the mechanics.
Of course. I was just bringing it up as a supporting argument to why the DMCA isn't specifically about that image or the trees on it.
But yeah, gameplay isn't protected by copyright, so that argument from microsoft is just bogus.
Is there a legal precedent on how copyright can be used against game clones?
I know that there is for board games, and there it says that the art and the rulebook cannot be identical, but that game rules aren't protectable. So it's basically the same level of protection that e.g. a painting would have.
If the same thing holds true for video games, then "The gameplay being similar" shouldn't matter at all, and the only question is whether the art is too similar.
Considering that the art for voxel games is limited by technicalities (1m size blocks are required by the gameplay) and the low-resolution texture art style, I would naively guess that there's not much room for differentiation and thus unless the textures are actual 1:1 copies of minecraft textures, there's not much that can be done there either.
There aren't a lot of ways you can draw a low-resolution square birch texture.
The gameplay being too similar is a bogus argument Microsoft's AI probably snuck in there. I mentioned it to support my point that the DMCA complaint isn't about the birch trees specifically, but that's definitely not an argument that would have worked out legally for Microsoft.
Patents could work out, like for Nintendo in the Palworld case. But DMCA is a copyright dispute, patent law doesn't apply here. And who knows if they even have any relevant patents to accuse this game of violating.
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I'd like to know what Steam has to say on the matter. They are usually one of the more reasonable software companies.
I watched a video about this and the game does look strikingly similar in every biome and mechanic. There are seed-based voxel games that manage to do things differently like Valheim. However, I found it ironic that they did not sue Hytale yet.
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