There’s a video game called Minecraft. It’s made by Mojang, now a subsidiary of Microsoft, and it’s probably the trope codifier for procedurally-generated open worlds with some mix of building, crafting, and survival mechanics, usually but not always built out of one-meter voxels. (The trope maker would be Infiniminer, unless an earlier game has escaped my notice.)

A lot of other game devs have done something like Minecraft or parts of it; see Terraria, Minetest/Luanti, and more recently Hytale for examples. See also Allumeria, which looks at first glance like an earlier-access Hytale but with more of a building focus (what with the emphasis on block shapes, colors, and lighting).

For a little while, though, you couldn’t see Allumeria, because Microsoft filed a DMCA claim with Steam. According to the claim (which is out there in a few places, like a screencapped tweet in this PCGamesN post), the “infringing content” was this screenshot from the Steam page:

…which looks like Minecraft in that it’s a procedurally generated landscape with trees. And it’s not even a similarly shaped landscape to the “original” in the complaint.

Some speculation has been made about whether Microsoft was using a dodgy automated IP-matching system from Tracer.ai (which advertises, among other things, “The Industry’s First Human-in-the-Loop AI Brand Protection Technology”, so it isn’t claiming to be fully automated).

Assigning responsibility would have been easier if I knew for sure which company “Judith Woodward” worked for. (A search turned her name up a couple of times, but only in the legal boilerplate of some DMCA takedown, and my curiosity isn’t intense enough to make me expose myself to LinkedIn.)

Anyway, it’s over now; in what the dev calls “the best case scenario,” the corpos revoked the spurious DMCA notice…

 

…unlike the other time.

While looking for coverage of this story I found mention of a British dev named Daniel P H Fox. One of his projects was Blox, basically another Minetest-like voxel builder but developed in the Roblox engine (which he’s described as “kind of like making a mac and cheese out of anything but mac or cheese”).

Sounds potentially cool, right? Well, apparently someone didn’t think so, because Roblox got a DMCA notice. Fox considered the risk of being buried in literal tons of corpo lawyers if he tried to fight the takedown, and Blox is no more.

The DMCA notice for Blox came from something called “TracerMojang”…

There’s that name again.

 

Via Leonard French, who mentioned in passing that if the normal two-week DMCA counter-notification timer had run its course, Allumeria would have just barely missed out on the Steam Next Fest. Hmmmm.