Outsider here.
The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots. It's a clone, and not a subtle one either.
To call this "Baseless" is hilarious.
The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots. It's a clone, and not a subtle one either.
To call this "Baseless" is hilarious.
Yes, it's inspired by Minecraft. The screenshots are of voxel-based survival crafter games you can build with their platform. The textures are not Minecraft textures. They are similar in style, sure, but that's not remotely the same thing. You can't copyright a general visual style, nor can you copyright a game genre.
To call this anything but "baseless" would be hilarious.
More likely that Minecraft was inspired by Luanti since Luanti was released first. (at least, formally released)
Never mind that the things in those in-game screenshots aren't even in the play store app, they're separately downloadable things.
> The screenshots are literally Minecraft screenshots.
Irrelevant to the DMCA claim.
> It's a clone, and not a subtle one either.
You are incorrect. Luanti is not a minecraft clone. It's more akin to Godot. I can import Minecraft assets into Godot, but it does not make Godot a copyright violator because of my actions.
> To call this "Baseless" is hilarious.
I would say it's justified.
They're not. It's a voxel game engine with an open source history dating back a year (October 2010) before Minecraft 1.0 was released (November 2011).
There are plenty of games for Luanti that have different textures and objectives.
It's all open source. Download it and try some of the different games.
https://www.luanti.org/en/#gallery
What percentage of the population would see those screenshots and say "Definitely Luanti" 0.00001%? 0.001%?
If it was a clone, surely the images would be the same.
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.
https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg
C'mon...
It looks more like a Runescape asset than a Minecraft one, for example:
https://runescape.wiki/images/thumb/The_Adventurous.png/1200...
"Obviously the real Spiderman has an "i" and not a "y" in its spelling!!1!"
Explain that to a jury in front of a judge and Disney lawyers and see how your legal theory goes over...
If this were ever to go to a jury trial, both sides would get to present their evidence, which includes explanations of how Luanti is different from Minecraft.
If you were correct, then basically every accusation of substantial similarity would be upheld in court because apparently juries are morons and they don't get given the full facts.
However, you also have failed to provide any support for your assumption that this would go to a jury trial; the article doesn't mention any kind of trial. DMCA notices are adjudicated by the platform owner, with very little transparency, and certainly no jury of peers. If it doesn't get resolved by the counter-notice, then maybe Luanti will sue (Microsoft? Google? Tracer.AI? all of the above? who knows!), and maybe it would go before a jury. But given how lawsuits in the US go these days, that's pretty unlikely. Odds are if there is a lawsuit, it will be settled before a jury ever gets selected.
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.
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.
They are literally not Minecraft screenshots. Your statement is a lie.