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Comment by xboxnolifes | Hacker News Reader

Being block based doesn't mean it is using Minecraft assets. Minecraft does not own the idea of having a block based world, and there are quite a few popular (and many unpopular) block-based games. If you played Minecraft you should be able to tell that none of the assets are Minecraft assets.

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Unfortunately (or fortunately, juries are generally a good thing), it's a jury of randos that will be shown the screenshots and asked to make a determination.

https://www.luanti.org/en/#gallery

What percentage of the population would see those screenshots and say "Definitely Luanti" 0.00001%? 0.001%?

If they put them side by side with the closest minecraft equivalent? Hopefully a few.

If it was a clone, surely the images would be the same.

A clone isn't the benchmark for breaking the law though, substantial similarity is.

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.

Oh my goodness, now you're conflating copyright with trademark law. This discussion is quite muddied. There are folks that are claiming intellectual property on the gameplay (that would be a patent and you can't patent gameplay, pokemon notwithstanding). There are folks that are claiming that the actual assets are derivatives of copyrighted work. This is obviously untrue if you've been following the mine test projects for any length of time. And now you're arguing the trademark angle, which is a wholly different argument based on customer confusion.

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.

Green Spiderman would be copying of protected elements - like Spiderman's outline. Style and general ideas are not protected by copyright. Substantial similarity comes in as a test for whether copying of those protected elements occurred, to avoid an otherwise disprovable "I didn't copy, I just drew Spiderman's exact outline by complete coincidence" defense, but is irrelevant if the what's supposedly been copied isn't protected by copyright in the first place.

Usually the benchmark is "would a person reasonably confuse this for being the IP of another company"

https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg

C'mon...

The most prominent object in that scene is the low poly airship. Minecraft does not have vehicles, does not have objects with components with such a small thickness as the railings, does not have angles like the bow of the ship or the ropes.

It looks more like a Runescape asset than a Minecraft one, for example:

https://runescape.wiki/images/thumb/The_Adventurous.png/1200...

And you would bet your life savings that the general public, including a jury, would know that? They would look at Minecraft and say it's a clearly different game?

"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...

Do you think that the way a jury trial works is that they call the jury into the room, show them a few screenshots, and then immediately say "right, time to give your verdict!"?

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.

> Usually the benchmark is "would a person reasonably confuse this for being the IP of another company"

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.

Conversely you can't say you own all green blocks that represent grass and all brown blocks that represent tree trunks.

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