If you look at the screenshots of the game in question, it's pretty obvious what is going on
https://www.luanti.org/en/#gallery
Even though those are mods, it's a bad look to be holding those up as reference game images.
https://www.luanti.org/en/#gallery
Even though those are mods, it's a bad look to be holding those up as reference game images.
And there's no screenshot of the two Luanti games that come the closest to Minecraft, both in terms of looks and gameplay. None of them are included in the standard Luanti distribution.
One can download games and mods from ContentDB (or directly from Luanti itself); ContentDB administrators are looking closely at the content users submit, from experience they will refuse your submission if everything is not properly licensed, even when the asserts are obviously FOSS (creators often include each other's stuff). They even were cautious about generative AI because the copyright assignment was unclear for them. They also have a DMCA page [1].
Long story short, Luanti is a respectable platform. They respect copyright and licensing (even for FOSS code and assets, unlike some private organizations). They also organize game jams and promote original content.
If your whole shtick is creating blocky games with retro-easy-to-recreate 8x8 or 16x16 textures it's not really weird people easily imitate it.
Even if they were similar, artistic style is not protected under copyright.
So with a straight face, you think a jury wouldn't call this Minecraft?
https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg
Also Luanti probably could doge all this if they just ditched all the blatant minecraft clone mods. A mining game with blocks is totally fine. If you look back at infiniminer, it's clearly a different vibe of the same concept.
That'll all become glaringly obvious when this is reinstated, because the copyright claim is bogus.
You can't take Minecraft assets, mix the pixels around a little bit, and then be legally free and clear. If the public looks at pictures of your game, and they say "100% it's Minecraft", you're gonna have a bad time.
IP protection is about reasonable confusion in the public. Not experts in field getting confused.
They're the same genre, but obviously not the same game. Is only one voxel sandbox game allowed to exist in the world? What's next, only one platformer can exist? Only one action movie is allowed to exist? Only one power metal band in the world?
Again, aesthetic is not copyrightable.