Bukkit no longer available for download. Hit with DMCA takedown.
dl.bukkit.org
dl.bukkit.org
This guy, whoever he is, has been making fixes/adding features to his fork of Bukkit, and some (most?) of them have been getting merged to trunk. Bukkit's repo is apparently GPL.
Now he's pissed off for some reason so he issues a DMCA to take down software he participated in the development of because it violates the GPL by depending on the closed-source Minecraft server software? Super confusing. I don't understand how you would be a developer on this project without knowing that it depends on closed-source software to function (and yes, is basically incompatible with the GPL as a result).
The end result of this appears to be that nobody can use the software he works on other than developers able to do the build locally and violate the GPL by hand themselves. Bizarre.
No one can issue a DMCA takedown notice on behalf of Mojang without Mojang's authorization. Period. A regular notice, yes--but not a DMCA takedown notice. This is because a DMCA notice triggers very specific and harsh liability if not acted upon. (Unless the alleged infringer files a counter-notification...but I digress)
As for copyright and the code this guy wrote, it's considered a work of joint authorship and no joint author can prohibit the exploitation of a joint work by any of the other joint authors. They can each do what they want with it. All that the disgruntled dev can do is to sue for an accounting of royalties to be paid based on monies earned from the exploitation of the work. Have fun with that calculation. And notably, such a suit is NOT an infringement suit. So it stays in state court and doesn't carry any of the crazy statutory damages or attorney's fees penalties that an infringement suit would, assuming the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, which it isn't.
As for the GPL, it's a nonexclusive license, revocable at will as to new users. Any dev who contributed to the work can license the work however he/she wants. Only the licensees (us users of bukkit) are bound by the GPL if and only if we downloaded bukkit pursuant to a GPL agreement.
All Mojang has to do is file a counter-notification and the files can all be reinstated without the webhost worrying about liability.
What makes this extraordinarily messy is the fact that it is almost indisputable that the author was aware of this at the time he contributed. IANAL, so I don't know how that effects the license, but entering in to agreements that you are knowingly violating at the moment you enter them has the effect of providing a basis to challenge the validity of the agreement. Again, IANAL, but my concern would be that if the license were found null and void, the whole situation would fall back to copyright law, which still gives the author ownership of the code he has written, because there was no explicit assignment of copyright.
Basically, the choice of GPL for the Bukkit project was a timebomb from day one. Any project using the GPL would be wise to take note of what has happened here. Should someone find any significant amount of proprietary code in your GPL project, they can quite simply nuke your entire project with a single DMCA.
Since copyright itself is bound mostly by legal treaties, it too makes it a bit unclear in which legal rules should be used if a Swedish company who host content on a US company, get sued by a German developer.
"It depends" is the actually answer to what Mojang has to do. Since they are located in Sweden and thus under the Swedish legal system, my view is that they can't distribute the work as it stands.
I hope they sort it out.
Deleted comment
http://www.pcgamer.com/2014/08/21/minecraft-bukkit-team-lead...
Seems like:
1) Mojang implemented EULA some 3rd party bukkit devs didn't like, they decided to stop supporting their Minecraft API software and publically quit the project, announcing the "end" of the project.
2) Turns out Mojang actually owns (or thinks they own) the project because some members of the bukkit team went to work for Mojang and part of the terms was that they would own it(?)
3) One of the external devs files DMCA to spite Mojang(?) citing GPLv3 incompatibility with being shipped alongside non-Free Software.
There's a lot of legal nuance here that I don't have any answers for, like how copyright assignment worked on this project and whether the people who "sold" bukkit to Mojang had the legal right to do so. If they actually did then Mojang (as copyright holder) could just relicense the project under a different license than GPLv3 and make this all go away in the blink of an eye, so I'm kind of assuming they don't own it as much as they appear to think they do.
Would love to hear more about this from someone who pays attention to this stuff because this seems like a fascinating copyright situation.
In any case, this is a really good case-in-point as to why getting copyright assignment from external developers on any FS/OSS project that you run is a really good idea in general.
Your welcome. =P
There's not a lot of context in the take-down notice... does anyone know the actual story? http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/notification.txt
It consists of two major projects. Bukkit itself is an API that plugin authors code against. In theory it could be implemented for e.g. Terraria too but in practice its completely tied to Minecraft. Bukkit (the api) is licensed under GPL with little issue.
CraftBukkit is the implementation of this API. It is licensed under LGPL.
This was originally started as a community project. However the issue is that CraftBukkit includes a decompiled Minecraft server, which mojang never officially allowed.
This meant that Bukkit (the server) contained the bukkit api (GPL), the craftbukkit implementation (LGPL) and the Minecraft server ( All rights reserved) and was being distributed as "GPL". While mojang looked the other way about their proprietary software being distributed as GPL, everyone was pretty much happy.
The issue gets muddier when Mojang hired the core Bukkit devs to work on Minecraft. They left the Bukkit project to run itself and everything continued as is for two years.
Then two years later the community team announce they're shutting down the project. At this point, Mojang reveals that when they hired the original team, they also acquired the Bukkit project (trademarks, infrastructure, the original core teams code, etc) and as such it didn't belong to the current community team to shut down.
Now one of the GPL contributors is demanding that Mojang take down the project because it contains his code under the GPL but isn't validly licensed under the GPL due to containing the all rights reserved mojang code.