Techdirt. Stories about "mojang"

Minecraft Creator Stops By Pirate Bay Co-Founder's Reddit AMA To Thank Him For 'Making The World A Better Place'

Tim Cushing — Mon, 11 Feb 2013 10:45:17 PST

A recent Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything, for the .005% of readers who aren't aware) featuring Peter Sunde, co-founder of the Pirate Bay, had a visitor drop by to pay his respects... and nearly derail the whole thing.

The perception of the Pirate Bay as a lawless infringement paradise makes it an unlikely entity for a software developer to be praising, even with a few reservations. But this is what Notch, the creator of ~~Legos~~ Minecraft, had to say when coming face-to-face with Peter Sunde.

How much money have I lost because of this? Do I need it? God knows I certainly work hard enough to deserve it. That said, thanks for making the world a better place.

Notch and TPB go way back, or at least Notch and piracy do. Minecraft has proven hugely successful for the developer (check out the "Do I need it?" link), much of that due to the sort of "rampant infringement" that makes Chris Dodd and Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot cry themselves to sleep at night (and craft terrible DRM strategies during the day). The difference between Notch and the aforementioned weeping sleepers is his refusal to equate piracy with either "theft" or "lost sales."

Piracy is not theft. If you steal a car, the original is lost. If you copy a game, there are simply more of them in the world.

There is no such thing as a 'lost sale'... Is a bad review a lost sale? What about a missed ship date?

Notch addressed the "lost sale" fallacy again, following up on a question from another Redditor.

Do you think the sales that you've made through pirate versions are worth the number of downloads? I know I bought the real Minecraft after testing it out via. pirate software, as I do with most worthwhile software.

This is an extremely interesting question. For a game like Minecraft, I definitely believe it's at least broken even because the game has quite a long lifespan and has viral aspects in that people enjoy sharing what they create in and with the game. More users means more talking about the game, which means more sales.

For other games, I think piracy can definitely negatively affect the total number of units sold. This is especially true for hollywood style big story heavy big productions that are only expected to sell well and stay in the public conscience for a few months. That still doesn't mean anyone has actually LOST any money, as a bad review also can affect the total number of sales, and hopefully nobody thinks it would be sane to sue magazines for "loss of profit" over bad reviews.

And for a few games where there's a per-user cost, piracy can definitely be directly harmful to the company.

As Notch states, no one's suing magazines for bad reviews... yet. And that day may never come, especially if a convenient scapegoat like "piracy" can be asked to shoulder the blame for lousy sales. As for the statement about per-user cost, Notch is referring to ProjectZomboid, which was taken down, not because of piracy itself, but because of a glitch in the program that downloaded the entire game from Zomboid's cloud server any time the player clicked the "Update Now" button, racking up bandwidth charges for the developers. Unlike a torrent, where the delivery cost is footed by every user, Zomboid was footing the bill for bandwidth on its own. Not your usual "taken down because of rampant piracy" situation.

And then there's his response to a Redditor's simple "I'm sorry."

For what? Pirating the game?

I strongly believe individual rights are much more important than corporate rights, and I consider piracy to be an extremely minor offense. It's less harmful than jaywalking.

Organized and business run copyright infringement where people try to make money of someone else's work is a problem, but people sharing stuff casually is just barely even worth talking about...

This is the part that is often overlooked when the usual suspects begin decrying piracy. They choose to conflate it with counterfeit goods, child pornography, drug trafficking, terrorism... whatever it takes to make individual, non-commercial file sharing look like criminal behavior.

Thousands of individuals sharing stuff they like adds up. But attempts to place this behavior in the same basket as commercial enterprises that sell pirated content just make the person doing the basket-loading look ridiculous. As Notch says, casual file sharing is "barely worth talking about." This sort of behavior has gone on since the day of cassettes (for music and software) and isn't going away anytime soon.

By taking a more pragmatic approach to infringement, creators may find that an entity like The Pirate Bay isn't the enemy -- or at least, not the only one or even the worst one. Attacking The Pirate Bay also attacks its users, and its users are people you want on your side, not fighting against you. Notch sees both the upside and downside of free (and uncompensated) distribution and his solution has been to craft something that people want to pay for, even after they've already picked it up for free. Part of that profitable equation is an awesome product. The other part is simply being awesome -- something that's much easier to do when you're not painting potential customers as freeloading pirates.

(This really was Peter Sunde's AMA, so I'm going to give him the last word with this particularly hilarious response to a somewhat loaded question.)

Leeches: you have been served.

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Makers Of Minecraft Documentary Put It On The Pirate Bay, Despite High Profile Launch With Xbox

Mike Masnick — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 08:50:57 PST

Last week, I got an email from 2 Player Productions, the video game documentary filmmakers who have done a documentary on Mojang (makers of Minecraft) and who are working on the documentary about Double Fine making their new adventure game, which was part of super successful Kickstarter campaign (the Minecraft movie itself was also a successful Kickstarter project). The email was to talk about the release of the Minecraft documentary, and they promised that backers of the Double Fine project could watch a free stream -- which seemed like a cool way to thank those fans. Reports also came out that Gold Members on Xbox Live could watch the film debut for free as well.

But, then, they took lots of folks by surprise and announced that they had put a copy up on The Pirate Bay as well. Even though they're selling it as an $8 DRM-free download, you can also get a copy at The Pirate Bay, where the 2 Player Production folks left a nice note:

Greetings Pirate Bay!

This is 2 Player Productions here, and we hoped we could be the first to upload our new movie "Minecraft: The Story of Mojang". We've never uploaded a torrent before so hopefully this isn't all screwed up.

We wanted to come here first because we knew the movie would end up here eventually, and the best thing to do seemed to be opening a dialogue. Torrents and piracy are a way of life and it probably won't be going anywhere anytime soon. There are many people that want to punish you for that, but we have a more realistic outlook on things.

We've been there. We've all needed to do it at some point. Maybe you don't have the money. Maybe you want to try before you buy. Maybe you're pissed at us for premiering the movie on Xbox Live. These are all fine reasons. But if you feel that piracy is, in Gabe Newell's words, "a service problem," please consider that we are selling DRM free digital downloads that you can watch in whatever manner you please.

We're just three guys trying to make a living doing what we love. We love the world of video games, and we love making it real. If you buy the movie, you support those efforts. The reason we Kickstarted this movie in the first place was that we didn't have enough money to make it ourselves, and even then, we still put A LOT of our own money into it. Not to mention nearly two years of work.

Watch the movie. Hopefully you'll like it, and understand what we're trying to do. Please consider supporting us by buying the $8 DRM-free digital download of the movie at www.theminecraftmovie.com, or the $20 DVD from www.fangamer.net.

We've worked with a lot of amazing people in the games industry and had the incredible fortune to make some great films the way we wanted to make them. Please consider helping us continue on this path. The best has yet to come.

-2pp

Seems like they're taking a page straight from Louis CK and being open, human and awesome. I know it got me to hand over my $8 to them, and I imagine many others will do the same as well. Of course, if you live in the UK, where they've decided that nothing good could possibly happen on The Pirate Bay, you're not even supposed to see that message or apparently you might do something evil... even if they're saying it's fine to download it. Seems silly.

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Uniloc In Such A Rush To Sue 'Minecraft' For Patent Infringement, It Didn't Even Spell The Name Right

Zachary Knight — Mon, 23 Jul 2012 10:10:00 PDT

Last time we visited Notch, the creator of Minecraft, and his legal woes, he was being sued for trademark infringement over his company Mojang's latest game, Scrolls. That suit was eventually settled—though unfortunately not over a Quake 3 match as Notch proposed. We probably won't get a similar offer from Notch in this new scenario: he's being sued for patent infringement by the Eastern Texas-based patent troll Uniloc. This is the same Uniloc whose suit against Microsoft led to the CAFC ruling that 25% of all profits for a single patent infringement claim was just a tad excessive.

So why exactly is Mojang getting sued for patent infringement? Well, Uniloc was awarded a patent for a "System and Method for Preventing Unauthorized Access to Electronic Data" back in 2005 (Patent # 6,857,067). The primary claim is that since Mojang has an Android game that uses a network to communicate with an authorization server to perform a license validation check, Mojang has willfully infringed on the patent. The game named in the suit is "Mindcraft"—which of course is not actually the name of Mojang's game. While it is very possible that Mojang may be infringing this patent, Notch stated in a follow up tweet that he is more than willing to "throw piles of money at making sure they don't get a cent". On that same front, this patent could also be invalidated if it is successfully challenged in court.

Perhaps Notch can take some solace in knowing that he is apparently not alone in being sued. According to Reddit, a number of other game companies are being sued for infringing this same patent. This list includes the likes of Gameloft, EA, Square Enix, Halfbrick Studios and a number of other developers. This practice of suing multiple parties for infringing a single patent is a typical sign of a patent troll. It is also a symptom of the huge mess that is software patents.

In a followup blog post, Notch reflected on the idea of software patents and patents in general. He even provided a nice illustration of theft, copyright infringement and patent infringement.

But there is no way in hell you can convince me that it’s beneficial for society to not share ideas. Ideas are free. They improve on old things, make them better, and this results in all of society being better. Sharing ideas is how we improve.

A common argument for patents is that inventors won’t invent unless they can protect their ideas. The problem with this argument is that patents apply even if the infringer came up with the idea independently. If the idea is that easy to think of, why do we need to reward the person who happened to be first?

The post is short but full of some really good insights. Some of them we have touched on before, such as the idea that patents are actually harmful to the software industry. This suit also illustrates another point we have recently written about: how it is impossible to avoid infringing someone's patent. On the bright side, as more such patent infringement suits are filed and more companies and individuals are harmed by the current patent system, perhaps we will see those in Washington take notice and implement some real reforms.

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Mojang and Bethesda Reach A Settlement In 'Scrolls' Trademark Dispute

Zachary Knight — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 00:05:00 PDT

In one of the biggest letdowns in trademark history, Bethesda and Mojang have finally ended the dispute over the trademark status of the name "Scrolls". No massive court battle. No Quake 3 match. Just a simple settlement. In a very short post on the Mojang blog, Carl Manneh answers the two big questions about the dispute:

To answer the big question – yes Scrolls is still going to be called Scrolls.

To answer the second question – we aren't going to keep the trade mark.

So that's that. Which is probably just as well. After the initial ruling that gamers would most likely not be confused over the similar names, Bethesda's success in court was looking bleak. This was probably the best solution for all parties involved. Bethesda wins by not losing the appearance of control over the word "Scrolls", and not ending up like Tim Langdell. Mojang gets to continue calling ~~its~~ this game "Scrolls", while ceding the right to name any subsequent game "Scrolls". The only downside is that we lose the opportunity to set legal precedent on the ability to control individual words within a trademarked phrase.

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Court Rules Gamers Are Not Idiots And Not Likely To Be Confused Over 'Scrolls'

Zachary Knight — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:31:59 PDT

Mojang has won the first of several battles in its legal troubles involving the trademark "Scrolls". Via a tweet, Markus 'notch' Persson announced:

We won the interim injunction! We can keep using the name "Scrolls". ZeniMax/Bethesda can still appeal the ruling, but I'm very happy. :D

According to a Gamasutra summary of the ruling, the court found that although the games in question have a high degree of similarities, the target consumers have a higher than normal awareness and are thus less likely to be confused over the trademarks.

Nevertheless, the Court finds that there are similarities as well - both games/series taking place in a fantasy setting, and that consumers appear to be somewhat overlapping, and that as a consequence, there is a relatively high degree of similarity of goods.

The Court then goes on to discuss the consumers of these kinds of games. ZeniMax’s opinion is that it is the general public, which holds no particular awareness of differences between various titles and games.

Mojang on the contrary, has argued that computer and video gamers constitute a well defined (albeit large) group which is very much aware of differences between various games and titles. The Court finds mostly with Mojang, agreeing that the relevant consumers are not the general public, and that their awareness is higher than normal.

While this is not a decisive victory for Mojang, it does mean that it can continue to use 'Scrolls' in its regular course of business. Bethesda/Zenimax still has a chance to block Mojang in the future but for now nothing will change. We have yet to hear if Bethesda plans to appeal this ruling or wait for the full proceedings to commence. This ruling, however, does not effect the trademark status in nations outside Sweden. Which means that the USPTO's rejection still stands in the US.

In the mean time, perhaps Bethesda's legal team should reconsider that Quake match. Notch is still up for it.

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Mojang's Trademark Application Rejected: Too Many 'Scrolls' For The USPTO

Zachary Knight — Fri, 14 Oct 2011 15:15:57 PDT

We have been covering the trademark dispute over 'Scrolls' and the pending lawsuit against Mojang's use of the mark. We have now learned that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has rejected Mojang's 'Scrolls' application for trademark status in the US.

The letter of rejection states that Mojang's application for 'Scrolls' infringes on two registered marks in the US. The first is for Bethesda's 'The Elder Scrolls'. The Second is for 'Scrolls', a registered trademark by a t-shirt company in California.

The t-shirt mark I can understand. Mojang's application listed t-shirts and clothing as areas where it is looking to use the mark. It seems pretty easy to understand why the USPTO would reject the application based on that criteria.

However, the logic behind the rejection based on Bethesda's trademark still makes little sense. According to the USPTO:

Regarding the THE ELDER SCROLLS marks, the applicant has merely deleted the term ELDER from the registered mark. The mere deletion of wording from a registered mark may not be sufficient to overcome a likelihood of confusion. The applicant's mark does not create a distinct commercial impression because it contains the same common wording as the registrant's mark, and there is no other wording to distinguish it from registrant's mark.

What really confuses me here is that the USPTO considers Mojang's mark to be Bethesda's mark with a few words cut out. This leads me to believe that the USPTO is willing to accept the idea that a trademark is not just limited to the full trademarked phrase but also to the individual parts. So not only does Bethesda own the trademark for 'The Elder Scrolls' when used in a game, but also to the words 'Elder' and 'Scrolls'. I hope that doesn't apply to the word 'The'. I really hope that this is not the USPTO's intention. If this ruling is left to stand, applying for a trademark could become an even more complicated process than it currently is. Not only do applicants need to look for exact matches to proposed trademarks, now they will have to make sure that individual words are not part of other trademarks. I don't think that is how trademark law is meant to function.

However, this rejection seems to leave room for Mojang to alter the title of its game by adding a subtitle or another word to the title as long as it creates a 'distinct commercial impression', however that is determined. Mojang has six months from the issue date of the letter to amend its application or appeal the ruling. It will be interesting to see what move Mojang will make in response to this letter.

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Bethesda Turns Down Quake Fight Over Scrolls Name; Takes Guaranteed Loss By Going To Court

Zachary Knight — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 13:19:58 PDT

A couple months ago, Mojang revealed that Bethesda had sent a cease and desist letter to the company over the use of the word "scrolls" in its latest game. Since then, Markus Persson, aka Notch, the creative mind behind Mojang and its massively successful game Minecraft, has been in a public relations spree against Bethesda. His boldest move was to challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake to determine the naming rights over "Scrolls." It would seem that Bethesda's lawyers were not impressed and, instead, have decided to follow through with their original threat.

As Notch announced on Twitter, "The Scrolls case is going to court! Weee! :D"

Gamasutra followed up with Daniel Kaplan, Mojang's business developer, who described the nature of the court filings from Bethesda.

He explained that the document reveals how Bethesda lawyers are using comments on Scrolls videos and articles about the game to prove that the name will confuse players into believing that Scrolls is part of the Elder Scrolls franchise.

"They even took screenshots from our trailer and said we copied them... we have mountains in the Scrolls trailer, and they have that too in Skyrim," he laughed.

This is all pretty much expected from Bethesda. However, in the comments on that article, Mihai Cozma made a good point, that "Bethesda will lose no matter what decision the court will take." As Cozma explains, "Notch is so popular among gamers and small developers alike as a person, nothing will dim that. The way he treated this accusations led to an image of 'the big guys who want to steal whatever this "poor" guy has achieved by hard work' for Bethesda, which is detrimental to them.'"

He is absolutely right. This has turned into a public relations nightmare for Bethesda -- which was easily avoidable. From the very first letter from Bethesda, Notch and the Mojang team have been very open and public about all events regarding "Scrolls" and the trademark threat. They have blogged, tweeted, done interviews with the press and have built up a lot of good will among gamers.

But what has Bethesda done? So far, all it has done is send threatening letters to Mojang and file the lawsuit in court. It has yet to speak to the press and share its side of the story and why it feels gamers would be confused over the name "Scrolls" and why it feels Mojang's use of the name would be detrimental to their business. What are they afraid of? Are they afraid they will accidentally reveal some information critical to their case? Or are they afraid that any statement will be misinterpreted by the gaming public and further tarnish their image? It's probably a little of both, but more of the latter.

As Cozma said, at this point in the situation, there is no winning for Bethesda.

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Notch Comes Up With New Plan To Settle Trademark Dispute: Quake 3 Battle

Mike Masnick — Wed, 17 Aug 2011 15:10:00 PDT

We noted recently the ridiculous trademark lawsuit filed by game company Bethesda against Markus Persson's company Mojang. Of course, Persson is better known as Notch, and Mojang is better known for creating Minecraft. Mojang is working on a new game called Scrolls and Bethesda is suing because it holds the trademark on Elder Scrolls, for its series of games. As we noted in the original post, the really amazing thing about Notch was how reasonable he had been throughout the whole thing, even talking up how much he liked Bethesda, and hoping this was just some lawyers over reacting.

Well, now he's decided to offer an "alternative settlement" technique. Rather than, say, trying arbitration or mediation, Notch is offering to settle this over a Quake 3 match. Seriously:

Remember that scene in Game of Thrones where Tyrion chose a trial by battle in the Eyrie? Well, let’s do that instead!

I challenge Bethesda to a game of Quake 3. Three of our best warriors against three of your best warriors. We select one level, you select the other, we randomize the order. 20 minute matches, highest total frag count per team across both levels wins.

If we win, you drop the lawsuit.

If you win, we will change the name of Scrolls to something you’re fine with.

Now wouldn't that be fun?

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