Microsoft’s AI-Powered Copyright Bots Fucked Up And Got An Innocent Game Delisted From Steam
from the ready-fire-aim dept
At some point, we, as a society, are going to realize that farming copyright enforcement out to bots and AI-driven robocops is not the way to go, but today is not that day. Long before AI became the buzzword it is today, large companies have employed their own copyright crawler bots, or employed those of a third party, to police their copyrights on these here internets. And for just as long, those bots have absolutely sucked out loud at their jobs. We have seen example after example after example of those bots making mistakes, resulting in takedowns or threats of takedowns of all kinds of perfectly legit content. Upon discovery, the content is usually reinstated while those employing the copyright decepticons shrug their shoulders and say “Thems the breaks.” And then it happens again.
It has to change, but isn’t. We have yet another recent example of this in action, with Microsoft’s copyright enforcement partner using an AI-driven enforcement bot to get a video game delisted from Steam over a single screenshot on the game’s page that looks like, but isn’t, from Minecraft. The game in question, Allumeria, clearly is partially inspired by Minecraft, but doesn’t use any of its assets and is in fact its own full-fledged creative work.
On Tuesday, the developer behind the Minecraft-looking, dungeon-raiding sandbox announced that their game had been taken down from Valve’s storefront due to a DMCA copyright notice issued by Microsoft. The notice, shared by developer Unomelon in the game’s Discord server, accused Allumeria of using “Minecraft content, including but not limited to gameplay and assets.”
The takedown was apparently issued over one specific screenshot from the game’s Steam page. It shows a vaguely Minecraft-esque world with birch trees, tall grass, a blue sky, and pumpkins: all things that are in Minecraft but also in real life and lots of other games. The game does look pretty similar to Minecraft, but it doesn’t appear to be reusing any of its actual assets or crossing some arbitrary line between homage and copycat that dozens of other Minecraft-inspired games haven’t crossed before.
It turns out the takedown request didn’t come from Microsoft directly, but via Tracer.AI. Tracer.AI claims to have a bot driven by artificial intelligence for automatic flagging and removal of copyright infringing content.
It seems the system failed to understand in this case that the image in question, while being similar to those including Minecraft assets, didn’t actually infringe upon anything. Folks at Mojang caught wind of this on BlueSky and had to take action.
While it’s unclear if the claim was issued automatically or intentionally, Mojang Chief Creative Officer Jens Bergensten (known to most Minecraft players as Jeb) responded to a comment about the takedown on Bluesky, stating that he was not aware and is now “investigating.” Roughly 12 hours later, Allumeria‘s Steam page has been reinstated.
“Microsoft has withdrawn their DMCA claim!” Unomelon posted earlier today. “The game is back up on Steam! Allumeria is back! Thank you EVERYONE for your support. It’s hard to comprehend that a single post in my discord would lead to so many people expressing support.”
And this is the point in the story where we all go back to our lives and pretend like none of this ever happened. But that sucks. For starters, there is no reason we should accept that this kind of collateral damage, temporary or not. Add to that there are surely stories out there in which a similar resolution was not reached. How many games, how much other non-infringing content out there, were taken down for longer from an erroneous claim like this? How many never came back?
And at the base level, the fact is that if companies are going to claim that copyright is of paramount importance to their business, that can’t be farmed out to automated systems that aren’t good at their job.
Filed Under: ai, allumeria, copyright, copyright detection, dmca, minecraft, steam
Companies: microsoft, tracer.ai, unomelon, valve
Comments on “Microsoft’s AI-Powered Copyright Bots Fucked Up And Got An Innocent Game Delisted From Steam”
there needs to be a modicum of liability for errant DMCA takedowns. even 5 fucking cents would be enough. but until then, here we are.
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This is the root problem. Add even a modest penalty for false takedown claims and suddenly AI enforcement becomes a major liability and the problem resolves itself.
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How about a penalty of perjury?
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This with financial penalties that are high enough to make the automated takedown request more expensive than having someone review the positives from said automated process.
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Maybe start with for each individial false copyright claim, the claimant must pay 10% of all revenue they generate from the supposedly “infringed” work to the party they falsely accused, forever.
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The standard excuse is that the “under penalty of perjury” clause only covers the statement that they own the copyright for which they’re sending the claim—regardless of whether the content to be taken down has anything at all to do with it.
There also needs to be hard conversations at Congressional level about the DMCA (and, really, IP law in general).
Maybe they’re not that bad. Can we try an AI president for a trump comparison?
this isn’t new
This video have reported the misshaps of tracer.ai, a company that claims to be a brand protector. Have taken down even content that merely says “Thanks Minecraft”, of a 2D sidescrolling inspired game with original graphics.
It kind of makes Hytale’s choice to not go on steam a bit smarted. Would Microsoft have “accidentally” DMCA’d their game as well and gotten it removed if it was on Steam?
Maybe games should not be deported without due diligence.
Looking at https://store.steampowered.com/app/3516590/Allumeria/ it not only looks very like Minecraft, but also feels like it.
I haven’t played Minecraft for 15 years but if someone said to me it’s actually the last version of Minecraft (what this game doesn’t pretend, for course), I would believe it. And I don’t think I’m dumber than any AI.
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Indeed, got into the MC beta in 2009/10, played for a while, but not really in over 10 years. Out of context, from the screenshots and videos, I’d have thought it was a MC mod.
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Surely not, but you may have the same level of understanding as to what constitutes infringement.
You are certainly smart enough to remedy that. “AI” and business people, definitely not.
And thanks to the game being delisted, I got to learn about Allumeria and downloaded the demo!
Nah everything worked as intended. Copyright at this point exists solely to protect the rich and powerful.
This is the same mistake people make when talking about Trump. Obviously, it can be farmed out to badly automated systems, even if that’s absurd. The DMCA’s been around for over 27 years now, and we must have been hearing about badly automated systems for at least 20. See Why My Printer Received a DMCA Takedown Notice from 2008, for example.
You know what we haven’t heard about? Any sender getting significantly punished for their errors, any court finding that it illegally blocks anonymous speech, or really anything like that. The closest we got was the Prenda Law scandal, because they were intentionally engaging in fraud and deception. The lesson is that one can get away with pretty much anything, as long as it can be plausibly passed off as an “innocent” error.
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Don’t equivocate with the word can’t to make a rhetorical point. The rest of your observation is spot-on enough.
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Why not? I think it’s a really important point, especially given the current U.S. government, who are doing most of what people say they “can’t” do. (Also an oblique reference to villainy, cf. Die Hard 2.)
Using “can’t” to mean “is forbidden to” is colloquial and imprecise, and problematic because companies don’t share the “moral” interpretation of that word (per The Corporation. They do what we let them get away with, and we’ve been letting them get away “farm[ing it] out to automated systems that aren’t good at their job” for decades.
If it seems like I’m scolding a toddler who’s trying to use a literal meaning to get away with bad behavior, that’s not an accident.
Registered DMCA Agents
It seems reasonable to require a licensed “DMCA agent” to be registered for each work. Much like a Sarbanes-Oxley attestor, a registered DMCA agent must be a human citizen domiciled in the USA (not a corporate or other non-human entity).
For fraudulent or erroneous takedowns, registered agents should incur automatic statutory penalties (w/o restraining the right to be sued for civil penalties). Further, all reversed takedowns accrue and after X their license is revoked (either for Y years or permanently).