13 ms·

I feel for the guy, making a living off of art is difficult. However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft

I feel for the guy, making a living off of art is difficult. However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement. > So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending Did the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely. I understand that to some the end story may be deemed to be essential to the experience and talent was required to write this story - but that attitude just undermines the hard work of everyone else involved. Who knows how much effort those staff members poured into perfecting things that were essential to the experience that made Minecraft? > Bear in mind, here we were a couple of weeks before the official launch, and Minecraft was already a phenomenon: in its unfinished state, it had already sold five or six million copies, in beta, at $15 a copy. So it was, at that point, already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no ending It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff.

asperous 4y ago
If he actually received $20,000 that still seems like a lot? Especially in a world where freelance writing is $0.01-$0.50 (pre-GPT3). And it sounds like at the time it was good money for the artist. I get that he feels like he was given a small amount relative to the great success of Minecraft, but I would hope he also realizes that it was risk free cash.
- ekianjo 4y ago
  reminds me recently of voice actors who think they are entitled for a bigger piece of the piece just because the game they worked on for a few hours had financial success. Hubris and pretentiousness at its best.
  - krisoft 4y ago
    They are free to negotiate as they are pleased. If the producer feels that they can find a cheaper acceptable alternative they will go with that. If they feel what the voice actor is offering is needed they need to pay for it. > the game they worked on for a few hours Voice acting is a hard job, and it takes more time than a “few hours” to get good at it. If you think anyone can do it certainly you can just pay an anybody to do it.
    - pclmulqdq 4y ago
      It can take a lifetime to get good at something, but a few hours of work after that lifetime generally doesn't cost much. Certainly not more than 5 figures.
      - zztop44 4y ago
        You’re free to negotiate whatever contract you want with the voice actors you hire.
        pclmulqdq 4y ago
        That's what they did in the case of the recent Bayonetta controversy. They actually paid less for the replacement than they were expecting to pay the original actor who wanted more.
        ekianjo 4y ago
        And the game will still sell very well anyway. Problem solved.
      - trhr 4y ago
        A man sails his smoking yacht into a repair shop. The head mechanic goes over with a hammer and slams it against the side of the engine. The engine roars back to life, and the smoke subsides. He submits a bill for $200,000. It is itemized as such: - $1 - Fifteen seconds of labor; striking with hammer - $199,999 - Knowing where to strike
- nmfisher 4y ago
  That was my reaction too, 20,000 (euros) seems quite decent for a tiny freelance engagement, and just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too. If he didn't think the money was fair, he shouldn't have accepted it. I expect Mojang would have simply pulled the plug and gone with someone else if he had done so. This really just smacks of sour grapes that Mojang was sold for squillions and the author feels entitled to some of that. Legalities aside (the absence of aa signed contract may be a problem) but I don't feel he is morally entitled to anything more than he's already received.
  - wheels 4y ago
    Indeed. This was a great deal for the writer. He wasn't part of the team. He was a contract writer. €20k is a lot of dosh for a few pages of text. It smacks of trivializing all of the work of the people who spent months working on it because he feels like he didn't get a big enough piece of the pie. It sounds like that got lost in the fog of war, because otherwise they'd just have said, "Ok, that's enough. We'll just hire someone else for half the price." I honestly suspect the €20k figure was, "Let's offer him a big enough number so that we don't have to be distracted by negotiating this." And then began the long-winded and self-important wall-of-text emails.
  - Moru 4y ago
    Mojang was not a tiny indie company though, it already sold millions of copies before the release. Yes, he should have let his agent negotiate the contract. Do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.
    - dcow 4y ago
      One can both be a small indie studio and also have sold multiple millions of copies of their game. Indie simply means you don't have a publisher. And Mojan didn't.
      - BlueTemplar 4y ago
        Then Activision-Blizzard is indie. You have to at least put a floor on that thing or you fall completely afoul of the common meaning. My rule of thumb would be less than $1 million spent before the first public release ? (Which I assume makes Minecraft indie ?) Now another question is whether you can even call indie those games being advertised and distributed by Steam (or any other platform) where developers are overwelmingly dependent on that platform for like 95%+ of their sales (including keys from third party websites still for that platform) - because dealing with advertisers and distributors was also an extremely important part of the job when games still came in boxes !
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  The problem with that line of thinking is that Minecraft itself is not worth $2.5 Billion of programmer's time under the same type of analysis. The ending is like the smile on Mona Lisa in my opinion. You can probably pay someone a few hundred dollars to paint that smile ...
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
Natsu 4y ago
I wonder if it counts as a work for hire then? Otherwise copyright vests with the author and requires a written memorandum of transfer as I understand it.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
operator-name 4y ago
I think your focus on the financials, which was a very small part of the article is misguided. I'm under the assumption that the article is part of the author trying to "piece things together" - as a part 2 of his spiritual journey where he concluded: > I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt. By accepting this premise, these are examples of when he expected to be treated as a friend, but was instead treated as an outsider. As for the legality, I don't think a vague agreement can clarify if the work is licenced or if the licence was transfered.
- cmeacham98 4y ago
  But he was an outsider, he wasn't Notch's friend. Notch contacted him for the express purpose of writing the End Poem. Of course, I'm sure they were friendly in their discussions, there's no point in being actively hostile to the people you're working with. But the idea the relationship extended anything past a game developer and a contracted writer seems to be entirely in the author's mind.
  - operator-name 4y ago
    I definitely agree, and on the basis of the information given that seems to be the crux of the issue. Yet I can easily believe and totally see that the author saw it as more - who's to say that they weren't closer to friends prior to the initial discussion about contracts?
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
  - mcv 4y ago
    One side sees it as the start of a friendship, the other as a work contract. It certainly feels a bit like he was feeling lonely and needed to see this as a friendship. I'm sure there was a deep artistic connection, but that's not quite the same thing as a friendship. It's awkward and frustrating when only one side sees a relationship as a friendship.
spuz 4y ago
My interpretation of the legal status is that the author is entitled to accept the €20k as payment for his time but that amount doesn't constitute payment for the copyright of the work. Mojang subsequently wanted to purchase that copyright and hence why they sent the contract for £1 to be signed. Julian believed the copyright was worth more and so rejected the offer. All that is to say that if my interpretation is correct then Julian is legally entitled to do what he wants with the work including selling it to someone else or in this case release it under a creative commons license.
- richardwhiuk 4y ago
  At minimum, they are buying a non-exclusive license to copy the work. Beyond that is speculation. (Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on nothing related, and love Minecraft the game.)
  - hnbad 4y ago
    I'm German and used to do freelance work. This interpretation is what I've been told by a lawyer in a similar case: the money is for the license, not the copyright, and unless specified, the license is the minimum of what could reasonably be expected, i.e. a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, limited license for the scope of the product. IANAL but I think Microsoft is in the clear here because they bought out Mojang but they couldn't for example use the ending (or derivative works of it) in a spin-off game because Mojang couldn't have done that either and they have no standing to go after anyone reproducing the poem as a whole or in part. In fact, the poem now being CC0 grants Microsoft more rights than they had, except it's still non-exclusive, meaning the same rights are granted to everyone else too.
    - mcv 4y ago
      MS can now use the End Poem in spin off products, or even adapt it and use variations or sequels of it in spin off products. Pretty good deal for them, I'd say. Though to be perfectly honest, if I were them, and they needed something like that, I'd hire Julian to write it. Or maybe ask him to write it for free after giving him a massive donation.
hnbad 4y ago
I don't know about Swedish law but in German law works created outside of an employment contract do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer, so at best Mojang had a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, limited usage right for the poem for the use in Minecraft and nothing else. As I understand it, this makes his claim that Microsoft may not have the right to use it questionable but it confirms his main point that they don't own it. Given that the author is German, this seems relevant. For what it's worth, this often comes as a surprise even to many German creators who are not aware of this because intuitively if you get paid to create something "for" someone, you sell them your rights to it. But in reality that requires an explicit contract spelling this out. A typical example is professional photographers actually only selling you prints of the photos they take for you, or a design agency not giving you the source files for designs they create for you.
- kqr 4y ago
  IANAL but AFAIK this is the case also in Sweden. (Researched it when I (otherwise an amateur) was asked to do paid photography for someone.) In fact, though now my memory is hazy and so I speculate more wildly, not even most kinds of employment grants copyright to the employer. Exceptions being software developers and teachers, I think.
- ketzu 4y ago
  > do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer Of course, because in germany you can not transfer your copyright at all, unless you die. ;) Without being nitpicky you are still right in the way you meant it: There is no automatic usage right afaik. (And also google results agree: eg https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht )
  - BlueTemplar 4y ago
    I think that in civil law countries you can sometimes give / sell away your copy rights, but never your moral rights ? (Though copy rights themselves might also be treated as actual rights, rather than a temporary monopoly, an exception to the normal state of everything being in the public domain that prevails in the common law countries ?)
cookie_monsta 4y ago
> It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff. I'm usually on the writer's side in these kinds of things, but I have to agree. I've played dozens of hours of that game and have never even considered that it might have an end
VoodooJuJu 4y ago
>Did the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely Ah, if only we were paid proportionate to how hard we worked. Stay-at-home moms and janitors would be billionaires.
- wsc981 4y ago
  It's comedy, but honestly, being a stay-at-home mom really isn't the hardest job on the planet. And looking back at most of history, it was probably a luxury. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-gbacsUKpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-gbacsUKpc P.S.: I am a father that works remote from home. My girlfriend is a stay-at-home mom. Our daughter spends most time at school. Honestly, my girlfriend has a pretty relaxed life. I take care of the money and we got a small house, so cleaning the house really takes little time (I even help in weekends vacuum cleaning and evenings doing dishes). In daytime she has many hours to spend as she sees fit. And in evenings often as well.
whywhywhywhy 4y ago
>already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no ending Just gonna say it, the game was better without the rushed ending anyway and the amount it sold before it had one is testament to that.
bambax 4y ago
That last quote is damning. The game works well without an ending poem -- or an ending, for that matter. I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set. That said, the rant, while much too long is interesting and explains well the misunderstanding between business people and artists. Some artists are good at business (Picasso) but most aren't because they speak a different language, and because, like this guy, they cultivate and probably enjoy ambiguity, or the protection and shadows it brings.
- baby 4y ago
  A lot of us never actually saw that ending because for the longest time minecraft didn’t have one. It came much much later and was kind of, to my understanding becaude I never finished the game, kind of a random and rushed way to add an ending to the game so that notch could not call it an alpha or something anymore and move on.
  - Cthulhu_ 4y ago
    That's how I felt about it; it doesn't really feel like you're working towards this ending throughout the game, it's more an area to unlock and an objective to achieve. But it doesn't feel like the objective of the game; it doesn't feel like the game has an objective, and I don't feel like adding one finished the game. It's still a goal that players aspire to, e.g. speedrunners who can now apparently achieve it in <10 minutes with the right world seed.
- tialaramex 4y ago
  Yes, I play mostly heavily modified Minecraft. Packs like Compact Claustrophobia or FTB Stoneblock 3. To the extent these have a definite ending, it's not the ending intended for Minecraft. Take Star Factory, you're not going to kill monsters and build up until you can take on a dragon, you're building a factory to make stars. You start with basic materials like an unlimited supply of wood and gold and you've reached the end of the game once your systems are just making stars automatically from your materials. The modern game actually has a bunch of stuff "after" the ending when played straight up.
pdpi 4y ago
> It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff. Notch’s choice to make it hard to skip/speed up the text scrolling suggests that he thought it had disproportionate value.
- mikkom 4y ago
  And that's why he paid 20000 euros for it, right? I don't understand what this guy is complaining about to be honest.
  - pbhjpbhj 4y ago
    I can't recall the details but wasn't it $20k under a $15M total valuation? Proportionally that would be $3.3M of a $2.5B valuation.
    - bena 4y ago
      He wasn't offering a portion of the game's profits or a portion of the company. He was offering money for a work-for-hire. At a $15M valuation, the work was worth $20k to them. At a $2.5B valuation, the work was $20k to them.
  - jrochkind1 4y ago
    Is he complaining? I don't think so? He does say he has had hurt feelings. Do you mean you don't understand why he has hurt feelings?
    - mikkom 4y ago
      It's very clear that he thinks he deserves more money because the game he write short story for was a success. 20k is a very reasonable sum for this kind of gig. For me he sounds greedy and yes it sounds like he complains (a lot)
cobertos 4y ago
What were those 25 staff doing though? It seemed like there was only actually 3 full time staff working on the game, or so the article mentions (Notch, Jeb, C418). I can't find any good sources about who was on the team at the time, but it seems like they were back office/customer support/community management/dev supporting roles? Which is super interesting! The most successful game dev of all time was only 20% actual game devs. As if it's not about making the game but about everything else (comms, community engagement)
- debugnik 4y ago
  The author talks about the team at the time of the 1.0 release, I think. Then Markus stopped working on Minecraft altogether while Mojang grew to support the game and explore new ventures.
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  That was long after the release of the game though...
franciscop 4y ago
Definitely not, one of the first things you learn when becoming a freelancer is that it's very important to specify in the contracts what the deliverables are exactly, specially regarding copyright, source files, photoshop file vs final product, etc. The reason is because in most cases (this is ~1 decade old personal research/opinion) unless specified the client is paying for access and use to the final product you make, not necessarily for anything else. This is the sane thing though, but in business in many cases you might want to also receive the blueprints, source code, assets, copyright, etc. This might be "obvious" depending on the industry and case, but that means it's not obvious at all in a general sense. For example here, the company (and that might be why Microsoft backed up) might be happy with just being able to use the work, even if they don't have an exclusive contract or are the copyright holders of that particular bit. I do agree that it seems Mojang had implicit permission at least to use it, but not exclusive/full copyright/etc.
_the_inflator 4y ago
Remember MP3? This dude, the inventor, received nothing from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Brandenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Brandenburg This might help talking about fairness when in fact MP3 build the foundation of streaming music. ;) Same goes for iPad silhouette girl: contract work, nothing else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_advertising Or the nike logo, or... It is hard. There won't be so many George Lucas opportunities: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/george-lucas-star-wars-288513/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/george-l...
SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago
I think this is a very important quote from the author: > And I finally got round to reading the original contract, the one I didn’t sign. > And… Jesus Christ. It was worse than I’d even imagined. It was horrible. > The contract was for a comprehensive buyout, signing away all my rights forever, which was exactly the thing I’d told Carl that I never did with my work. So the fact that he kept the money does say that he agreed to write the piece for that amount of money, but it doesn't say anything about under which terms, and the terms is where they disagree. The money transfer says nothing about what rights do Mojang have over the piece and what rights the writer have over the piece.
ClarityJones 4y ago
> an agreed upon offer Where do you see that? I went back and re-read the section and it still seems to say that the negotiations failed and no agreement was reached.
- chrisan 4y ago
  You typically don't perform the work and take the money if you don't agree to it, or at the very least agree to future payments. If negotiations failed then it reverts back to the original offer. At some point, contract or not, he agreed to take the money and do the work.
- wartijn_ 4y ago
  > And eventually Carl threatened to dump me, and get someone else in to write the ending, if I didn’t wrap up the negotiations that day and take his first offer. I was stunned, I didn’t understand what was happening, and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was. The friendship is more important than the money.
  - ClarityJones 4y ago
    Thanks. I don't think that's a contract. We need an offer and acceptance (and consideration). More broadly we also need adequate specificity to determine the essential terms. Here there were two essential terms: 1) the author would write a poem for use in Minecraft, and 2) Minecraft would pay consideration. Stepping through the rounds: 1. ... skip prior rounds ... 2. Minecraft demands that Julian accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is not an offer because it does not specify the essential term, consideration.] 3. Julian agrees to accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is also not an offer, because they still have not indicated what the consideration will be.] 4. Minecraft offers $20,0000 in exchange for the poem. [This is the first offer.] 5. Julian refuses to sign. [This is a rejection of the offer.]
axus 4y ago
I'd agree that something was purchased for $20000, but what? My assumption is a license to redistribute the poem as part of the game. This guy is probably correct that he did not agree to an NDA, or transferal of exclusive rights. That's why I think MS did not need to pay him off; they thought they had a license, even if they didn't own the IP. And that's also why it's totally legit for him to republish his own work under a free license.
thrwy_918 4y ago
> However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement. It sounds like an awful, muddy mess that would take a great deal of time and money to litigate if the author decided to take that path. Without an explicit contract, even determining which court (and which nation) has jurisdiction for this kind of international transaction sounds like a nightmare. I agree that in most jurisdictions I have any familiarity with, some kind of contract likely exists for usage of the text, but that is a fundamentally different question from ownership of the text. And I imagine that the text has subsequently been used by Mojang and Microsoft for other purposes, which may or may not be found to be covered by the original agreement. In short, it's exactly the kind of ambiguity that big corporations hate when it comes to intellectual property.
- imtringued 4y ago
  He could win in court and then what? Microsoft would remove his poem and nobody would read it ever again. He can only lose.
  - zimpenfish 4y ago
    > Microsoft would remove his poem and nobody would read it ever again. He can only lose. No, because he retained the copyright. If he won against Microsoft he would a) presumably get a lot of money (financial win), b) strike a small blow for the little guy against megacorps (moral win), and c) still be able to release the poem as CC0 or whatever he wanted (win).

asperous 4y ago

If he actually received $20,000 that still seems like a lot? Especially in a world where freelance writing is $0.01-$0.50 (pre-GPT3). And it sounds like at the time it was good money for the artist. I get that he feels like he was given a small amount relative to the great success of Minecraft, but I would hope he also realizes that it was risk free cash.

ekianjo 4y ago
reminds me recently of voice actors who think they are entitled for a bigger piece of the piece just because the game they worked on for a few hours had financial success. Hubris and pretentiousness at its best.
- krisoft 4y ago
  They are free to negotiate as they are pleased. If the producer feels that they can find a cheaper acceptable alternative they will go with that. If they feel what the voice actor is offering is needed they need to pay for it. > the game they worked on for a few hours Voice acting is a hard job, and it takes more time than a “few hours” to get good at it. If you think anyone can do it certainly you can just pay an anybody to do it.
  - pclmulqdq 4y ago
    It can take a lifetime to get good at something, but a few hours of work after that lifetime generally doesn't cost much. Certainly not more than 5 figures.
    - zztop44 4y ago
      You’re free to negotiate whatever contract you want with the voice actors you hire.
      - pclmulqdq 4y ago
        That's what they did in the case of the recent Bayonetta controversy. They actually paid less for the replacement than they were expecting to pay the original actor who wanted more.
        ekianjo 4y ago
        And the game will still sell very well anyway. Problem solved.
    - trhr 4y ago
      A man sails his smoking yacht into a repair shop. The head mechanic goes over with a hammer and slams it against the side of the engine. The engine roars back to life, and the smoke subsides. He submits a bill for $200,000. It is itemized as such: - $1 - Fifteen seconds of labor; striking with hammer - $199,999 - Knowing where to strike
nmfisher 4y ago
That was my reaction too, 20,000 (euros) seems quite decent for a tiny freelance engagement, and just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too. If he didn't think the money was fair, he shouldn't have accepted it. I expect Mojang would have simply pulled the plug and gone with someone else if he had done so. This really just smacks of sour grapes that Mojang was sold for squillions and the author feels entitled to some of that. Legalities aside (the absence of aa signed contract may be a problem) but I don't feel he is morally entitled to anything more than he's already received.
- wheels 4y ago
  Indeed. This was a great deal for the writer. He wasn't part of the team. He was a contract writer. €20k is a lot of dosh for a few pages of text. It smacks of trivializing all of the work of the people who spent months working on it because he feels like he didn't get a big enough piece of the pie. It sounds like that got lost in the fog of war, because otherwise they'd just have said, "Ok, that's enough. We'll just hire someone else for half the price." I honestly suspect the €20k figure was, "Let's offer him a big enough number so that we don't have to be distracted by negotiating this." And then began the long-winded and self-important wall-of-text emails.
- Moru 4y ago
  Mojang was not a tiny indie company though, it already sold millions of copies before the release. Yes, he should have let his agent negotiate the contract. Do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.
  - dcow 4y ago
    One can both be a small indie studio and also have sold multiple millions of copies of their game. Indie simply means you don't have a publisher. And Mojan didn't.
    - BlueTemplar 4y ago
      Then Activision-Blizzard is indie. You have to at least put a floor on that thing or you fall completely afoul of the common meaning. My rule of thumb would be less than $1 million spent before the first public release ? (Which I assume makes Minecraft indie ?) Now another question is whether you can even call indie those games being advertised and distributed by Steam (or any other platform) where developers are overwelmingly dependent on that platform for like 95%+ of their sales (including keys from third party websites still for that platform) - because dealing with advertisers and distributors was also an extremely important part of the job when games still came in boxes !
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
pbhjpbhj 4y ago
The problem with that line of thinking is that Minecraft itself is not worth $2.5 Billion of programmer's time under the same type of analysis. The ending is like the smile on Mona Lisa in my opinion. You can probably pay someone a few hundred dollars to paint that smile ...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

Natsu 4y ago

I wonder if it counts as a work for hire then? Otherwise copyright vests with the author and requires a written memorandum of transfer as I understand it.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

operator-name 4y ago

I think your focus on the financials, which was a very small part of the article is misguided. I'm under the assumption that the article is part of the author trying to "piece things together" - as a part 2 of his spiritual journey where he concluded: > I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt. By accepting this premise, these are examples of when he expected to be treated as a friend, but was instead treated as an outsider. As for the legality, I don't think a vague agreement can clarify if the work is licenced or if the licence was transfered.

cmeacham98 4y ago
But he was an outsider, he wasn't Notch's friend. Notch contacted him for the express purpose of writing the End Poem. Of course, I'm sure they were friendly in their discussions, there's no point in being actively hostile to the people you're working with. But the idea the relationship extended anything past a game developer and a contracted writer seems to be entirely in the author's mind.
- operator-name 4y ago
  I definitely agree, and on the basis of the information given that seems to be the crux of the issue. Yet I can easily believe and totally see that the author saw it as more - who's to say that they weren't closer to friends prior to the initial discussion about contracts?
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- mcv 4y ago
  One side sees it as the start of a friendship, the other as a work contract. It certainly feels a bit like he was feeling lonely and needed to see this as a friendship. I'm sure there was a deep artistic connection, but that's not quite the same thing as a friendship. It's awkward and frustrating when only one side sees a relationship as a friendship.

spuz 4y ago

My interpretation of the legal status is that the author is entitled to accept the €20k as payment for his time but that amount doesn't constitute payment for the copyright of the work. Mojang subsequently wanted to purchase that copyright and hence why they sent the contract for £1 to be signed. Julian believed the copyright was worth more and so rejected the offer. All that is to say that if my interpretation is correct then Julian is legally entitled to do what he wants with the work including selling it to someone else or in this case release it under a creative commons license.

richardwhiuk 4y ago
At minimum, they are buying a non-exclusive license to copy the work. Beyond that is speculation. (Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on nothing related, and love Minecraft the game.)
- hnbad 4y ago
  I'm German and used to do freelance work. This interpretation is what I've been told by a lawyer in a similar case: the money is for the license, not the copyright, and unless specified, the license is the minimum of what could reasonably be expected, i.e. a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, limited license for the scope of the product. IANAL but I think Microsoft is in the clear here because they bought out Mojang but they couldn't for example use the ending (or derivative works of it) in a spin-off game because Mojang couldn't have done that either and they have no standing to go after anyone reproducing the poem as a whole or in part. In fact, the poem now being CC0 grants Microsoft more rights than they had, except it's still non-exclusive, meaning the same rights are granted to everyone else too.
  - mcv 4y ago
    MS can now use the End Poem in spin off products, or even adapt it and use variations or sequels of it in spin off products. Pretty good deal for them, I'd say. Though to be perfectly honest, if I were them, and they needed something like that, I'd hire Julian to write it. Or maybe ask him to write it for free after giving him a massive donation.

hnbad 4y ago

I don't know about Swedish law but in German law works created outside of an employment contract do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer, so at best Mojang had a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, limited usage right for the poem for the use in Minecraft and nothing else. As I understand it, this makes his claim that Microsoft may not have the right to use it questionable but it confirms his main point that they don't own it. Given that the author is German, this seems relevant. For what it's worth, this often comes as a surprise even to many German creators who are not aware of this because intuitively if you get paid to create something "for" someone, you sell them your rights to it. But in reality that requires an explicit contract spelling this out. A typical example is professional photographers actually only selling you prints of the photos they take for you, or a design agency not giving you the source files for designs they create for you.

kqr 4y ago
IANAL but AFAIK this is the case also in Sweden. (Researched it when I (otherwise an amateur) was asked to do paid photography for someone.) In fact, though now my memory is hazy and so I speculate more wildly, not even most kinds of employment grants copyright to the employer. Exceptions being software developers and teachers, I think.
ketzu 4y ago
> do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer Of course, because in germany you can not transfer your copyright at all, unless you die. ;) Without being nitpicky you are still right in the way you meant it: There is no automatic usage right afaik. (And also google results agree: eg https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht )
- BlueTemplar 4y ago
  I think that in civil law countries you can sometimes give / sell away your copy rights, but never your moral rights ? (Though copy rights themselves might also be treated as actual rights, rather than a temporary monopoly, an exception to the normal state of everything being in the public domain that prevails in the common law countries ?)

cookie_monsta 4y ago

> It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff. I'm usually on the writer's side in these kinds of things, but I have to agree. I've played dozens of hours of that game and have never even considered that it might have an end

VoodooJuJu 4y ago

>Did the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely Ah, if only we were paid proportionate to how hard we worked. Stay-at-home moms and janitors would be billionaires.

wsc981 4y ago
It's comedy, but honestly, being a stay-at-home mom really isn't the hardest job on the planet. And looking back at most of history, it was probably a luxury. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-gbacsUKpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-gbacsUKpc P.S.: I am a father that works remote from home. My girlfriend is a stay-at-home mom. Our daughter spends most time at school. Honestly, my girlfriend has a pretty relaxed life. I take care of the money and we got a small house, so cleaning the house really takes little time (I even help in weekends vacuum cleaning and evenings doing dishes). In daytime she has many hours to spend as she sees fit. And in evenings often as well.

whywhywhywhy 4y ago

>already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no ending Just gonna say it, the game was better without the rushed ending anyway and the amount it sold before it had one is testament to that.

bambax 4y ago

That last quote is damning. The game works well without an ending poem -- or an ending, for that matter. I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set. That said, the rant, while much too long is interesting and explains well the misunderstanding between business people and artists. Some artists are good at business (Picasso) but most aren't because they speak a different language, and because, like this guy, they cultivate and probably enjoy ambiguity, or the protection and shadows it brings.

baby 4y ago
A lot of us never actually saw that ending because for the longest time minecraft didn’t have one. It came much much later and was kind of, to my understanding becaude I never finished the game, kind of a random and rushed way to add an ending to the game so that notch could not call it an alpha or something anymore and move on.
- Cthulhu_ 4y ago
  That's how I felt about it; it doesn't really feel like you're working towards this ending throughout the game, it's more an area to unlock and an objective to achieve. But it doesn't feel like the objective of the game; it doesn't feel like the game has an objective, and I don't feel like adding one finished the game. It's still a goal that players aspire to, e.g. speedrunners who can now apparently achieve it in <10 minutes with the right world seed.
tialaramex 4y ago
Yes, I play mostly heavily modified Minecraft. Packs like Compact Claustrophobia or FTB Stoneblock 3. To the extent these have a definite ending, it's not the ending intended for Minecraft. Take Star Factory, you're not going to kill monsters and build up until you can take on a dragon, you're building a factory to make stars. You start with basic materials like an unlimited supply of wood and gold and you've reached the end of the game once your systems are just making stars automatically from your materials. The modern game actually has a bunch of stuff "after" the ending when played straight up.

pdpi 4y ago

> It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff. Notch’s choice to make it hard to skip/speed up the text scrolling suggests that he thought it had disproportionate value.

mikkom 4y ago
And that's why he paid 20000 euros for it, right? I don't understand what this guy is complaining about to be honest.
- pbhjpbhj 4y ago
  I can't recall the details but wasn't it $20k under a $15M total valuation? Proportionally that would be $3.3M of a $2.5B valuation.
  - bena 4y ago
    He wasn't offering a portion of the game's profits or a portion of the company. He was offering money for a work-for-hire. At a $15M valuation, the work was worth $20k to them. At a $2.5B valuation, the work was $20k to them.
- jrochkind1 4y ago
  Is he complaining? I don't think so? He does say he has had hurt feelings. Do you mean you don't understand why he has hurt feelings?
  - mikkom 4y ago
    It's very clear that he thinks he deserves more money because the game he write short story for was a success. 20k is a very reasonable sum for this kind of gig. For me he sounds greedy and yes it sounds like he complains (a lot)

cobertos 4y ago

What were those 25 staff doing though? It seemed like there was only actually 3 full time staff working on the game, or so the article mentions (Notch, Jeb, C418). I can't find any good sources about who was on the team at the time, but it seems like they were back office/customer support/community management/dev supporting roles? Which is super interesting! The most successful game dev of all time was only 20% actual game devs. As if it's not about making the game but about everything else (comms, community engagement)

debugnik 4y ago
The author talks about the team at the time of the 1.0 release, I think. Then Markus stopped working on Minecraft altogether while Mojang grew to support the game and explore new ventures.
BlueTemplar 4y ago
That was long after the release of the game though...

franciscop 4y ago

Definitely not, one of the first things you learn when becoming a freelancer is that it's very important to specify in the contracts what the deliverables are exactly, specially regarding copyright, source files, photoshop file vs final product, etc. The reason is because in most cases (this is ~1 decade old personal research/opinion) unless specified the client is paying for access and use to the final product you make, not necessarily for anything else. This is the sane thing though, but in business in many cases you might want to also receive the blueprints, source code, assets, copyright, etc. This might be "obvious" depending on the industry and case, but that means it's not obvious at all in a general sense. For example here, the company (and that might be why Microsoft backed up) might be happy with just being able to use the work, even if they don't have an exclusive contract or are the copyright holders of that particular bit. I do agree that it seems Mojang had implicit permission at least to use it, but not exclusive/full copyright/etc.

_the_inflator 4y ago

Remember MP3? This dude, the inventor, received nothing from it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Brandenburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karlheinz_Brandenburg This might help talking about fairness when in fact MP3 build the foundation of streaming music. ;) Same goes for iPad silhouette girl: contract work, nothing else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_advertising Or the nike logo, or... It is hard. There won't be so many George Lucas opportunities: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/george-lucas-star-wars-288513/ https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/george-l...

SkeuomorphicBee 4y ago

I think this is a very important quote from the author: > And I finally got round to reading the original contract, the one I didn’t sign. > And… Jesus Christ. It was worse than I’d even imagined. It was horrible. > The contract was for a comprehensive buyout, signing away all my rights forever, which was exactly the thing I’d told Carl that I never did with my work. So the fact that he kept the money does say that he agreed to write the piece for that amount of money, but it doesn't say anything about under which terms, and the terms is where they disagree. The money transfer says nothing about what rights do Mojang have over the piece and what rights the writer have over the piece.

ClarityJones 4y ago

> an agreed upon offer Where do you see that? I went back and re-read the section and it still seems to say that the negotiations failed and no agreement was reached.

chrisan 4y ago
You typically don't perform the work and take the money if you don't agree to it, or at the very least agree to future payments. If negotiations failed then it reverts back to the original offer. At some point, contract or not, he agreed to take the money and do the work.
wartijn_ 4y ago
> And eventually Carl threatened to dump me, and get someone else in to write the ending, if I didn’t wrap up the negotiations that day and take his first offer. I was stunned, I didn’t understand what was happening, and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was. The friendship is more important than the money.
- ClarityJones 4y ago
  Thanks. I don't think that's a contract. We need an offer and acceptance (and consideration). More broadly we also need adequate specificity to determine the essential terms. Here there were two essential terms: 1) the author would write a poem for use in Minecraft, and 2) Minecraft would pay consideration. Stepping through the rounds: 1. ... skip prior rounds ... 2. Minecraft demands that Julian accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is not an offer because it does not specify the essential term, consideration.] 3. Julian agrees to accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is also not an offer, because they still have not indicated what the consideration will be.] 4. Minecraft offers $20,0000 in exchange for the poem. [This is the first offer.] 5. Julian refuses to sign. [This is a rejection of the offer.]

axus 4y ago

I'd agree that something was purchased for $20000, but what? My assumption is a license to redistribute the poem as part of the game. This guy is probably correct that he did not agree to an NDA, or transferal of exclusive rights. That's why I think MS did not need to pay him off; they thought they had a license, even if they didn't own the IP. And that's also why it's totally legit for him to republish his own work under a free license.

thrwy_918 4y ago

> However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement. It sounds like an awful, muddy mess that would take a great deal of time and money to litigate if the author decided to take that path. Without an explicit contract, even determining which court (and which nation) has jurisdiction for this kind of international transaction sounds like a nightmare. I agree that in most jurisdictions I have any familiarity with, some kind of contract likely exists for usage of the text, but that is a fundamentally different question from ownership of the text. And I imagine that the text has subsequently been used by Mojang and Microsoft for other purposes, which may or may not be found to be covered by the original agreement. In short, it's exactly the kind of ambiguity that big corporations hate when it comes to intellectual property.

imtringued 4y ago
He could win in court and then what? Microsoft would remove his poem and nobody would read it ever again. He can only lose.
- zimpenfish 4y ago
  > Microsoft would remove his poem and nobody would read it ever again. He can only lose. No, because he retained the copyright. If he won against Microsoft he would a) presumably get a lot of money (financial win), b) strike a small blow for the little guy against megacorps (moral win), and c) still be able to release the poem as CC0 or whatever he wanted (win).