38 ms·

Could the sequence of events be: 1) open source project publishes source 2) AI scrapes source 3) AI generates code for proprietary game similar to that of th

Could the sequence of events be: 1) open source project publishes source 2) AI scrapes source 3) AI generates code for proprietary game similar to that of the source 4) AI tool scans jar files and finds similar code, triggers copyright violation

puskavi 1mo ago
It probably just looks at pictures
clort 1mo ago
Could be, but unfortunately (3) can generate the code but it is not copyrightable (Thaler v. Perlmutter)
- sidewndr46 1mo ago
  No, that isn't what that case ruled at all. It ruled that the program generating the code cannot be the author.
  - em-bee 1mo ago
    interesting interpretation. most other articles on the topic have a different interpretation. if the AI can not be the author, then who can? is writing the prompt enough to establish being the creator? i think we need a few more cases to get an answer to that.
    - Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
      A company does NOT have rights to copy/mimic other works without legal license outside fair use like satire. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfie-that-predicted-the-ai-age https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-sel... The owner of the Camera in this case lost copyright ownership claim, as did the rights-group representing the monkey. =3
    - codedokode 1mo ago
      Clicking a button is enough to become an "author" of the photo, and writing a prompt requires more skill.
      - atakan_gurkan 1mo ago
        Obviously, taking a photo requires much more than clicking a button. Even if you simply pointed and shot, the timing can be special. Copyright requires some creativity, if the creation process is completely mechanical you may not be able to copyright the end result.
astrobe_ 1mo ago
It's very unlikely. The DMCA notification is from Microsoft, who owns Minecraft. The sequence of events is: 1) US votes a law that is hilariously favourable to copyright holders 2) Copyright holders abuse it for a while with non-AI bots 3) Copyright holders abuse it with AI-bots 4) Copyright holders will continue to abuse it until the law is amended.
- SXX 1mo ago
  Fun part is that US legislative branch did not have much say in creation of DMCA. US executive branch back then was just lobbied by major copyright holders and they literally bypassed much of legislation process around congress by creating and signing international agreements instead. By the time DMCA landed in congress there was very little that could be changed because US already had to honour intetnational agreements it's already created and signed. Louis Rossman have a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-j89LJysY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-j89LJysY
  - gpderetta 1mo ago
    Didn't the international agreements require ratification from legislative?
    - SXX 1mo ago
      Yes, but as told by DMCA creator quoted in video congress cant amend them much unlike any other law. Congress could obviously not pass ratificarion, but you know how its usually going.
  - account42 1mo ago
    Yes, treaties are effectively a backdoor around the already imbalanced democratic process.
- zdragnar 1mo ago
  Except, of course, Luanti holds copyright over their own assets and app. Copyright is not something you get when you file paperwork with the government, it is automatic for creative works. DMCA is punitive to platforms who do not correctly adjudicate the law and self enforce, which is why they err on the side of the claimant rather than the accused (or the side more likely to defend their copyright in court). So, the law doesn't really favor copyright holders, it favors extremely conservative and risk averse behavior from large platforms, regardless of who would actually win a dispute over copyright.
duskdozer 1mo ago
Doubt it. Microsoft probably just sees "voxel game" and files the claim, because they don't lose anything if it fails. From the article: >Luanti’s Android app is currently not available on the due to a baseless DMCA notice filed on behalf of Microsoft by Tracer.AI, alleging that Luanti infringes Minecraft’s copyright. >Luanti is a voxel game-creation platform where anyone can make, share, discover, and play blocky games.
- em-bee 1mo ago
  (edit: oh, sorry, i thought you were doubting the quoted text, but you were actually using it as evidence to support your argument. my bad. if you delete your reply, maybe i can delete this comment too) my old comment for reference: you doubt what? the claim they are filing is that luanti violates the copyright. that's the point of filing a DMCA notice. that means they are alleging that luanti infringes minecraft’s copyright. what else could it be?
  - duskdozer 1mo ago
    I see the quotes are misleading. I doubt the parent's suggestion and was providing the article quotes as justification. I've edited it now.
- danaris 1mo ago
  Yeah; notice that "on behalf of": Microsoft isn't even the one filing this, they've outsourced their enforcement and may not even have known about this before it blew up.
  - shiandow 1mo ago
    I'd imagine Microsoft gave them pretty clear instructions to not let them know officially when they're bullying other companies on Microsoft's behalf.
  - veeti 1mo ago
    Here's another arm using Luanti as a test bed: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.03482v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.03482v1
Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
Most pirated game assets or code is usually naive contamination from market place re-sellers that don't have a legal right to the kit-bashing content. Very common to find pitch shifted audio getting resold on Unity store or web, images/3D with intact watermarks/meta-data, and scraped shader code. If you are credulous enough to buy files from a shady online seller, the copyright/trademark liability almost always falls on the person that publishes the IP. You can do everything above board, and still get sued as other license holders may register the asset signature with anti-piracy/YT bots. For example, you could buy BBC/NBC/Sony libraries off ebay/web for a few bucks, but they will 100% still sue you into bankruptcy if you ever publish content with their media IP. "AI" vector search can produce similar results of existing scraped works, and almost every LLM knows Disney Mickey Mouse. How LLM are trained means isomorphic plagiarism will occur regardless of data granularity. Just like how mp3 were a lousy highly compressed version of CD audio, the output does not have to be a verbatim copy to trip copyright and trademark IP laws. Isomorphic plagiarism becomes less obfuscated when compiled into standard executable code. However, some firms actually used human session chat admins for data labeling/edits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1iLPxwgV4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1iLPxwgV4E People may still lose even if they are right. If you resell something you didn't actually make yourself or purchased royalty free perpetual rights from the authorized holder, than the liability still falls on you when content rights change. This is why fun indie games sometimes disappear. Some may not like these rules, but most play by them to survive as a business. =3
WarmWash 1mo ago
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 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.
- maybewhenthesun 1mo ago
  Meh. Luanti is nearly as old as minecraft itself. You could say just as well that they copied the style of infiniminer. 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.
  - RunSet 1mo ago
    https://web.archive.org/web/20060117081147/http://www.blockland.us/index.asp?p=media https://web.archive.org/web/20060117081147/http://www.blockl...
- Intermernet 1mo ago
  Minecraft looks very similar to original Wolfenstien or Ultima Online. Probably a bunch of earlier games that used blocks of simple textures. It's not an original art style, and it's not gonna stand up in any fair court. Notch never claimed that he invented the graphical style of Minecraft. He deliberately used low complexity graphics for ease-of-use and the ability to create large, performant maps.
  - account42 1mo ago
    Art style has never been copyrightable in the first place and games copy it all the time.
- nvme0n1p1 1mo ago
  Um, why? Because they both have blocks? Is Microsoft the only company allowed to use cubes now? Even if they were similar, artistic style is not protected under copyright.

puskavi 1mo ago

It probably just looks at pictures

clort 1mo ago

Could be, but unfortunately (3) can generate the code but it is not copyrightable (Thaler v. Perlmutter)

sidewndr46 1mo ago
No, that isn't what that case ruled at all. It ruled that the program generating the code cannot be the author.
- em-bee 1mo ago
  interesting interpretation. most other articles on the topic have a different interpretation. if the AI can not be the author, then who can? is writing the prompt enough to establish being the creator? i think we need a few more cases to get an answer to that.
  - Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
    A company does NOT have rights to copy/mimic other works without legal license outside fair use like satire. https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-selfie-that-predicted-the-ai-age https://www.bbc.co.uk/future/article/20260414-the-monkey-sel... The owner of the Camera in this case lost copyright ownership claim, as did the rights-group representing the monkey. =3
  - codedokode 1mo ago
    Clicking a button is enough to become an "author" of the photo, and writing a prompt requires more skill.
    - atakan_gurkan 1mo ago
      Obviously, taking a photo requires much more than clicking a button. Even if you simply pointed and shot, the timing can be special. Copyright requires some creativity, if the creation process is completely mechanical you may not be able to copyright the end result.

astrobe_ 1mo ago

It's very unlikely. The DMCA notification is from Microsoft, who owns Minecraft. The sequence of events is: 1) US votes a law that is hilariously favourable to copyright holders 2) Copyright holders abuse it for a while with non-AI bots 3) Copyright holders abuse it with AI-bots 4) Copyright holders will continue to abuse it until the law is amended.

SXX 1mo ago
Fun part is that US legislative branch did not have much say in creation of DMCA. US executive branch back then was just lobbied by major copyright holders and they literally bypassed much of legislation process around congress by creating and signing international agreements instead. By the time DMCA landed in congress there was very little that could be changed because US already had to honour intetnational agreements it's already created and signed. Louis Rossman have a video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-j89LJysY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0-j89LJysY
- gpderetta 1mo ago
  Didn't the international agreements require ratification from legislative?
  - SXX 1mo ago
    Yes, but as told by DMCA creator quoted in video congress cant amend them much unlike any other law. Congress could obviously not pass ratificarion, but you know how its usually going.
- account42 1mo ago
  Yes, treaties are effectively a backdoor around the already imbalanced democratic process.
zdragnar 1mo ago
Except, of course, Luanti holds copyright over their own assets and app. Copyright is not something you get when you file paperwork with the government, it is automatic for creative works. DMCA is punitive to platforms who do not correctly adjudicate the law and self enforce, which is why they err on the side of the claimant rather than the accused (or the side more likely to defend their copyright in court). So, the law doesn't really favor copyright holders, it favors extremely conservative and risk averse behavior from large platforms, regardless of who would actually win a dispute over copyright.

duskdozer 1mo ago

Doubt it. Microsoft probably just sees "voxel game" and files the claim, because they don't lose anything if it fails. From the article: >Luanti’s Android app is currently not available on the due to a baseless DMCA notice filed on behalf of Microsoft by Tracer.AI, alleging that Luanti infringes Minecraft’s copyright. >Luanti is a voxel game-creation platform where anyone can make, share, discover, and play blocky games.

em-bee 1mo ago
(edit: oh, sorry, i thought you were doubting the quoted text, but you were actually using it as evidence to support your argument. my bad. if you delete your reply, maybe i can delete this comment too) my old comment for reference: you doubt what? the claim they are filing is that luanti violates the copyright. that's the point of filing a DMCA notice. that means they are alleging that luanti infringes minecraft’s copyright. what else could it be?
- duskdozer 1mo ago
  I see the quotes are misleading. I doubt the parent's suggestion and was providing the article quotes as justification. I've edited it now.
danaris 1mo ago
Yeah; notice that "on behalf of": Microsoft isn't even the one filing this, they've outsourced their enforcement and may not even have known about this before it blew up.
- shiandow 1mo ago
  I'd imagine Microsoft gave them pretty clear instructions to not let them know officially when they're bullying other companies on Microsoft's behalf.
- veeti 1mo ago
  Here's another arm using Luanti as a test bed: https://arxiv.org/html/2603.03482v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2603.03482v1

Joel_Mckay 1mo ago

Most pirated game assets or code is usually naive contamination from market place re-sellers that don't have a legal right to the kit-bashing content. Very common to find pitch shifted audio getting resold on Unity store or web, images/3D with intact watermarks/meta-data, and scraped shader code. If you are credulous enough to buy files from a shady online seller, the copyright/trademark liability almost always falls on the person that publishes the IP. You can do everything above board, and still get sued as other license holders may register the asset signature with anti-piracy/YT bots. For example, you could buy BBC/NBC/Sony libraries off ebay/web for a few bucks, but they will 100% still sue you into bankruptcy if you ever publish content with their media IP. "AI" vector search can produce similar results of existing scraped works, and almost every LLM knows Disney Mickey Mouse. How LLM are trained means isomorphic plagiarism will occur regardless of data granularity. Just like how mp3 were a lousy highly compressed version of CD audio, the output does not have to be a verbatim copy to trip copyright and trademark IP laws. Isomorphic plagiarism becomes less obfuscated when compiled into standard executable code. However, some firms actually used human session chat admins for data labeling/edits. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1iLPxwgV4E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1iLPxwgV4E People may still lose even if they are right. If you resell something you didn't actually make yourself or purchased royalty free perpetual rights from the authorized holder, than the liability still falls on you when content rights change. This is why fun indie games sometimes disappear. Some may not like these rules, but most play by them to survive as a business. =3

WarmWash 1mo ago

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 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.

maybewhenthesun 1mo ago
Meh. Luanti is nearly as old as minecraft itself. You could say just as well that they copied the style of infiniminer. 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.
- RunSet 1mo ago
  https://web.archive.org/web/20060117081147/http://www.blockland.us/index.asp?p=media https://web.archive.org/web/20060117081147/http://www.blockl...
Intermernet 1mo ago
Minecraft looks very similar to original Wolfenstien or Ultima Online. Probably a bunch of earlier games that used blocks of simple textures. It's not an original art style, and it's not gonna stand up in any fair court. Notch never claimed that he invented the graphical style of Minecraft. He deliberately used low complexity graphics for ease-of-use and the ability to create large, performant maps.
- account42 1mo ago
  Art style has never been copyrightable in the first place and games copy it all the time.
nvme0n1p1 1mo ago
Um, why? Because they both have blocks? Is Microsoft the only company allowed to use cubes now? Even if they were similar, artistic style is not protected under copyright.