Putt-Putt Fails To Comprehend User-Generated Content, Sends C&D To Mojang Over Mini Golf Games Recreated With Minecraft

from the those-protecting-the-brand-seem-least-capable-of-the-position dept

I suppose kids staying indoors playing their video games and zoning out to a steady stream of YouTube videos and social media streams has had a slightly deleterious effect on mini-golf giant Putt-Putt's fortunes. That theoretical downturn might explain the cease-and-desist letter sent to Mojang, the company behind Minecraft, threatening to sue the developer if tons of user-generated content doesn't just up and vanish from the web.

Putt-Putt, the entity behind the chain of miniature golf courses so prevalent that its name has practically become synonymous with the hobby, is threatening to sue Minecraft developer Mojang over user-generated levels that allegedly infringe upon the "Putt-Putt" name.

Minecraft creator Markus "Notch" Persson released the cease-and-desist letter on Twitter along with the musing, "Putt-Putt being silly."

"It has recently come to our attention that Mojang AB has been using, without authorization our famous Putt-Putt trademarks in connection with your business," said the letter. "We feel that Mojang AB's use of of the Putt-Putt name has benefited Mojang AB to the detriment of Putt-Putt."

Putt Putt offered the following screenshot as "proof" of Mojang's wrongdoing.


The President and CEO of Putt Putt, David Callahan, threatens to "refer this matter to our legal counsel" and "seek damages of a reasonable royalty for Mojang AB's past infringing use." Hopefully, Putt Putt's legal counsel will save Callahan a bit of money by explaining user-generated content to him. Mojang didn't create the Putt Putt "knockoffs," nor, in a majority of these cases, does it even host the servers where the content is contained. (Mojang only began offering hosting in May of 2013.)

Putt-Putt's move makes no sense, as Alex Chapman, a lawyer contacted by Eurogamer points out:

"Mojang doesn't control what users build and Mojang doesn't control the content of the videos users make. Suing Mojang for what people do using Minecraft is like suing Microsoft for what people do using Word."

If Putt-Putt seriously wants to make this content vanish (and protect the brand), it will have to go after individual users, something not known for its cost-effectiveness or PR value. Sony spent some time killing off "infringing" user generated content crafted by fans of the M-rated E-rated LittleBigPlanet series, but it failed to net the beleaguered company much more than additional scorn to throw on top of the pile of scorn it had already amassed due to previous assaults on its customers.

Mojang isn't complying with this C&D simply because there's nothing for it to comply with. The deadline was July 10th, so hopefully we won't have to wait too long to see if Putt-Putt managed to find counsel willing to pursue Callahan's folly.

Filed Under: minecraft, minigolf, notch, putt putt, trademark, user generated content
Companies: mojang, putt putt

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

from the reddit:-making-the-impossibly-cool-seem-almost-commonplace dept

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.

Filed Under: brokep, markus persson, minecraft, notch, peter sunde
Companies: mojang, the pirate bay

Mark Cuban Funds EFF's New 'Mark Cuban Chair To Eliminate Stupid Patents'

from the go-julie dept

Some fantastic news from EFFland, where Mark Cuban and Markus 'Notch' Persson have agreed to give EFF $250,000 each in order to fund its latest efforts to stop bad patents. This includes naming EFF attorney Julie Samuels "The Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents." This is a job title that only a few people deserve and, knowing Julie, she's one of them. Over the years, EFF has done some really great work on patents, but they've often seemed like a backburner issue compared to other things -- so we're excited to see what comes next.

Filed Under: julie samuels, notch, patent trolls. mark cuban, patents

Friendly Pirate Challenges Minecraft Creator To Quake 3 Battle

from the what-goes-around-comes-around dept

Minecraft developer Markus Persson, better known as notch, made headlines last year when he proposed to settle a trademark dispute with Bethesda with a Quake 3 match. Now, in yet another example of how being open, human and awesome is the best response to "problems" like piracy, Ashley Sheridan points us to two recent tweets on notch's feed:

Notch is well known for not worrying too much about piracy or believing in "lost sales", and the staggering success of Minecraft speaks for the wisdom of that attitude. It also goes to show that, despite what critics claim, accepting the reality of piracy doesn't mean letting any and all activity run rampant. When you threaten people, or send lawyers after them, they might get scared but they will definitely get defensive (and not like you very much). But by reaching out to the guy, notch had a friendly exchange and the pirate site came down (plus what I assume will be an epic Quake battle on q3dm17, which I gather from Google is some sort of badass space platform map). Are there other pirates who would have ignored notch or set up shop elsewhere? Probably—but they will always find a way to do what they do. Indeed, some people will always be jerks/idiots/dumb kids too, as some of the reactions to the disappearance of the site showed—which notch recognizes, so he took it in stride:

It sucks that some people are like that, but attacking them sure isn't going to change them. It's a waste of time, and can cause people to threaten and drive away pirates like the one with whom notch reached a friendly resolution.

Filed Under: markus persson, minecraft, notch, quake 3

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

from the ah,-if-only-all-legal-disputes-were-handled-this-way dept

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?

Filed Under: elder scrolls, markus persson, minecraft, notch, quake, scrolls, trademark
Companies: bethesda, mojang

What Happens When A Reasonable Developer Runs Into Aggressive Trademark Lawyers?

from the scrolls! dept

A whole bunch of you have been sending in Markus Persson's blog post about the the legal threat from game developer Bethesda over his attempt to name his new game, Scroll. We've written about Markus, better known as notch, a few times. He's the eminently reasonable and quite successful developer of the game Minecraft.

What struck me about Notch's blog post wasn't yet another story of lawyers overreacting via intellectual property law, but Markus' continued reasonableness involving pretty much all things intellectual property related. Forgive me for quoting much of the blog post, but there are so many good examples of him acting reasonably. Let's start at the top:

First of all, I love Bethesda. I assume this nonsense is partly just their lawyers being lawyers, and a result of trademark law being the way it is.

He's being threatened with a lawsuit, and talking about how much he loves the company that's threatening him, and even giving them excuses for why they're threatening him. Okay, in this case, maybe he's being a little too reasonable.

Next up, he explains why they even bothered to try to get trademarks in the first place:

About half a year ago, our lawyers recommended us to register “Minecraft” as a trademark, so we did. I had voted against it initially, but we did it anyway. Better safe than sorry, and all that. At the same time, we also applied for “Scrolls”, the new game we’re working on. We knew of no similarly named games, and we had even googled it to make sure. I’m not even sure if you CAN trademark individual words, like “Scrolls”, but we sent in the application anyway.

I can definitely respect this position. While some countries (the US in particular) do allow for common law trademarks based on usage (meaning you never really have to apply for a trademark if you don't want to), some countries do have first to file rules, and that can make things messy. I'm not convinced that it always makes sense to file, but it certainly can be a "better safe than sorry" kind of situation. I also like the fact that he even admits that he's not sure trademarking a word like "Scrolls" is possible (though, the answer is that it is, with certain clear limitations).

(Disclosure: We’ve enforced the trademark for Minecraft once, when there was a minecraft clone on iOS, using our name. People were emailing me saying our iOS version was buggy and bad, so we asked them to change the name of their game, and they did.)

This is actually my favorite part of the post. This is how trademark law should work. When you have a specific case where there's a very high likelihood of confusion -- thus potentially harming the consumer -- it can be useful. And even then, he was careful not to go legal at all, but to just reach out and ask them to change the name... which they did. Everyone's happy, move on.

A while later, out of the blue, we got contacted by Bethesda’s lawyers. They wanted to know more about the “Scrolls” trademark we were applying for, and claimed it conflicted with their existing trademark “The Elder Scrolls”. I agree that the word “Scrolls” is part of that trademark, but as a gamer, I have never ever considered that series of (very good) role playing games to be about scrolls in any way, nor was that ever the focal point of neither their marketing nor the public image.

The implication that you could own the right to all individual words within a trademark is also a bit scary. We looked things up and realized they didn’t have much of a case, but we still took it seriously. Nothing about Scrolls is meant to in any way derive from or allude to their games. We suggested a compromise where we’d agree to never put any words in front of “Scrolls”, and instead call sequels and other things something along the lines of “Scrolls - The Banana Expansion”. I’m not sure if they ever got back to us with a reply to this.

When contacted by another company, even when he thinks their case is weak, he responds amiably, and tries to figure out a reasonable compromise that will make them happy.

Today, I got a 15 page letter from some Swedish lawyer firm, saying they demand us to stop using the name Scrolls, that they will sue us (and have already paid the fee to the Swedish court), and that they demand a pile of money up front before the legal process has even started.

I assume this is all some more or less automated response to us applying for the trademark. I sincerely hope Bethesda isn’t pulling a Tim Langdell.

And... blech. A perfect example of bad trademark bullying in response from Bethesda. While notch implies early on that this may just be a result of trademark law, he's being generous. While trademark law often does require proactive protection of the mark, that's often misinterpreted to mean you must sue anyone who does anything remotely similar. In reality, you just have to protect the mark from becoming generic. There's little evidence here that the use by notch in any way harms Bethesda. Hopefully notch is correct and Bethesda quickly comes to its senses and apologizes for going full-on trademark bully after he's been entirely reasonable all along.

Filed Under: markus persson, minecraft, notch, scrolls, trademark
Companies: bethesda

Minecraft Creator Says 'No Such Thing As A Lost Sale'

from the give-people-a-reason-to-buy dept

Last year we wrote about how Minecraft developer Notch (Markus Persson) had been quite vocal in saying that worrying about piracy was a waste of time, and it was much more important to focus on giving people a reason to buy. And has he ever. The game keeps selling like crazy, and we detailed how he was raking in a ton of money, despite not caring if people were using his software for free.

In a short presentation at the Independent Games Summit he elaborated on those positions and again told people to stop worrying about "piracy" and focus on giving people reasons to buy. He dismissed the standard party line on these issues:

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?

The "lost sale" point is one we've raised a bunch in the past, but people have a lot of trouble grasping it. There is no such thing as a lost sale, because a lost sale just means a failure to get people to buy. And that's a marketing issue, not a legal one. If a "lost sale" is illegal, then anyone who gives you a coupon to buy their product instead of a competitors is "causing a lost sale." But that's ridiculous. And that's the point Notch is making. There are all sorts of reasons people might not buy from you -- and most of them may be your fault. So it's your job to convince people to pay for something -- which he's clearly done. As he notes:

If you just make your game and keep adding to it, the people who copyright infringed would buy it the next week.

Another report of the talk showed he expanded on the "copying isn't theft" concept:

A lot of big companies try to make piracy like theft; I wouldn't steal a car, but I would 'steal' a good design. If I liked another person's apartment, I would try to make mine look like someone else's... but that's not stealing.

And, of course, he's still making money like crazy. While it doesn't look like he posts historical data any more, he does show a running tally of the past 24 hours, and as of me writing this, he's sold 10,348 copies in the past 24 hours (out of 36,612 registered). At 15 euros a pop, that's over 150,000 euros in the last day -- for a small indie game. And these numbers have been going on for months. It's not even a situation where there was a big boom and then sales dropped off. It appears that the game just keeps on selling.

But it's impossible to make money because of "piracy" right?

Filed Under: lost sales, markus persson, minecraft, notch, piracy, reasons to buy