Unomelon, the developer of Minecraft-inspired sandbox game Allumeria, says a DMCA from Microsoft, evidently related to Minecraft, got the game removed from Steam.
“The Allumeria Steam page is currently down because Microsoft has filed a false DMCA claim on it,” Unomelon said on Bluesky on Tuesday. “They sent an email earlier today claiming that this screenshot infringes on their copyright. I am taking a moment to figure out what my path is going forward, will update soon.”
The screenshot in question (above) is a simple wide shot of a forest filled with birch trees, what look to be oak trees with green and autumnal leaves, and a few pumpkins and weeds checkering the grassy dirt. There are definitely some similarities to Minecraft; if you told me this was a screenshot of a Minecraft mod, I’d probably believe you, but that’s true of many voxel-based games, including Hytale.
It does not matter that this is a Minecraft clone, there are hundreds of them and mojang has always been fine with them.
Minecraft itself is inspired and started as a clone of infiniminer.
The general rule has always been “as long as it does not use assets or code made by mojang” its fine and they wont care or sue.
Unless this tree is using a stolen texture from the game there is nothing that makes this more illegal then the thousands of cloned already out there.
Of course a doubt microsoft would respect such, they shown their hands when they presumed ownership over the now open sourced end poem.
They have an AI tool that scrapes everything on the Internet until it finds copyright violations. The entire and only job of humans in this process is to press the big “C&D” button, so the barrier is just much too low, allowing for stuff like this to happen accidentally.