The developers of the free game engine Luanti, which allows you to create Minecraft-style games, announced that they have removed the project’s mobile application from the Google Play catalog after receiving a complaint about copyright infringement related to the Minecraft game. The blocking was carried out on the basis of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in force in the United States.
The complaint was sent on behalf of Microsoft by Tracer.AI, a company that specializes in using AI to automatically find violations and send content removal requests. Luanti developers insist that the accusation of copyright infringement is untrue and the removal was unreasonable due to an unverified manual false positive by Tracer.AI’s AI system. The submitted complaint does not contain evidence of violation and includes only vague general language claiming that the application included assets copied from the original Minecraft game. Exactly which components of Luanti violate copyright are not indicated, only the general fact of registration of rights to the Minecraft Java Edition 1.9 product with the US Copyright Office is mentioned.
Luanti developers filed an appeal, but the last time the application was restored on Google Play after a false complaint, it took 46 days instead 10-14 days as defined in the DMCA law. The appeal states that the Luanti app does not contain proprietary code or assets from Minecraft or other games. The package includes only the engine, tools for content creation and simple examples of textures of our own design (an example of a finished game is not included in the delivery from 2023). The very concept of using voxels cannot be Microsoft’s intellectual property, since elements of the use of textured 3D cubes to form the surrounding space were used in games before the advent of Minecraft, for example, in the game Infiniminer.
Similar incidents with erroneous deletion upon request of Tracer.AI have already been recorded in the past. For example, in February, a false complaint from Tracer.AI from the Steam catalog was