Time Nick Message 03:02 MTDiscord Minecraft's end story is now in the public domain. Mineclone could use it if the devs so wanted:https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2022/12/minecrafts-ending-is-now-free-for-anyone-to-use 03:02 MTDiscord Microsoft didn't own it, and its author just released it to the public domain 03:04 MTDiscord To clairfy, it is under the CC0 license: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/End_Poem 03:05 MTDiscord not surprising, minecraft doesnt own some of its original sounds, or music, the sounds being under cc licenses 07:51 MinetestBot Yad: Dec-04 12:34 UTC it can obviously only operate on loaded mapblocks 07:53 Yad sfan5: Yes, I suppose I misspoke, are some mapblocks considered not loaded, even though I can see them? 08:35 MTDiscord I documented as many as I could 08:35 MTDiscord Xnotch and c418 have public download lists on freesound.org 08:53 sfan5 Yad: mapblocks may be loaded without any client being able to see them yes 14:00 Yad sfan5: Thank you but I meant the opposite...when I *can* see a mapblock from having walked there previously during the current session, but am now standing more than n meters away. 14:01 Yad sfan5: There seems to be some radius beyond which I cannot search metadata? 16:03 MTDiscord Turns out this is actually wrong. While the guy never got a signed contract for it, he DID receive payment for it, which automatically makes it a Work For Hire and thus owned by the payor. In this case a contract would have been needed to prevent ownership from transferring to Microsoft... 16:05 muurkha no, receiving payment for a copyrighted work does not automatically make it a work for hire under US law 16:06 muurkha (outside the US there is no such thing as "work for hire") 16:07 muurkha normally a work for hire is "a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment", and both halves of this test are frequently disputed in copyright litigation 16:08 MTDiscord If you created the work, and then later somebody offered to buy it, then it's not a work for hire. If the work was created because of the offer, then it is. 16:08 muurkha no, that is not correct 16:08 MTDiscord "Frequently disputed" is not sufficient to grant us permission to use a thing. Unless you think you've got the money to cover that dispute. 16:09 muurkha accepting money from someone (again, under US law) is very far from making you their employee. employment is a complex relationship with many factors 16:09 muurkha money is just one of them 16:19 sfan5 Yad: a mapblock may also be cached on the client while not being loaded on the server 16:19 MTDiscord Accepting money from someone (again, under US law) is also very far from making you NOT their employee. Employment is a complex relationship with many factors, very much like a copyright lawsuit. I wish you luck with your trial, assuming you don't take their settlement offer. 16:20 Yad sfan5: Thanks for clarifying. :) 16:21 muurkha no, being NOT their employee is the default 16:23 MTDiscord I'm not the one you need to convince. You'll have to wait until after jury selection to find out who. 16:23 MTDiscord You're entirely missing the point here. MisterE posted a thing that looks like it asserts that the end poem is CC0. It is not: its state right now is uncertain. Wait for the dust to settle before you start relying on that license. 16:33 muurkha I'm not involved in the dispute; I was just correcting your unintentionally incorrect statements about US copyright and employment law. I'll add one more: a person who owns a copyright can certainly license it under CC0 (or, more debatably, abandon it to the public domain) even if someone else disputes their ownership of the copyright. But you are certainly right that anyone who relies on that license 16:33 muurkha may be harmed if the disputant is successful. 16:34 muurkha From the little I've gathered of the facts of the case, though, an actual lawsuit is very unlikely in this case, much less a jury trial. 16:39 MTDiscord Actual lawsuits would be ideal, because even a settlement has a chance of actually clarifying things. Unfortunately, a popular strategy for potential litigants with a lot of resources is to leave thing unclear and just chill them indefinitely. It's basically the same thing that happened with cryptography export laws: it's "obviously" unconstitutional, but it remained on the books despite a determined challenge, because the case was 16:39 MTDiscord dismissed without prejudice, and then they played a shell game with the law itself. 16:40 MTDiscord Likely the best evidence we'd get that allows us to use that end poem would be something like the evidence from the original creator being publicized, microsoft having no rebuttal, and then waiting for armchair analysis from lawyers to be published. But it may take some time to ensure that there's no further evidence. 16:40 MTDiscord So, I'd still wait on it. 16:42 muurkha It sounds like we agree. 16:42 MTDiscord It's very unlikely that you'd get anything worse than maybe a C&D, but even those can just be more trouble and worry than they're worth. The fact that the C&D is not necessarily on unassailable legal ground itself wouldn't make you feel any better about it. 😅 16:43 muurkha Well, *I'm* unlikely to get anything at all, due to my total lack of involvement in the potentially alleged copyright infringement 16:43 MTDiscord allegedly potentially alleged 😆 16:43 muurkha heh 23:13 runs hiz