riot bought hytale but then sold it, it's no longer theirs

this is almost certainly an ai tool run amok, not a deliberate attempt to stomp on the little guy.

I have no doubt that in law and the wealth of microsoft to argue in court that could indeed do that.

But my point is that there was an established public agreement with mojang. It could be raised as a legal defence that you where given permission pre-microsoft.

And also that this law is dumb as fuck.

Here is a screenshot of infiniminer (2009)

You could show that to people and they would say it looks like minecraft,

If infiniminer has sued during the minecraft browser version days it would never even have gotten the chance to become what it is now.

The stripped log and the wood are fine, but the regular birch log is almost impossible to use in builds. It just looks bad in almost any context.

Burn them to the ground to expose the hyper-green grass blocks below! (/s... maybe)

The stripped log and the wood are fine, but the regular birch log is almost impossible to use in builds. It just looks bad in almost any context.

Huh. I just looked it up and apparently birch was added just about a year before I started playing. Crazy how we assume everything that was in there when we started has "been there forever."

Sure you can. People richer than us will just make less profit.

Why "can't you"? Why would academic research be impossible?

Of course. I was just bringing it up as a supporting argument to why the DMCA isn't specifically about that image or the trees on it.

But yeah, gameplay isn't protected by copyright, so that argument from microsoft is just bogus.

The gameplay being too similar is a bogus argument Microsoft's AI probably snuck in there. I mentioned it to support my point that the DMCA complaint isn't about the birch trees specifically, but that's definitely not an argument that would have worked out legally for Microsoft.

Patents could work out, like for Nintendo in the Palworld case. But DMCA is a copyright dispute, patent law doesn't apply here. And who knows if they even have any relevant patents to accuse this game of violating.

(1m size blocks are required by the gameplay)

They aren't? There's nothing that requires a voxel to represent a 1m cube. They could be 0.5m cubes, or even something exotic like spheres with a calculated surface stretching over them to smooth out the result. 1m cubes are just convenient and popularized by Minecraft.

IANAL, and this is oversimplifying. Copyright protects the creative elements of a game, including the specific way that a game is coded (so you cannot decompile a game, modify all the art assets, change the code a little, and then sell it), and possibly aspects of the gameplay required to give it a specific "feel".

If you want a solid legal defense for cloning, you could have one team that describes the original game in a way that removes the creative elements, and a second team that works from that description to make a new work. This works for other works, too; I can write my own "book about an orphan that learns he has magical powers, goes to a school to learn to use those, and ultimately battles and defeats the powerful dark wizard that killed his parents", but can't sit down following the story elements of Harry Potter for my new Barry Cotter book series.

Ultimately the line is what you can convince a judge and/or jury is "different enough".