FOSS gamedev and creative worlds

Once I was talking to a friend who plays Minecraft. I told him that I play Minetest. He tried to convince me to stop playing this game because that he thinks that Minetest players will be "sued" for because Minecraft is copyrighted. Personally, I have no concerns about what he thinks, but just to make sure, what do you think?

No way can they sue you. The concept of a block-style game is completely un-copyrighted and there is no real reason to sue you. They could only sue you if you directly copied thir code, etc. Again, the idea of a block based game is no way copyrighted. If they were going to sue you, they would end up having to sue literally 10s of thousands of people for playing games similar to Minecraft. There is no way you are going to be sued at all.

Oh no! We have a healthbar, and EA has copyright of healthbars because of Battlefield 1942!

But so many games have healthbars already there is no way they can do anything about it.

PilzAdam wrote:Oh no! We have a healthbar, and EA has copyright of healthbars because of Battlefield 1942!

Oh no! Minetest runs in a window and Apple has copyright of windows!

Ah, but if they have copyright of windows why aren't they successfully doing anything about the Windows os? :)

PilzAdam wrote:Oh no! Minetest runs in a window and Apple has copyright of windows!

Oh no! We are in a forum but the Romans have copyright of forums because they build them first!

lol

But the Romans, to our knowledge, didn't copyright the idea of forums as pulses of electrical charge stored on big complicated boxes of elements (server computers) viewable and easily interpretable by humans from another box-o'-elements somewhere possibly on the other side of a spherical world.

PilzAdam wrote:Oh no! We are in a forum but the Romans have copyright of forums because they build them first!

Dan Duncombe wrote:But the Romans, to our knowledge, didn't copyright the idea of forums as pulses of electrical charge stored on big complicated boxes of elements (server computers) viewable and easily interpretable by humans from another box-o'-elements somewhere possibly on the other side of a spherical world.

Of course they didnt copyright that because the world was flat when they lived.

Yeah. About 15 years after the last Roman died out Chuck Norris made the world spherical for a laugh. It still took ages for people to notice it was round, not flat anymore.

Let's put copyright on breathing air.

Copyright didn't exist in Rome.

I know everyone else is joking, but I want to be serious, just to be clear: you can't copyright ideas. I don't know why people would be so ignorant of copyright law, yet think that they know so much. Only specific works can be copyrighted. The patent system is what deals with ideas, and frankly, software idea patents are a bullshit policy that needs to be abolished in places where they are allowed.

If ideas were restricted by copyright, every program and video game would immediately be in violation of several copyrights. Actually, we already have this problem with the patent system in the U.S. despite the fact that patents need to be explicitly registered and authorized by the government. Any given program is likely infringing several, perhaps hundreds of software idea patents. All we software developers can do is turn a blind eye to software idea patents and hope we don't get sued.

Take Super Mario Bros, for example. It had multiple lives and a score; first use: classic Pinball. It had platforming; first use: Space Panic. It had levels larger than one screen; first use in a platformer: Pitfall. It had a scrolling screen; first use in a platformer: Jump Bug. In fact, the only new ideas Super Mario Bros adds that I can think of are jumping on enemies and bumping blocks from below, and that's probably just because I don't know any examples. If old ideas couldn't be used, Super Mario Bros wouldn't have been possible.

Tell your friend that he should stop playing Minecraft because Minecraft players will be sued by Infiniminer developers.

kaeza wrote:Tell your friend that he should stop playing Minecraft because Minecraft players will be sued by Infiniminer developers.

or 3D Construction Kit developers which was made in 1991 ~20 years before MC was even a thought

shadowwraith wrote:

kaeza wrote:Tell your friend that he should stop playing Minecraft because Minecraft players will be sued by Infiniminer developers.

or 3D Construction Kit developers which was made in 1991 ~20 years before MC was even a thought

Domark for the win? Wow, you are probing the dark recesses of my mine... mind.

Hell the concept of building 3d worlds with friends online is nothing new - was doing it back in '95 on Activeworlds. The only difference was 56K and flat objects.