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Well, Microsoft's legal team obviously came to the conclusion that the emails and payment were at least sufficient to grant Mojang a license to the artist's work. So there's that. They could have been wrong, sure. But absent further legal judgement, I'm willing to side with the decision reached by the team of lawyers over random Internet commenters.

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> Microsoft's legal team obviously came to the conclusion that the emails and payment were at least sufficient to grant Mojang a license to the artist's work

Who knows. They might have thought that litigation costs would be small enough, or it might have slipped through the cracks. We don’t know what Carl told them.

Not necessarily. They might have concluded that the potential liability from non-ownership was insignificant compared to the upside. Even when courts find against corporations who have massively screwed artists the compensation tends to be modest, and this case isn't clear cut.

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