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Comment by rpdillon | Hacker News Reader

You're confusing copyright with patents, and you cannot patent a game design. Well, you couldn't. I'm not sure about these days. In any case, this isn't a patent claim. It's a copyright claim, and copyright protects expression, not the idea.

That'll all become glaringly obvious when this is reinstated, because the copyright claim is bogus.

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The design or gameplay isn't the issue, the aesthetic is clearly Minecraft.

You can't take Minecraft assets, mix the pixels around a little bit, and then be legally free and clear. If the public looks at pictures of your game, and they say "100% it's Minecraft", you're gonna have a bad time.

I'll be honest, you sound like someone's grandma who calls every game console a "Nintendo" and every game character "Mario". So what if the general public can't tell the difference between Samus and Mario? That doesn't mean we ban Metroid.

They're the same genre, but obviously not the same game. Is only one voxel sandbox game allowed to exist in the world? What's next, only one platformer can exist? Only one action movie is allowed to exist? Only one power metal band in the world?

Again, aesthetic is not copyrightable.

What are you talking about? There are no Minecraft assets in that screenshot, even with "pixels mixed around". I play both games and can tell you that screenshot is easily distinguished from Minecraft.

A jury deciding the case would exclude people who play the games or play them heavily.

IP protection is about reasonable confusion in the public. Not experts in field getting confused.

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