The writer of the poem, or short story, when you beat the ender dragon in Minecraft, never signed the contract releasing his copyright on it. That means Microsoft doesn't actually own the ending to Minecraft.
Microsoft probably doesn’t own the ending to Minecraft, since my non-lawyer understanding is that assignment must be done a particular way unless it is done in very specific terms as a ‘work for hire.’
However, his acceptance of the money, things written in his emails, the poem itself or other behaviors, could possibly form a case that he implicitly assigned a transferable non-exclusive license to Mojang for it to be used in MC.
(not a lawyer caveat applies)
(It looks like Irish law requires a written agreement for any non-exclusive license, but Swedish law looks a bit vague and it’s possible to assign ownership via implicit license.)
In some countries, commissioned work belongs to the buyer by default, even without an explicit agreement for payment and even if the buyer never pays anything. This can be a nasty surprise. Probably not applicable to him but with all those other factors, I hope he checked with a lawyer before declaring that he owns it!
The author acknowledges that he gave implicit permission to Notch/Mojang, and goes so far as to mention that the permission only extended to the original PC version of the game (which is all that existed at the time).
> I was stunned, I didn’t understand what was happening, and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was. The friendship is more important than the money.
I don’t think we know exactly how this offer was worded and, therefore, what the 10k euros bought.
> he implicitly assigned a transferable non-exclusive license to Mojang
This is almost correct. If this was decided in the US, his discussions and acceptance of payment gave Mojang a non-transferable license. During the sale to Microsoft, he was a stakeholder. Microsoft failed to acquire a license, which was why they were trying to force him to sign a contract with terms - of perpetual transfer - that he did not agree to. Mojang needed that signed otherwise Microsoft needed to negotiate a license or purchase from him directly. Microsoft did not do this so they don't own it nor did they have the right to distribute his work until he public-domained it. They are still guilty of infringements up to the date he public domained it, but he seems to have released he right to pursue this as part of this essay.
To what extent it matters: I happen to have be quite familiar with Swedish copyright (apart from more recent changes made after the events in the article).
> but Swedish law looks a bit vague and it’s possible to assign ownership via implicit license.
It's quite clear on this part - economic rights and right to use can be assigned to others no problem like most places but creative ownership can never be renounced, explicitly or implicitly. Details below for the curious.
Copyright is divided into economic rights and moral rights/droit moral (ideell upphovsrätt).
For the most part, moral rights can not be transferred - any contract claiming to do is void. Part of moral rights is the right to attribution - this can be signed away, but only "under kind and art limited use of the work" (that is, a poem could have been explicitly signed away for e.g. use as ending in a PC game title, but I have a hard time seeing the verbiage by Carl at the time of the acquisition being valid). Also, even if there is a contract full permission of use and reassigning all economic rights, unless explicitly noted the creator would still have an enforceable perpetual right to attribution.
More interesting is the "right to respect". It gives the right of the creator to object to changes to the work, or publication in a context, which damages the artistic reputation of the creator, which according to the explanatory memorandum means "violation of the author's personality, as expressed in the work".[1]
The author may sign an agreement promising the purchaser of a work to not execute their rights towards them (like Carl's rejected contract attempted, and like OP is effectively doing further down in the post when they announce it to be public domain).
droit moral limitations/transfers need to have a limited timespan (non-perpetual) and explicit and limited scope in use.
Not sure to what extent Swedish copyright was/is relevant for the situation in the article.
When learning this in uni, the Swedish way was presented as somewhat different in the amount of protection for the creator, the limited scope under which author rights can be restricted or transferred. Wikipedia tells me that most European countries apart from the UK have somewhat similar interpretations, though.
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[1]: For example if the ending would have had a completely different twist, and adjustments made to the poem that changes its message, that could also be an issue even if the use and rights transfer was otherwise agreed upon. To give you an idea of how far this can go, a film director was awarded damages on the grounds of TV channels making inappropriate cuts for commercials when airing their movies: https://lagen.nu/dom/nja/2008s309
[2]: Related to this case: a reporter writing a news article for their employer, a local newspaper. The next day the same article was republished in another publication owned by another company, with the permission of the employer. The court held that the employer had no rights to extend the economic license to another company, and the second paper had to pay the reporter. Seems pretty clear-cut that if Swedish law were to apply, Microsoft has 0 rights wrt the economic rights of the poem and would be liable to compensate OP for past unlicensed use, up until the point of the blog post where they renounce these rights moving forward. https://lagen.nu/dom/nja/1993s390
> Making a server is surprisingly terrible for such a ‘mature’ game.
The official Minecraft server software is exceptionally unoptimized, but a number of independent open source forks exist, some of which can substantially improve performance. Unless you're talking about maintaining the community aspect, which is definitely not so easy... :)
For anyone getting into Minecraft for the first time, be sure to check out the mod Optifine [1]. A substantial portion of the Minecraft community uses it for its UI and performance improvements to the base game. It also allows the use of custom shaders [2], which totally change the feel of the game by adding realistic effects like long shadows, wavy water, and swaying plants. I personally stick with the base game's appearance, but shaders can be really fun for exploring caves and other places with unique lighting.
I don't see why it can't be as easy as Multiplayer -> Host -> Select World. The average player shouldn't need to download a server jar, accept a eula, edit the config, run the jar with command line arguments for ram allocation, and set up port forwarding just to play block game with their friends.
It is that easy, if you're willing to pay Microsoft a monthly fee. If not, then you can also use the open to LAN button on any world, but that will also require port forwarding.
I agree that playing online is terrible and there's really not a great excuse for how bad it is but there are options that aren't quite as bad as setting up and hosting a Java edition server.
1. If you're on the same network, you can select "open to LAN" in the menu once you load into a world and it'll give you a port so anyone on your network can play in your world with you as if it's a multiplayer server. This is nice for playing with family.
2. Minecraft Realms is Mojang/Microsoft's first party solution to the problem where you pay $8 /month for essentially a private server but with some stricter rules and easier ui.
3. Now we're getting into the weeds but if you want to set up a server on your local machine but don't have admin access to your router to set up port forwarding (as is the case for many young people), there are some free tunneling services you can use like Hamachi. You'll need everyone who wants to play on the same tunnel and then they can connect to a locally hosted server as if it's online.
The remaining options are the obvious ones of setting up port forwarding so you can host a public server from your home and renting a server from a third party provider, many of which have Minecraft instances you can spin up pretty easily.
If you want to play online with friends on Bedrock Edition, the more popular multi-platform version of the game, I think it's actually pretty easy but I don't play that edition much anymore so I can't be sure.
It genuinely does make me really upset though that young people who don't have parents willing to pay monthly fees can't easily play Java edition with their friends. Plenty of other games let you host a public server on your own machine. I don't see why they wouldn't implement this except that it costs them money bydepopularizing Realms. It's honestly really sad and goes against the original spirit of the game.
I don't think Microsoft has much incentive to make creating servers easier than it is; there would be somewhat less incentive for players to buy Realms if setting up a server was just a click.
It's a Java applet, so it runs everywhere, but due to the migration from minecraft.net accounts to Mojang accounts, and the second migration from Mojang to Microsoft accounts, a lot of people lost access to the game.
After all these years sure. But at the time the game felt like it had already peaked and was pretty stable. To me it felt like the ending came much after for some reason
I think one important thing for people on HN here is this:
> I think Carl, with his background as a Corporate Finance guy, seeing the world through that filter, must have believed that I was trying to blackmail them; trying to maximise my revenue, like the “rational agents” that populate economics textbooks; that I was refusing to sign it to hold up the deal, because I wanted to get paid off. And I totally get how he could see it that way, given where he was coming from; but that wasn’t really what the issue was.
There are many people on HN (and elsewhere) who see behaving as a rational economic actor as a default state and - worse - many believe economics is a zero sum game.
Neither of these things is true, and it's a big mistake to think so. People do things for diverse motivations, and money is only one.
Would you be happy if only your tax rate went up, or is that tied to other people in your tax bracket also paying out more and thus, presumably, benefiting society more than they would by hoarding/wasting the money?
I don’t think it’s weird that people don’t behave “rationally” in the crude sense of that word[1]. But it seems really weird to be happy about your tax rate going up. Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries. So there seems to be two explanations:
(1) Either you consider yourself prodigal and want an authority to take care of your spending for you.
(2) Or you have weirdly framed your views for extra shock value; and you simply dislike inequality and suffering; and you think that the state can help alleviate some of it by reallocating social resources in a socially beneficial manner. And you think it would be just if they also would take some money from you, even if it’s done by force. There is really nothing surprising about this view; I would rather say it is very popular. (And, unfortunately, for most people that feeling for equality doesn’t spread beyond their own country.)
[1] In principle, rationality in economics doesn’t necessarily imply egoism. It just means that the choices made by a person have nice properties like completeness or transitivity. Whether your choices maximize your consumption, consumption of other people, the scientific progress or the amount of plastic in the world ultimately doesn’t matter.
> Consider the alternative: for example, you could give the money to charity that works in developing countries.
Why not both? I am happy for my tax rates to go up - indeed, I will vote for any political party that advocates this - and donate to developing countries (and also food banks in the UK because we are shamefully bad at being a developed country.)
The third option is that it genuinely makes me happy, because it implies we're taking care of everyone more. My money going to charity is fine. My money going to taxes implies other wealthy people like me are also chipping in for schools, healthcare, etc.
The idea that we have to use force to take money away from people to take care of those in need doesn’t make me genuinely happy. That is rather depressing that we cannot solve those problems without ultimatums based on violence. Necessary? Maybe. Wholesome? Not really.
The main takeaway here is that you definitely should not interact with a corporation as anything other than rational economic actor, because while people have motivations, corporations only have one: money.
> Neither of these things is true, and it's a big mistake to think so. People do things for diverse motivations, and money is only one.
Well, when most of the essay contains references to how much money Mojang made, how much Notch went home with, the many billions thrown around, the bonuses paid out per employee, the dividends from Mojang, over and over again, one gets the strong impression that he is concerned about how much money he didn't get.
My point is that he's in a shared melodramatic phase. It seems bad now, no doubt. But time heals all wounds. He'll find his friends again. He'll realize that Twitter isn't the right forum for posting batshit crazy stuff if you're sensitive to criticism. He'll repair things. He'll find his peace. Or he'll go insane. I'm hoping the former as a fellow human.
That's the story of the people who are mad at him on Twitter. It's not what he says, he says he's happy and has kept saying things like how getting out of Mojang was the best thing he did.
It seems to me he's reasonably happy, especially considering his circumstances were far from happy before Minecraft - his parents were ex-addicts, he had himself dropped out of school, his father had a mood disorder and relapsed into drug use and killed himself just weeks after the first big Minecon.
I didn't say it does, but the clear fact of the matter is that there is literally no evidence that being rich leads to being miserable.
People saying "money doesn't buy happiness" don't realise that money doesn't bring unhappiness either. You can't use that statement for asserting that some rich person must be unhappy.
That's not what he said, and no, Notch didn't do anything wrong here. He's referring to everything about current day Notch(sad, alone, transphobe in billion $ mansion that panders to the right on Twitter all day and hasn't had anything creatively interesting to say since 2015).
Just want to say, it's definitely not THE most popular game of all time... Candy crush could be a strong candidate, though they probably never use that term on themselves.
This list by definition excludes free and free-to-play games, which is why Candy Crush isn't even on the list.
As for others talking about games like Pac Man: yeah, they were probably the most popular games at the time but the number of total players probably pales because the audience has grown considerably over time. I guess there's a strong case for Windows Solitaire though that seems to have somewhat of an age limit as I'd expect there to be a drastic cut-off for younger generations, especially since macOS became mainstream.
Certainly there's a world where the author just knew, at some point in this process, "let me just give this giant stressor of a problem to a lawyer"—without losing whatever it means to "be an artist" or opportunities at growth he attributes to only occurring because he was awful at business.
There definitely was, as they mentioned in the article. They choose not to though, opting instead to just sit on it for a long time I guess? Hopefully they talked to a lawyer before releasing this though, and hopefully Microsoft doesn’t go after this guy.
It would not be too hard for Microsoft to argue that they did come to an agreement with the artist to transfer the rights in exchange for 20,000 euros, so they do now own the copyright to the End Poem and will sue for damages if the artist reneges on the deal and starts claiming it's public domain.
I hope they don't, but they definitely could. It would be a PR nightmare though, and there's not all much to be gained either (how much money can you make with the poem if you can't mention Minecraft?), so with any luck that will stop them.
For legal purposes, verbal agreements can be contracts, plus here there's an email trail that includes what very much looks like an acceptance of terms by the author.
They had a long conversation over email and an exchange of payment for the right to at least use the poem. Whether you like it or not, that can count as a contract. It might be different in different jurisdictions but here's the US definition of a contract (https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/contract):
> The basic elements required for the agreement to be a legally enforceable contract are: mutual assent, expressed by a valid offer and acceptance; adequate consideration; capacity; and legality.
> They had a long conversation over email and an exchange of payment for the right to at least use the poem.
I agree with that.
This would be a real encumberance if the author were to decide he wants to sue someone. But that is not what we are discussing here. We are discussing if Microsoft will sue the author.
We are not discussing if Microsoft can sue him. The way this works anyone can sue anyone for pretty much any reason. So that is not an interesting question.
So will they sue? The problem with these kind of informal contracts is that they are vague. Vague in practical terms means two things: 1 the outcome of any legal action is uncertain. 2 things take longer. This means that litigating things about them are expensive and uncertain.
And here I repeat: the question here is not if they can use it, but if they paid for exclusive rights.
So on one hand you have a huge mess of a litigation. On an other hand do you think microsoft is meaningfully and perceptibly harmed here? Do you think they will sell less game licences or ender dragon plushies because of this? I very much doubt it.
Based on the balance of these two above do you feel it is in the best interest of Microsoft to sue the author?
That's a fair point. I think I was looking at it from the other perspective where the author was claiming that he had never approved a contract with Mojang and therefore deserved additional compensation which is pretty far from true. But I agree that Microsoft probably doesn't have a strong case here either and wouldn't gain anything from suing anyway.
Such a world sounds unappealing, if not naive and silly - why can't people be motivated by multiple reasons anyways? The author doesn't claim that they are a great at business in the first place.
They do express regret for not simply doing this, so I guess you are right. But, the story wouldn't be very interesting if it had played out that way, so I guess here we are.
Yeah I feel a twist in my gut for this guy. He is so frustrated it's incredible. He wrote 90% more than he needed to on this topic. The essay is long and rambling and I've missed any point he's trying to make... much like the words of his "End Poem". They are senseless and, ultimately, meaningless. They are not deep. They are incoherent. No wonder he's stuck in a narrative of his own creation. That's his life. If his emails with Carl were anything like his writing in this essay, then any reasonable person would have been at wits end trying to negotiate with this guy. He is right about one thing, though: the universe owes him nothing.
All of his problems could have been solved if he just did the sensible normal thing any person would do and have a lawyer help him figure it out.
The end poem is fine. It doesn’t have particularly interesting rhythm, sound or structure in a ‘poetic’ way until the last bit. It has some weird stops, starts and repetition, but it’s coherent overall and has a functional enough core metaphor. Plus, the payoff is being told you matter, that you’re not alone. You know, the ‘we are all made of stars’ bit. It can be a powerful thought if you let it.
I realize I'm being critical. For me any message contained therein would have landed much more powerfully if it was communicated more gracefully. I, personally, believe that such stylized writing serves more to cover up shortcomings in an author's ability to communicate than it does any service to the reader. But that's my opinion. Maybe don't write the poem on drugs... idk.
Curious where you got that impression? I can't see anything in the bit where he's writing the poem that he mentions anything even vaguely pertaining to drugs.
I found it the opposite. I felt touched, it was very human and raw and real.
It's not an essay about a problem, it's an essay about experiencing a problem. The former can be solved with a lawyer, the latter with... Well nothing really. It's an experience.
If you have a case, especially one presumably of this profile, then many firms would take it for no up front cost with an expectation of some cut of the damages.
Then he would have been told as much by any lawyer he approached. Point was that not having money wouldn't be a nonstarter.
And of course, even though he said he didn't approach anybody, the speculative part of my brain actually thinks he informally may have done so and received such advice (that he didn't have a case) and conveniently omitted as much from the narrative.
I doubt any lawyer would bring a suit against one of the biggest corporations on the planet on contingency. Its going to be a hell of a lot of work to win even a clear-cut case against an opponent with this much resources. See also: the cave-diver that sued Elon Musk for defamation. Or Miller UK vs Caterpillar Inc (they won, but it took 5 years)
But then Mojang sent the money without a contract. The writer thought he was working under some conditions, the company thought he was doing it under other conditions and they never actually agreed to anything. Sending the money without a contract is just as sloppy as sending the work and I really don’t see how the author would be responsible here.
Not having a contract does not mean that Mojang’s terms are in force.
It depends on those initial emails and what was agreed upon. Assuming no information was left out and he truly said "The contract was for a comprehensive buyout, signing away all my rights forever, which was exactly the thing I’d told Carl that I never did with my work", it could be presumed that what he was paid for was essentially just a license to use his work for the Java game.
He also made it clear that he had an agent. And he had worked with large corporations in the past given his background so I'm surprised he tripped up here. It's not like this was some first time author learning about how cruel the real world can be.
That's all pretty tangential to the claim that he should "just" get a lawyer. He even describes how his life was kind of falling apart and his first marriage ended partially due to stress and partially due to his financial situation. It's wonderful to say you can "just" do this and "just" do that but it seems like things weren't "just" that simple for this person.
For what it’s worth I found this to be a very worthwhile read. And not too hard to follow.
He’s very open about his responsibility for the miscommunication. And says he does not blame Carl (except for apparently hiding the Microsoft buyout from him).
As for the end poem, I’ve never played Minecraft but I found it to be beautiful and touching writing.
> All of his problems could have been solved if he just did the sensible normal thing any person would do and have a lawyer help him figure it out.
Whilst this may have reached a better legal and financial conclusion, I don't think it would have helped the author that much. It's obvious that he cares of the art, and for his perceived friendship.
> All of his problems could have been solved if he just did the sensible normal thing any person would do and have a lawyer help him figure it out.
Did you mean:
All of his problems could have been solved if he just did the sensible normal thing any person would do and flat out assume all the other humans on the planet are complete assholes.
He had an agent he could have just called up— but you see this all the time. People think that sorting out business with contracts ruins friendships, but it’s very often the lack of contract and the resulting fight that irreparably severs relationships.
It’s not just some capitalism v art thing either. It’s communicating and promising and accountability.
To anyone reading, if you’ve got a business partner and you think he’s given you 50% of a business because he said it one night at dinner, saying you’re cofounders— get it on paper in terms you both agree to. Go halfsies on a lawyer who helps you both accurately match terms (copyright assignment is one of those things where particular wording, intent and employment arrangement are important.) If you have doubts, maybe watch The Social Network or read about Hoefler&Co. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoefler_%26_Co.)
What struck me is it doesn't seem these people really were his friends. He didn't know them before writing the poem, it seems he only communicated with them via email, and then only regarding the poem, and he certainly wasn't friends with them afterwards.
I mean I'm probably missing a lot of details that weren't necessary to the telling of this story, but perhaps the lesson here is don't assume people are your friends when all you have is a brief business relationship.
I'd like to believe the contrary. It is in the nature of an artist to create needless complication. That is art, that is culture, that is human life. Without it, we just consume starches and protein until we are full, grunt directions at one another, and fuck passionlessly to soothe the itch in our loins. And then we die.
Then again, maybe that's all that's happening anyways.
He even had an agent. He realizes he should have just let the agent handle it. And then when they come back for the contract in 2014, he just does it again!
Still, thought this was very well written, and he's not assigning them the blame.
> And so: you are free to set it to music; dramatise it; animate it. Mash it up with whatever you think it would go well with. Whatever you’re inspired to do. (Ideally inspired by love, but that’s on you.)
When so much money is involved very few friendships or relationships will survive. You can't morally steer someone into the "right" direction by sending frustrated emails when there's generational wealth on the line for the other parties involved. The author should have put his feelings aside and involved a lawyer.
I love the idea of the public domain so much - the idea that these bits of culture may have been created by a single person, but that they ultimately belong to everyone as members of the culture. I've always wanted to host a New Years Public Domain Day party to celebrate everything already in and entering the public domain, but I'm not sure my friends are quite as excited by the idea as I am...
Human culture in general exists and is also something (hard to compare with other ones right now, but I bet that aliens - if existing - would have a different ones)
I quite like that idea of a party haha. I also don't know that my friends would appreciate it, but I'd love to see a website or something that lists works that belong to us now
I am absolutely not a lawyer, but I would guess his implicit agreement together with accepting the money gives Microsoft at least some right to use the poem?
Mojang yes. Microsoft... eh... that's more difficult and depends on a number of factors. As I understand it, Mojang was acquired by Microsoft, i.e. Microsoft inherits all contracts Mojang held. IANAL but in this case they would probably be able to use the poem under the same implied limited license.
But I'm not sure how this works when Minecraft itself was moved out of Mojang in any way (i.e. if this is formally a Microsoft game and no longer a Mojang, now subsidiary of Microsoft, game).
Anyhow, the CC0 license also applies to Microsoft going forward so unless he wants to challenge their rights prior to this, Microsoft is apparently in the clear now. They just can't sue anyone who wants to also use the poem because they don't have standing.
Anybody have a pointer to the "iHole" story mentioned in the article? It seems to have been purged not just from the author's website, but archive.* as well.
I feel for the guy, making a living off of art is difficult.
However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement.
> So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending
Did the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely. I understand that to some the end story may be deemed to be essential to the experience and talent was required to write this story - but that attitude just undermines the hard work of everyone else involved. Who knows how much effort those staff members poured into perfecting things that were essential to the experience that made Minecraft?
> Bear in mind, here we were a couple of weeks before the official launch, and Minecraft was already a phenomenon: in its unfinished state, it had already sold five or six million copies, in beta, at $15 a copy. So it was, at that point, already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no ending
It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff.
If he actually received $20,000 that still seems like a lot? Especially in a world where freelance writing is $0.01-$0.50 (pre-GPT3). And it sounds like at the time it was good money for the artist.
I get that he feels like he was given a small amount relative to the great success of Minecraft, but I would hope he also realizes that it was risk free cash.
That was my reaction too, 20,000 (euros) seems quite decent for a tiny freelance engagement, and just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too.
If he didn't think the money was fair, he shouldn't have accepted it. I expect Mojang would have simply pulled the plug and gone with someone else if he had done so.
This really just smacks of sour grapes that Mojang was sold for squillions and the author feels entitled to some of that. Legalities aside (the absence of aa signed contract may be a problem) but I don't feel he is morally entitled to anything more than he's already received.
Indeed. This was a great deal for the writer. He wasn't part of the team. He was a contract writer. €20k is a lot of dosh for a few pages of text. It smacks of trivializing all of the work of the people who spent months working on it because he feels like he didn't get a big enough piece of the pie. It sounds like that got lost in the fog of war, because otherwise they'd just have said, "Ok, that's enough. We'll just hire someone else for half the price."
I honestly suspect the €20k figure was, "Let's offer him a big enough number so that we don't have to be distracted by negotiating this." And then began the long-winded and self-important wall-of-text emails.
Mojang was not a tiny indie company though, it already sold millions of copies before the release. Yes, he should have let his agent negotiate the contract. Do what you are good at and let others do what they are good at.
One can both be a small indie studio and also have sold multiple millions of copies of their game. Indie simply means you don't have a publisher. And Mojan didn't.
You have to at least put a floor on that thing or you fall completely afoul of the common meaning.
My rule of thumb would be less than $1 million spent before the first public release ? (Which I assume makes Minecraft indie ?)
Now another question is whether you can even call indie those games being advertised and distributed by Steam (or any other platform) where developers are overwelmingly dependent on that platform for like 95%+ of their sales (including keys from third party websites still for that platform) - because dealing with advertisers and distributors was also an extremely important part of the job when games still came in boxes !
Indie is when the major investors are making the game, at least for me. So if the guys are making their own game without investments they are indie, as in the creators can be free of influences of outside investors.
Size of Mojang is immaterial. If Apple or Microsoft hire a copywriter they'll still pay market rate. Any reason to believe the Author would have received bigger value with help of agent in 2010?
He would not have worried about it for so long, so yes I believe he would have help from his agent. I'm not talking about getting more dollars, he is buying peace of mind for his art.
Yeah looking at the contract, it seems exactly like the kind of thing you’d want to have for content in a game. It removes all complexities as you may need to edit or do whatever to it years later.
Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code.
> Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code.
Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.)
Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.
> What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work?
The definition of “keep” in that sentence is the principal question of copyright, isn’t?
That is to say, if I produce a physical object at someone’s behest, I have to completely give up on the result in order for them to have unrestricted use of it, for reasons of physics. There are no such reasons for texts, computer programs, and so on, unless imposed artificially by law.
(I’m not going to call something good just because it’s the natural state of things, but neither am I going to automatically consider something reasonable just because it’s the law.)
For example, if I’m employed as a teacher, a good portion of my work is producing notes to give lectures from or to hand out to students, so that’s partly what I’m being paid for. Yet it’d be pretty normal for me to then publish them in some form, for money or not, without my employer trying to lay claim to them.
Even a developer who is employed by virtue of his experience in databases is generally not precluded from publishing a book summarizing that same experience for others to use.
> The guy got £20,000 for some pages of [babble]. He should be elated.
I don’t know anything about his situation, but a freelancer’s budgeting always has to account for the time spent waiting or searching for the next gig; being paid fabulously for a job that occupies your every waking hour for a month, then spending the next two sucking on your thumb (and recovering from the overtaxing sprint you’ve just had) is pretty normal, and on average the money ends up much less abundant than you’d guess just looking at the numbers. (Unless you’re Brandon Sanderson and can finish a novel a year, I guess.)
I think a lot of people here are probably used to consulting/contracting being somewhat extended work towards completing a work order.
But there is definitely a lot of consulting where you're working more or less full-time to stay current, market yourself, etc. and when you do get work the day rate may be eye-watering--but those jobs may be short and/or infrequent.
When I was an industry analyst, in addition to our regular subscription clients, we did present at company events, did a la carte consulting days, and things like that for which we got about $10K per day. But we didn't have a lot of those.
Actually, how does this compare to, for example, architects? They must at least sometimes keep the ability to show off their designs, to build up their portfolios, right?
> What other profession expects to be paid for producing work and expects to keep the result of the work?
There are, I believe, a non-negligible number of companies who will write software for you, to a specification, and grant you a (sometimes non-exclusive) license to use that software but absolutely will not give you the copyright. Pretty sure there's a lot of IT companies, for example, that UKGOV contract to which do this.
>Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.
Well, it's less common for fiction but if you're working for a company and writing content you're almost certainly giving up any rights.
If you're ghostwriting without credit, it's not explicitly spelled out but the way it works is they'll slap it on their copyrighted website, possibly under someone else's byline. And they'd reasonably expect you not to publish the same thing verbatim somewhere else.
Though you also have cases where cross-posting is at least tolerated.
I would be shocked if the exact exchange of copyright were not explicitly spelled out when hiring a ghostwriter, unless the hiring party has no idea what they are doing!
Most freelance developers do? This is a work-for-hire situation, not an employment type situation. Works for hire have a different legal basis than works created as an employee.
Not a lawyer, but… I don’t believe that’s true. As I understand it ‘work for hire’ is the basis by which work done by an employee creates intellectual property belonging to an employer. When you contract a non employee to produce intellectual property for you it is common to write an explicit ‘work for hire’ agreement that ensures that the work you are paying for is handled on the same basis as work by an employee.
I’m a freelance developer. My clients pay for a perpetual non-exclusive non-transferable license to the software I write for them. I explain this very clearly to every client, and tell them explicitly that I hope and intend to sell the same software (probably with modifications) to another client down the track. I’ve never had a single client push back on this ever. I could definitely imagine for some companies this arrangement might be a dealbreaker for whatever reason, but I don’t think it’s all that unusual.
Right, so that is not a ‘work for hire’ agreement. It is an agreement that explicitly ensures they are aware they are not getting your code on a work for hire basis.
> just skimming the contract, that all seems bog-standard, too.
It is, and that's the problem. From way down the post:
BEGIN QUOTE
Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living. But over the past century, corporations like Disney, Sony, Universal, and Microsoft, have lobbied hard to twist those laws out of shape. Now, the vast power imbalance between rich corporations and poor artists (particularly when negotiating) allows the corporations to stripmine the copyrights from artists, and keep the artists poor. To see how, just look again at the contract I refused to sign. It’s astonishing that such a mafia-shakedown, you-will-never-see-your-kid-again contract is legal; that it is considered a standard way to treat an artist, rather than greeted with gasps of horror, and treated as a crime. This is why none of your favourite comic book writers and artists own any of their creations. This is why Alan Moore, who created Watchmen, cannot use his own characters in his own work. This is why the original blues musicians, whose talent transformed global culture while creating a hugely profitable industry, died broke. This is why, even today, for every $1,000 of sales in the modern music industry, the average individual musician gets $23.40.
He's got that wrong: the average musician loses money, gets nothing.
Honestly, that's true at a lot of levels, not just the poverty level. It is said if you want to make a million dollars running a recording studio… spend three million dollars. If you want to be a million dollar rock star… invest (or have your family invest) ten million. It's like that.
It's like, you can wear rags, or you can wear a suit, or you can wear a Superman cape. Would you like to for-real wear that Superman cape, to be the hero? Well, you can, for real. And it will cost you everything, more than you could imagine.
I read this guy's essay in part because he WAS the Minecraft Story Guy, not because I thought he'd have good arguments. That's what he earned, and that's what it cost him (didn't sign up for his mailing list tho :) )
After he dies (assuming I don't go first) I'll remember things about his words. After Markus dies I won't remember a thing about his money (though I'll remember things about the game he made, he's not so different in that respect). I won't remember a thing about the Microsoft lawyers no matter whether they win or lose, whether they enjoin this guy from public-domaining what they see as their employer's property. So in a sense that thing didn't end up being their property and that's the writer's point.
It all gets into philosophic realms, and that's where poets live, not lawyers.
reminds me recently of voice actors who think they are entitled for a bigger piece of the piece just because the game they worked on for a few hours had financial success. Hubris and pretentiousness at its best.
They are free to negotiate as they are pleased. If the producer feels that they can find a cheaper acceptable alternative they will go with that. If they feel what the voice actor is offering is needed they need to pay for it.
> the game they worked on for a few hours
Voice acting is a hard job, and it takes more time than a “few hours” to get good at it. If you think anyone can do it certainly you can just pay an anybody to do it.
It can take a lifetime to get good at something, but a few hours of work after that lifetime generally doesn't cost much. Certainly not more than 5 figures.
That's what they did in the case of the recent Bayonetta controversy. They actually paid less for the replacement than they were expecting to pay the original actor who wanted more.
A man sails his smoking yacht into a repair shop. The head mechanic goes over with a hammer and slams it against the side of the engine. The engine roars back to life, and the smoke subsides.
He submits a bill for $200,000. It is itemized as such:
- $1 - Fifteen seconds of labor; striking with hammer
> Voice acting is a hard job, and it takes more time than a “few hours” to get good at it. If you think anyone can do it certainly you can just pay an anybody to do it.
So it takes a long time to learn how to take good pictures, and therefore every picture you take after being good should be worth 5k USD or something? that's not how things work at all.
> Voice acting is a hard job,
So all other jobs are easy? That's again pretentiousness at play.
I wonder if it counts as a work for hire then? Otherwise copyright vests with the author and requires a written memorandum of transfer as I understand it.
I think your focus on the financials, which was a very small part of the article is misguided. I'm under the assumption that the article is part of the author trying to "piece things together" - as a part 2 of his spiritual journey where he concluded:
> I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.
By accepting this premise, these are examples of when he expected to be treated as a friend, but was instead treated as an outsider. As for the legality, I don't think a vague agreement can clarify if the work is licenced or if the licence was transfered.
But he was an outsider, he wasn't Notch's friend. Notch contacted him for the express purpose of writing the End Poem.
Of course, I'm sure they were friendly in their discussions, there's no point in being actively hostile to the people you're working with. But the idea the relationship extended anything past a game developer and a contracted writer seems to be entirely in the author's mind.
I definitely agree, and on the basis of the information given that seems to be the crux of the issue. Yet I can easily believe and totally see that the author saw it as more - who's to say that they weren't closer to friends prior to the initial discussion about contracts?
One side sees it as the start of a friendship, the other as a work contract.
It certainly feels a bit like he was feeling lonely and needed to see this as a friendship. I'm sure there was a deep artistic connection, but that's not quite the same thing as a friendship. It's awkward and frustrating when only one side sees a relationship as a friendship.
It's possible this is true, but then the author needs to stop acting like they are totally blameless and everything is just where the universe took him. All of the author's problems here are self-inflicted.
> We just didn’t understand each other, because we were playing different language games.
The author collectively places the blame on poor communication from both sides. But the reality is that all of the poor communication was entirely from his side, and he knew in advance he struggled talking about money and had an agent for that very purpose.
There's also this whole weird subsection where he describes things the universe did to him as if he has no agency in his own actions and where he ended up in life.
How could you possibly read that into it? The only blame I see assigned in the text is self-blame.
Select snips:
> I just misunderstood what was going on.
> Now, Carl didn’t do anything wrong here. Carl is not the baddie either. He was a CEO, and major shareholder, behaving the way a CEO and major shareholder is supposed to behave. The misunderstanding was all mine.
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
> Again, I have to calm down and remind myself, and you, there are no bad guys in this story. Do not hassle Markus, or Carl (or even Microsoft) about this. I’m sure they didn’t even think of it as “tricking” me; that’s my perspective, not theirs.
> He was projecting his motivations onto me, in the same way I had been projecting my motivations onto him. Mutual misunderstanding.
> Most of the fault there is mine (I am a deeply flawed guy)
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
While the author says this in a few places, the picture he tries to paint is one of a grand misunderstanding. Both sides of the communication just weren't understanding each other.
But the reality is that _all_ of the misunderstanding comes from him. There is no "mutual misunderstanding", Mojang understood the conversation perfectly well.
The author asked for an offer, Mojang offered $20k, and the author accepted. It's not reasonable to expect Mojang to "understand" the author is going to hold some grudge about believing they deserve more than the offer they accepted without negotiation.
The correct response from the author would be something along the lines of "I am entirely at fault, all of the misunderstanding was on my side, Mojang/Notch/Carl did nothing wrong".
Instead the author reminds us at every turn about how Notch gave bonuses to all the Mojang employees but not him, how they're such a great guy for not getting lawyers involved, and how they're turning their work into a "priceless gift" (despite being paid $20000 for it).
I think it's fair to say that Carl, and Mojang in general, didn't understand him either. So the understanding was definitely mutual, even if the reason for that was almost entirely Julian's inability and unwillingness to talk about contracts and money, but also not wanting to hand that over to his agent.
But at the same time it's pretty clear he was jealous of all the money he didn't want to talk about, and that he saw himself as a partner rather than a contractor.
It was very much mutual. Mojang seemed to have been of the understanding that they paid for more than just the work done and the right to use the poem in the agreed initial release of the game, which was a major misunderstanding on their part. IP transfer was not part of the agreement.
It is what it is, everyone involved probably learned some form of lesson, and I don't see why we need to create villains or victims in this story.
More fundamentally, it takes two to tango. Just because the perspective of Mojang is the more common one in the industry doesn't make it the more "correct" interpretation. It's very much a two-way street and it's on both parties to make sure they understand each other when things are not explicitly spelled out and agreed upon.
The author never attempts to communicate they didn't want to transfer the IP. I believe that if the author told Mojang "I don't want to sign this contract, I'll give you a license to use the poem instead." that Notch would have been entirely open to that - after all, that is the deal they had with C418.
Mojang, at a minimum, paid for a license to use the poem in the game. They wanted to have this on paper because it would make the deal with Microsoft easier, but they would have been right about that fact either way. The author, on the other hand, believes they are in a situation where Microsoft has no right to use the End Poem despite the fact they accepted $20k for it.
Mojang clearly did not understand the conversation perfectly well, if they did they wouldn’t have sent the check until the contract was signed.
I mean, ignore all the stuff about friends, blah blah, Carl has apparently signed them up for whatever the defaults are under (based on other comments) UK IP laws?
I found the writer’s story engaging, moving, and with a satisfying conclusion. I appreciated his articulation of his struggles with how he feels about art and money. I definitely did not take away the same feelings from it that you apparently did.
It’s fair to focus on financial when the author spends the entire article mulling over legal action because he feels hard done by, and then ends the article begging for money in the form of donations.
My interpretation of the legal status is that the author is entitled to accept the €20k as payment for his time but that amount doesn't constitute payment for the copyright of the work. Mojang subsequently wanted to purchase that copyright and hence why they sent the contract for £1 to be signed. Julian believed the copyright was worth more and so rejected the offer.
All that is to say that if my interpretation is correct then Julian is legally entitled to do what he wants with the work including selling it to someone else or in this case release it under a creative commons license.
I'm German and used to do freelance work. This interpretation is what I've been told by a lawyer in a similar case: the money is for the license, not the copyright, and unless specified, the license is the minimum of what could reasonably be expected, i.e. a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, limited license for the scope of the product.
IANAL but I think Microsoft is in the clear here because they bought out Mojang but they couldn't for example use the ending (or derivative works of it) in a spin-off game because Mojang couldn't have done that either and they have no standing to go after anyone reproducing the poem as a whole or in part.
In fact, the poem now being CC0 grants Microsoft more rights than they had, except it's still non-exclusive, meaning the same rights are granted to everyone else too.
MS can now use the End Poem in spin off products, or even adapt it and use variations or sequels of it in spin off products. Pretty good deal for them, I'd say.
Though to be perfectly honest, if I were them, and they needed something like that, I'd hire Julian to write it. Or maybe ask him to write it for free after giving him a massive donation.
> Mojang subsequently wanted to purchase that copyright and hence why they sent the contract for £1 to be signed.
That is the move by Mojang that I didn't understand. They were about to be paid 2.5 billion. Why not offer 1 million for the signed contract? They could easily afford that, and with his financial troubles at the time, Julian would probably have signed it.
And he'd have missed out on his subsequent personal growth, and we wouldn't have gotten this beautiful story, and the universe wouldn't have gotten the End Poem, but Microsoft would, and the world would have been more normal, predictable, corporate. But he would have been able to eat and pay rent.
> Why not offer 1 million for the signed contract?
Because they believed (erroneously or not) that they already had paid for the thing the contract was about, and were offering a "peppercorn" payment for the signature itself to make the exchange complete.
What's objectionable about this specific example of contract law? If the law didn't require contracts to have some consideration they would have offered $0. No real difference.
There was something similar with the soundtrack of Doom Eternal [1]. They were also about to get paid billions by Microsoft and didn't pay the composer.
That story sounds way worse. Mick Gordon seemed to understand the business side better than the people at Id he was talking to. That's more of a sad story of a guy being treated poorly by an incompetent/malicious company steamrolling over him, throwing him under the bus, refusing to listen to reason, and doubling down every step of the way with no justice in sight.
Julian's story is more a story of a misunderstood artist caring more about the art than the money, mistaking contract work for friendship, struggling with the consequences, hating himself for it, and finally coming to terms with it.
That seems to happen quite often. People forget that it's impossible to be friends with someone who's employing you without some major conflicts of interest on both sides.
Wow. Just wow. I would say that's godawful but it would be a gross understatement.
Given the blatantly deliberate blocking to get the OST done and getting a moron to ghostwrite it makes me think id deliberately decided to ruin Mick's reputation so the fans would eat him alive and then they went for straight up libel to complete it. Marty Stratton, what a complete piece of shit.
> he'd have missed out on his subsequent personal growth
Maybe. Maybe not. People say these kind of things, but it is often a retcon aimed to help them deal with some emotion.
Maybe he would have asked his agent to agree on a deal. The agent would have got him a tiny percentage and he would have spent the money to bring something wonderfull to the world. During which process he would have attained even more personal growth.
Totally made up story, but so is the hint that if he would have had a contract he would have missed out on personal growth.
Call it what you want. If you spend all your time whinging about misfortune, you'll never grow.
As Marcus Aurelius wrote sometime around 170CE:
>It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. ...
>So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.
So you shouldn't have empathy because it's a waste of time and emotion? That seems like a depressingly selfish outlook on life. I understand not trying to get up in arms about everything but to just ignore it...
I think he was trying to express the importance of resilience. Things that happen, stay happened. So the best outcome for yourself following misfortune is to move ahead as best you can.
Personally, I don't think that stoicism is a good fit for modern times, because it conflates virtue with foregoing strong emotions, and leaving other people to their mistakes.
It does have its share of worthwhile lessons though, and if you dig a little deeper you'll find that it encourages guiding and explaining when people are wrong, rather than getting upset with them about perceived moral or practical failures.
In the UK I think you're probably right, but it's not the clearest situation. You may argue that all of the communication up to the point where he agreed with their offer is part of the contract.
> However, in some circumstances, for example when copyright is not dealt with in the contract to commission the work, courts may be willing to find that there is an implied licence allowing the commissioner to use the work for the purpose for which it was commissioned. This does not necessarily result in a transfer of ownership. Instead, the commissioner of the work may only get a limited non-exclusive licence. This situation demonstrates the importance of establishing who owns copyright through a contract.
It's very likely that an attempt on his part to sue Microsoft would fail on the grounds that a tacit agreement was reached for the use of the work, based on his acceptance of payment. However, it doesn't sound like there was any agreement, tacit or otherwise, that the license should be exclusive. So he's still well within his rights to dedicate it to the public domain.
It kind of reminds me of the story of Clare Torry, who did the vocals on Pink Floyd's The Great Gig In The Sky[1], and received the standard £30 flat fee for session work. Of course the song ended up being a critical piece of an album that went on to be one of the best selling albums in the history of music. Sometimes, we make a big contribution to something and don't end up with a big payoff. It's sad that business shrewdness and negotiating skills tend to have a higher ROI than actual subject matter talent.
Torry ended up suing and they settled out of court, so I guess that's a win.
Well, and you're not reading about the countless people who contributed to something that never made any money. Or for that matter the countless people who work on Hollywood blockbusters for guild scale and a small credit at the end.
I don't know about Swedish law but in German law works created outside of an employment contract do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer, so at best Mojang had a non-exclusive, non-transferrable, limited usage right for the poem for the use in Minecraft and nothing else. As I understand it, this makes his claim that Microsoft may not have the right to use it questionable but it confirms his main point that they don't own it. Given that the author is German, this seems relevant.
For what it's worth, this often comes as a surprise even to many German creators who are not aware of this because intuitively if you get paid to create something "for" someone, you sell them your rights to it. But in reality that requires an explicit contract spelling this out. A typical example is professional photographers actually only selling you prints of the photos they take for you, or a design agency not giving you the source files for designs they create for you.
IANAL but AFAIK this is the case also in Sweden. (Researched it when I (otherwise an amateur) was asked to do paid photography for someone.)
In fact, though now my memory is hazy and so I speculate more wildly, not even most kinds of employment grants copyright to the employer. Exceptions being software developers and teachers, I think.
> do not automatically assign an exclusive copyright to the buyer
Of course, because in germany you can not transfer your copyright at all, unless you die. ;)
Without being nitpicky you are still right in the way you meant it: There is no automatic usage right afaik. (And also google results agree: eg https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht )
I think that in civil law countries you can sometimes give / sell away your copy rights, but never your moral rights ?
(Though copy rights themselves might also be treated as actual rights, rather than a temporary monopoly, an exception to the normal state of everything being in the public domain that prevails in the common law countries ?)
If you want to nitpick, Germany technically doesn't have copyright in the US sense and instead the term is usually considered equivalent to what is called Urheberrecht (author's rights), which is indeed not transferrable.
You can however grant an unlimited, transferrable, exclusive license, which for all intents and purposes is like "transferring copyright".
Your nitpick isn't entirely irrelevant though. This is why Germany does not recognize public domain dedications and why CC0 is necessary.
> It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff.
I'm usually on the writer's side in these kinds of things, but I have to agree. I've played dozens of hours of that game and have never even considered that it might have an end
It's comedy, but honestly, being a stay-at-home mom really isn't the hardest job on the planet. And looking back at most of history, it was probably a luxury.
P.S.: I am a father that works remote from home. My girlfriend is a stay-at-home mom. Our daughter spends most time at school. Honestly, my girlfriend has a pretty relaxed life. I take care of the money and we got a small house, so cleaning the house really takes little time (I even help in weekends vacuum cleaning and evenings doing dishes). In daytime she has many hours to spend as she sees fit. And in evenings often as well.
That last quote is damning. The game works well without an ending poem -- or an ending, for that matter.
I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set.
That said, the rant, while much too long is interesting and explains well the misunderstanding between business people and artists. Some artists are good at business (Picasso) but most aren't because they speak a different language, and because, like this guy, they cultivate and probably enjoy ambiguity, or the protection and shadows it brings.
A lot of us never actually saw that ending because for the longest time minecraft didn’t have one. It came much much later and was kind of, to my understanding becaude I never finished the game, kind of a random and rushed way to add an ending to the game so that notch could not call it an alpha or something anymore and move on.
That's how I felt about it; it doesn't really feel like you're working towards this ending throughout the game, it's more an area to unlock and an objective to achieve. But it doesn't feel like the objective of the game; it doesn't feel like the game has an objective, and I don't feel like adding one finished the game. It's still a goal that players aspire to, e.g. speedrunners who can now apparently achieve it in <10 minutes with the right world seed.
Yes, I play mostly heavily modified Minecraft. Packs like Compact Claustrophobia or FTB Stoneblock 3.
To the extent these have a definite ending, it's not the ending intended for Minecraft.
Take Star Factory, you're not going to kill monsters and build up until you can take on a dragon, you're building a factory to make stars. You start with basic materials like an unlimited supply of wood and gold and you've reached the end of the game once your systems are just making stars automatically from your materials.
The modern game actually has a bunch of stuff "after" the ending when played straight up.
I played it in college, during the beta. There was no ending, no purpose, or quest, and the phenomena was already in full steam. To me part of the appeal was that it was essentially infinite, there was no end. By the year mark when the full version was released, the game was already cemented in history. I've since never seen the ending until reading it in this article.
If he wanted more than $20k he should have asked for it then, but I think the appeal of putting your writing in front of over a hundred million people and a $20,000 check was "enough" compensation for the work, at the time. But resentment grew as the game continued to succeed.
To me this feels like it was written after seeing the Doom music story...which is entirely different as the music of the first (new) doom game was a huge part of its success. This is literally the opposite as the text was tacked on after the game was already successful (Just not yet at its peak success.) And in some ways feels like it is inviting MS lawyers to intervene, but he has much less of a standing.
It's fascinating, I play video games with my wife. She's never been a "solo gamer" but a "social gamer" - watched and played with her big brother when growing up, then guitar hero and such, some arcade games. We finished firewatch, tale of two sons, neir automata, machinarium/botanicula/samorost, days of tentacle, overcooked,it takes 2, the recent Stray, etc etc together.
But she straight up does not UNDERSTAND a game like Sim city, or rim world. Why would anybody "play" that, is her perspective. It doesn't have a sufficiently, singularly clear narrative, flow, goal, beginning and an end. We talked about such games a few times and I have not really succeeded in moving the needle - not in her being interested in such games, but even remotely comprehending their existence or allure.
I guess it was my wife's friends that felt minecraft really needed an ending :-)
She's got a point: the game provides no clear purpose. Instead, you bring the purpose, and the game gives you a way to achieve it.
We engage in many other "pointless" pursuits: beauty, love, culture, civilization, and indeed, life itself. Everyone "plays" for a different reason, and that makes us human.
When I took a course in game design years ago I recall a lecture that distinguished between "toys" and "games". A game has an objective whereas a toy does not.
Now, you can start with a toy (like The Sims or a regulation basketball or a pencil, paper, and dice) and create a game around it by applying rules, goals, and objectives. They may be defined by others or you may be creating the game in your own mind -- either way the toy is a piece of equipment used to play the game, it is not in and of itself a game.
Your wife may not enjoy electronic toys like Sim City or Rim World, but perhaps you could pique her interest by working together to come up with games that the two of you could play using those toys?
> I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set.
There is no real ending in Minecraft. "The End" is just the name of another dimension - where of course you have to battle the big bad dragon and get the "end credits" afterwards and so on. But the dimension is literally just called "The End" and is indeed just a pun - you can mine, build, explore, and play there just like in the Overworld or in the Nether, and go back & forth between the three at any time.
In fact, most of us consider visiting The End as the real beginning of the game - exploring it gives you access to two items (shulker boxes and the Elytra), that we consider about as fundamental and essential to the game as the pickaxe or the crafting table.
"Wait what? You can craft a pickaxe? I've been punching rocks all this time!"
Yeah. I was in on early builds of Minecraft. I've never seen the end poem. Had no idea it even existed.
The entire post reads like really sour grapes from someone who believes his contribution is way more important than it is. He thinks he deserves a significant higher chunk than what he was paid.
He also acts like he has a leg to stand on and is magnanimously deciding not to bring the hammer down. No. He's going to get laughed out of the lawyer's office. It's not even going to sniff a court. I can imagine what happened.
Markus and Carl were talking with their lawyers about what was needed to facilitate the Microsoft deal. Mojang's lawyers notified them to cases like this, where there's an unsigned contract floating about. They said, get that signed so Microsoft doesn't potentially pull the deal over potential issues. Microsoft, in their due diligence, also had their lawyers combing over Mojang's contracts, assets, and liabilities. Microsoft came across this contract, meetings were had, they found out about the email chain, etc. And Microsoft's lawyers decided this was not an issue. So at that point, Mojang didn't care. Because they didn't have to.
Markus and Carl didn't tell this guy about the deal because it wasn't his business. He was an artist contracted for a bit of poetry. For all intents and purposes, everyone at Mojang considered their business with him over.
It's a weird mix of buddhist "I was and am at peace with this", but with a "I feel like I missed out" mixed in. But he fully admits it's his own fault because he was up in his own world, instead of leaving the business end to his agent.
But I don't believe this would stand up in court. There was a verbal agreement before he signed a contract. He was paid for his one-off contribution; I don't know how much work he delivered or how many hours he put into it, but 20K is half a year's income for some people, not to be sniffed at.
This has come up recently as well in some drama about voice acting on the one hand, and video game soundtracks on the other. Normally you get paid for the time spent, or the amount of your contributions used. But in the case of the voice actor, they decided the normal amount - or as it turned out later, a chunk well above the normal amount - wasn't enough and they threw it onto the internet.
But in the end, I think this is just a business transaction - one part of one part of the game, paid for with a five figure sum. The author neglected to do his due diligence and neglected to review and sign the contract in a timely fashion. Mojang and Microsoft may be susceptible to a lawsuit because the author never surrendered the rights to his work until now, but his unwillingness to cooperate while accepting payment for work delivered won't work in his favor.
And while he gave the text up into the public domain, I don't know if this holds up in court; iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright. Which means that if the author's copyright is voided, then Microsoft's copyright for Minecraft and all it contains might take over, and they might sue him instead. I'm not a lawyer or versed in copyright law, so this is just fantasizing.
iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright.
That's trademark law you're thinking of.
Copyright always applies and is automatically assigned at the time of creation. Belongs to the author by default unless created in the context of some other agreement (e.g. work for hire)
$20,000 is actually an insane amount to be paid for for the amount of effort it takes to write a poem like that. Even if it took 40 hours a week for 2 months.
Which, I really doubt it did. I read a fair amount of poetry and while it is nice, it's not particularly deep, it's also a prose poem with little to no effort put into metrical style. I feel like I could write something similar in 2-3 hours if given the prompt. To be fair, part of the value is the ideation of the universe-intelligent-being vagueness, but given the context of the game, that doesn't seem like it would take that long to think of, either.
The same can certainly be said for everyone else involved in this. Notch made off with 1.7 billion dollars for a few years of work - that's a disproportionate reward for the level of effort.
But if the poetry author wanted a disproportionate reward for their level of effort, they should have asked for it. It's business at the end of the day - they didn't write it for art's sake, they wrote it for a contract job. And it's not a particularly great poem that will be featured on poetry.com, IMO
I know basically nothing about the life of artists in general, but this interests me. Where can I read about this? Would appreciate a link that deals with the business side more than a general biography. Thanks.
Read "why are artists poor?" By Hans Abbing, who is an artist and an economist himself. It's more focused on the economy of what we call the contemporary art market but it does spend time contrasting it with the economy of """lower""" forms of art (recorded music, commercial illustration etc)
> I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't.
I inherited a server hosting and came across the ending by accident. It was a moment of "What? I can win Minecraft?". Kids were "Yeah. Winning is boring."
The "ending" of minecraft is just the point at which you have access to the entire game.
You probably know what The Nether is, that hellish looking place you access by making a portal. Reaching The Nether is progress, by getting there you get access to stuff you didn't have before, sure you can do whatever you feel like in Minecraft, but by getting there you can do more stuff than before because you have access to more stuff.
By defeating the Ender Dragon you are free to roam The End (which is the name of the whole place) and thus you finally gain access to everything the game has to offer.
What were those 25 staff doing though? It seemed like there was only actually 3 full time staff working on the game, or so the article mentions (Notch, Jeb, C418). I can't find any good sources about who was on the team at the time, but it seems like they were back office/customer support/community management/dev supporting roles?
Which is super interesting! The most successful game dev of all time was only 20% actual game devs. As if it's not about making the game but about everything else (comms, community engagement)
The author talks about the team at the time of the 1.0 release, I think. Then Markus stopped working on Minecraft altogether while Mojang grew to support the game and explore new ventures.
Definitely not, one of the first things you learn when becoming a freelancer is that it's very important to specify in the contracts what the deliverables are exactly, specially regarding copyright, source files, photoshop file vs final product, etc.
The reason is because in most cases (this is ~1 decade old personal research/opinion) unless specified the client is paying for access and use to the final product you make, not necessarily for anything else. This is the sane thing though, but in business in many cases you might want to also receive the blueprints, source code, assets, copyright, etc. This might be "obvious" depending on the industry and case, but that means it's not obvious at all in a general sense.
For example here, the company (and that might be why Microsoft backed up) might be happy with just being able to use the work, even if they don't have an exclusive contract or are the copyright holders of that particular bit. I do agree that it seems Mojang had implicit permission at least to use it, but not exclusive/full copyright/etc.
I think this is a very important quote from the author:
> And I finally got round to reading the original contract, the one I didn’t sign.
> And… Jesus Christ. It was worse than I’d even imagined. It was horrible.
> The contract was for a comprehensive buyout, signing away all my rights forever, which was exactly the thing I’d told Carl that I never did with my work.
So the fact that he kept the money does say that he agreed to write the piece for that amount of money, but it doesn't say anything about under which terms, and the terms is where they disagree. The money transfer says nothing about what rights do Mojang have over the piece and what rights the writer have over the piece.
You typically don't perform the work and take the money if you don't agree to it, or at the very least agree to future payments. If negotiations failed then it reverts back to the original offer.
At some point, contract or not, he agreed to take the money and do the work.
> And eventually Carl threatened to dump me, and get someone else in to write the ending, if I didn’t wrap up the negotiations that day and take his first offer. I was stunned, I didn’t understand what was happening, and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was. The friendship is more important than the money.
I don't think that's a contract. We need an offer and acceptance (and consideration). More broadly we also need adequate specificity to determine the essential terms.
Here there were two essential terms: 1) the author would write a poem for use in Minecraft, and 2) Minecraft would pay consideration.
Stepping through the rounds:
1. ... skip prior rounds ...
2. Minecraft demands that Julian accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is not an offer because it does not specify the essential term, consideration.]
3. Julian agrees to accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is also not an offer, because they still have not indicated what the consideration will be.]
4. Minecraft offers $20,0000 in exchange for the poem. [This is the first offer.]
5. Julian refuses to sign. [This is a rejection of the offer.]
I'd agree that something was purchased for $20000, but what? My assumption is a license to redistribute the poem as part of the game. This guy is probably correct that he did not agree to an NDA, or transferal of exclusive rights.
That's why I think MS did not need to pay him off; they thought they had a license, even if they didn't own the IP. And that's also why it's totally legit for him to republish his own work under a free license.
> However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement.
It sounds like an awful, muddy mess that would take a great deal of time and money to litigate if the author decided to take that path. Without an explicit contract, even determining which court (and which nation) has jurisdiction for this kind of international transaction sounds like a nightmare.
I agree that in most jurisdictions I have any familiarity with, some kind of contract likely exists for usage of the text, but that is a fundamentally different question from ownership of the text. And I imagine that the text has subsequently been used by Mojang and Microsoft for other purposes, which may or may not be found to be covered by the original agreement.
In short, it's exactly the kind of ambiguity that big corporations hate when it comes to intellectual property.
> Microsoft would remove his poem and nobody would read it ever again. He can only lose.
No, because he retained the copyright. If he won against Microsoft he would a) presumably get a lot of money (financial win), b) strike a small blow for the little guy against megacorps (moral win), and c) still be able to release the poem as CC0 or whatever he wanted (win).
That's a lot of anger, negativity and bitterness, and entitlement (one of the game's creators for writing the ending text?). Reminds me of the kid on the cover of the Nevermind album and other people that are kinda tangentially connected to something massively successful, but not connected enough to benefit materially, and they let that define who they are and ruin their lives.
Could have been a neat personal story, "hey you know I wrote the ending text to Minecraft?" Instead, it's this.
It's the attitude espoused in the writing. The outcome was literally his way of not letting his own frustration consume him and only available to him after doing heavy doses of psychedelics. I'm glad he was able to let go because his attitude of being entitled to something when he was, in fact, not, is what has been causing him all the pain.
I think we all can empathize with the guy. He was close to massively successful people and he clearly contributed something soulful. It is the end jewel of the most successful game of all time! I feel for him and think this was a really nice outcome for everyone.
(I just wish the essay was edited down by 1/3, but that’s me)
Isn't the whole point that the author thinks he deserves more compensation than he got? He's quoting the compensation for various Mojang employees and comparing it to what he got. He seems quite jelaous and/or entitled.
20000€ would in most European countries be a pretty good compensation for about 3 months of work, after taxes. It doesn't seem unreasonable on the face of it.
Agreed, other companies/video games would have asked him for his stories on their games considering that he'd done it for one of the biggest video games.
> Early next year, Markus earned a three-million-dollar dividend on his shares in Mojang. But, as the actual value of his company, which he mostly owned, had gone up by many tens of millions, he figured he didn’t really need another three million on top. So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending.
(Since the author seems to have spent about a month or so working on the game, you could reason that his compensation is about on par with the employees who worked for a full year. But he doesn't seem to see it that way, or he thinks he should be compensated better than them? I don't know.)
Or he's upset that he didn't even hear from Notch at all at this point? That at the success of the game he felt forgotten for his contribution and was using this as an example of other contributors being kept in mind?
I'm speculating, but having known "artists", some of them think very differently to the average HN crowd.
Never before has the HN bubble been so clear to me before reading the comments of this post.
He outright says it in the article, about how it wasn't about the money. If it was, there are more effective ways of going about getting that compensation than putting the story into the public domain
To me, it seems clear that he was not a friend. The people, who slaved away for months or years as employees to build the game may have been friends. That would explain the outsized compensation they all got.
However, he was just a contractor found via twitter who wrote a few pages of text for the ending credits.
They really did not think of him as a friend, and when he was done with work they never contacted him again except for legal reasons.
But once again, why the focus on compensation? It's a pretty small section of the article that's after the frustration with Carl.
Once again speculating, but the author didn't want to be treated like "just a contractor", and nor did that seem like how the relationship started out. Even as a contractor, I personally feel Notch could have reached out with happy words at a minimum - instead the author got silence.
Notch probably dealt with tons of temporary contractors during the development of the game. He doesn’t have to keep life time commitments to all of them surely
Is he asking for nothing? Half of the post is about how Mojang got millions then billions and he got nothing. If he's not asking for what he considers to be his share of the pie, then I don't know what the whole post is about.
No, that's what he says. But someone who genuinely grew to understand he was wrong doesn't write blog posts like this, explaining how he was wrong, like that's a question in everyone's mind (honestly until now I'd never known there was an end to Minecraft)
No, this is a person who's burning with envy and finds telling yourself stories an outlet.
Or it's a person who burned with envy, is introspective enough to recall that feeling and write from that perspective in order for his readers to learn from his own shortcomings.
Or, it's a writer, who writes for a living, spinning a story to draw the reader in. He pitches his product at the end: he want's subscriptions to pay his rent and buy his socks.
I have no ire towards the author. I thoroughly enjoyed the post and found several aspects of it that helped me find some introspection to something I was talking about with my wife just the other day (regarding capitalism, career, compensation).
I think in the end that's what he's doing. It's an overly long winded way to say he wrote the poem. He's trying to wrestle that recognition for his work he thought Mojang was going to provide him and he's sharing a tale of one artist who wants to live above Intellectual Property law and create beautiful things while recognizing he has to eat and put a roof over his head.
I pass no judgment on the author. I might slip him a few bucks in the paypal link he gave because I acquired Minecraft during beta and continue to play it off and on today and consider his contribution to be a nice addition to the game. Perhaps I will buy his novel. I think he did a great job trying to market himself here.
It's emblematic for his entire inability to talk about money. He didn't want to talk about money, but he also didn't want his agent to do it for him. He has some highly idealistic beliefs about how money is not important, but he struggles to pay rent.
I love his story, I sympathise, and I want Microsoft, or Notch, or Mojang, to just give him a million dollars. But I can also see that his financial struggles are mostly his own doing. And probably his own choice. He wants to live in a world that's not about money, but he also wants to be able to pay rent.
This is what does it for me. This was entirely of his own doing. He didn't want to negotiate, didn't want to get his agent involved for either no reason or a reason that he's not explaining, he managed to annoy the CEO of a three person company so much over email that Mojang's Carl lost his patience and told him to either take the deal or go away.
You're trying to ship a game. This writer keeps hitting your inbox with prose that I assume that is about as annoying to read as the original article. He's wasting your time and not getting to the point. You don't know what the guy's deal is and you stopped trying to figure out two emails ago. Compared to all the other things that you need to be doing to actually ship the game, this is incredibly minor and taking up your time daily. You finally tell him, "look, it's 20k or we go look elsewhere".
From that story, the only thing Mojang did wrong is that they didn't send him the contract straight away. We all know he would have signed whatever was on it back then, as he clearly didn't know what he wanted. Looks like someone regretted behaving completely irrationally when closing a deal, then regretted it some more than he never attempted to get more compensation even after the fact (he could have easily gotten something a couple of years later if he had tried, and once more the article completely omits as to why he didn't try to reach out through his agent or anyone that can behave as an adult after the launch) and is now screaming at the universe that he's not being showered with riches and glory when all of this was his own doing, even after he had multiple opportunities to come out winning.
Originally, they were just trying to release the official release version of the game. Stakes weren't so high then, and he already had trouble discussing their contract.
Of course when the Microsoft deal came along, stakes were much higher and patience for his reluctance a lot less.
To me the post is about how he wrote a story for a friend, that friend didn't treat him like a friend, and how he was hurt by that. It sounds like the post was about letting him vent his pain and frustration and reach some level of emotional catharsis, as well as officially releasing the story to the public domain.
I find some people don't draw strong distinctions between friends and acquaintances; they treat acquaintances like friends. After going through a collaborative purely creative journey, I could almost see that boundary being broken down further.
So yeah, they weren't friends. But he thought they were, between whatever interaction they had before the poem and the collaborative effort of creating the poem. So does that really make it a Flawed premise?
Yeah, seriously. You didn't create Minecraft you wrote a poem that shows up in the credits. Notch wasn't your friend he found you through a recommendation on Twitter and contracted some content. 20k for something less intelligible than Kubla Khan seems pretty fair to me. Be happy your acid trip is preserved forever in one of the most successful games in history. And get over yourself.
Yeah I need to stop. The more I brood over what I just read the more unbearably frustrated it makes me. I want my time back. I am sorry if I'm being overly harsh. This one really hit a nerve.
I am going to assume you are one of those reductionist materialists I read about. /s
Just saying that I found the story interesting and well… lovely (in a way) but perhaps that’s different backgrounds at work (I dabble in art) so I wonder what makes this such an unbearable thing to read, perhaps a very practical person? Not necessarily directed at you dcow.
I actually did find parts of the essay quite reassuring and beautiful and the story in isolation rather interesting. As a copyleft non-believer in intellectual property (and rather that you must apply labor to ideas and can only own the outcome of such acts), I am also pleased with the outcome.
So the sour aftertaste, for me, is likely related to the juxtaposition of positive and negative elements and I think ultimately is a reflection of the balance he chose to give each. Suffice to say, I think there's a not-so-different delivery of this essay which would have left me with a much better aftertaste.
Sounds like his art had a bigger impact on you than you realized. :)
I share your beliefs about IP, and I hope one day the world breaks free of the concept. But maybe try to be a little less mean. It’s worth it if only not to be one of those people that just post dunks for internet points. (I’ve done it a few times and usually regretted how I sounded after the dust settled.)
Cheers for openly expressing “down with copyright” though.
One thing I learned about HN that I don't even think about anymore is that upvotes are only weakly correlated with the quality of the submission itself - they usually reflect the interest in the topic revealed by the headline, or signify there's good HN commentary, or both.
IIRC, back before the "favorite" feature was introduced, people would use - and some still use - upvotes to bookmark interesting threads.
Second thing I learned is to always at least skim the comments before opening the submission itself, to gauge whether the latter is even worth it. Quite often it isn't. Here I thought it is, but the text was so long and... off somehow, that I got back to comment thread and read it more carefully, and now I know why it's off and that it's not worth it (for me personally) to read it more carefully.
That kid had no creative input though, they did no work; this person did work, as an already successful professional, and had (IMO, obviously) a transformative effect on the whole project through his work.
he had zero effect on the whole project, the game was already massively popular and a cultural phenomenon well before 2011 and before it had an ending.
And not just entitlement, it's enjoyment coming from the worst place. This guy by his own admission never made the effort to fight for money, instead prioritizing love, whatever that means, but when it comes to getting paid he feels entitled to money. He just wants "fair" without having to make the effort to think about what that means.
Did we read the same thing? He says he felt at the time that he should have got something. Much of the post is about him avoiding trying to get any money. He had some issues, sure. Still has, by the look of it. But it’s not accurate to say he’s greedy and entitled. He failed to understand the situation he was in, got something that seemed good but was actually not that good (which does happen all the time), went through all sorts of weird metaphysical things (not my cup of tea, but I am not him), and apparently ended up somewhat satisfied in the end.
We can disagree with him, the writing is rambling and takes for ever to get to the point, and then hits it on the head repeatedly, but in the end it does not matter. I suspect what is important (to him) is that he’s written it, not that you read it.
Anyway, I am surprised to see so much hostility here.
> But it’s not accurate to say he’s greedy and entitled
I didn't say he was greedy; by the sounds of it he's happy with very little. It is 100% correct to say he's entitled. He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does, and in a way that protects his interests. He feels entitled to that.
Yes, sorry, that was in other posts and it got blurred. I did not want to put words into your mouth.
> He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does
He explains why he did not involve his agent, and also that he does not expect anyone to do it. Otherwise he’d have plenty of opportunities to do it. He sounds entitled in that he has weird ideas about love and friendship but he just sounds like someone hurt that the world does not work as they thought.
He didn't want to involve his agent, but he didn't want to negotiate the contract himself either. He just wanted the purity of the art. Which I can understand and admire, but it was also contract work. And his unwillingness to see it for what it was, made the whole thing incredibly awkward for everybody.
In the end, his struggles seem to have lead to a lot of personal growth, and that's great, and he does seem to understand that he mostly created this problem himself, and could easily have prevented it by involving his agent. But I'm not so sure that he understands that this was never about friendship; he was hired to write an ending, had a profound artistic connection with the guy who hired him, and somehow he seemed to think that entitled him to a friendship rather than a business relationship. I'm not sure he understands that that was the core misunderstanding here, and that his belief in a friendship that was really a business relationship, made the business relationship really awkward and dysfunctional.
> he just sounds like someone hurt that the world does not work as they thought
Exactly, that's another facet of his entitlement that I have deep content for. Many good people work hard to figure out how the world works. Other people have in mind how it should work and get upset when it doesn't.
I think he was just very, very misguided, and he still is. And possibly on drugs. I cannot imagine myself following the reasoning he did. But at the same time I can see he was not trying to take advantage of it.
Im honestly chocked that people react so negatively to this piece. Yes, the author expresses many negative and self centered emotions. He is very clear about that. It is part of the story. It is a story about being a flawed person.
I sympathize with him. I loved this piece. I hope he truly did let go of all the hangups he described. And it does seem that he actually did sell the the rights of use to microsoft, making this whole text a weird misunderstanding. But that does not mean that the text is bad, or boring, or uninteresting. Rather the opposite.
I read the whole thing. It was somewhat overwritten. Not my favorite ever post-hallucinogen-trip essay.
I agree with other commenters that the author is greedy and petty. He accepted €20,000 for his work, a decent amount. Then he decided that he should make way more money because the game was successful. Then he tried to take advantage of the fact that he hadn't signed a contract, even though he had obviously accepted the terms when he accepted the money. He behaved shittily by not honoring an informal contract. He tried to paint it as some huge company legal dept vs little guy thing based on the fact that it's now Microsoft and yes, work for hire contracts drafted by corporate lawyers do look evil. But he had already reneged on his handshake agreement, after spending the 20K, even before big companies or professional lawyers were involved.
Now he's trying to parlay his brush with fame into Substack subscriptions. Good luck to him.
I read almost the whole thing but stopped before the End Poem, because I still haven't defeated the Ender Dragon. I admit I'm not really trying, but might still do so at some point.
> I admit I'm not really trying, but might still do so at some point.
It's kinda worth it to get access to elytra and shulker boxes but they do tend to make you a bit OP. Then again to make sensible use of elytra you need a gunpowder farm and once you're building farms like that, you're already on the way to domination...
To me the agreement sounds like they bought the right to use the story as the ending to the game. They didn't agree on signing over the rights to the story, and he said if he knew that would have been part of the deal he wouldn't have agreed. He was caught by surprise when he found that language in the contract. Sure he was negligent in not following up when the contract didn't match his expectations, but so was Mojang for not ensuring the contract was signed before using his work.
> He behaved shittily by not honoring an informal contract.
Did he not honor the informal contract? What did he not honor?
If anything, Carl didn't honor the informal contract, he was the one saying Minecraft would promote his work, and no a name in a tiny credit is not doing that... but I'm feeling generous as let's be honest that's a bullshit clause that corporation always try to use that line without meaning much so it's to be expected.
Julian said he was never giving all its rights away. That was part of the informal contract. That's the thing that made him not sign it.
My biggest problem with the post is the massive ego the author seems to have about the impact and importance of their writing.
To be frank, the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success.
The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees and seem to genuinely believe their contribution is on the same level as people like Jeb and C418. They literally describe the End Poem as a quote "Priceless Gift".
I've never even looked at the poem and have beaten Minecraft many times. I'm probably not the target audience though, I generally skip quest text in games.
You should read it. IMO it transforms Minecraft from being just an ordinary game experience into being art, it makes the context of what you've been doing, in playing Minecraft, into something like folklore.
Late at night, having defeated the Ender dragon, having spent months in the game, it turns that moment into an almost spiritual experience.
I was 14 and it brought the silly little block building game where I farmed trees and made dirt houses and turned it into a meaningful story, something that made me think, something that moved me.
You really think that a poem that people have tattooed on themselves, put onto tee shirts and mugs, inspired emotional emails to the author, and so on has inspired exactly zero excess recommendations to friends, zero dinnertime discussions or social media posts that have led to purchases?
Did you read the ending text? It's incredibly long. Are you claiming that people have the entire thing tattooed on themselves? I definitely can't see it fitting on a coffee mug in any readable fashion
To be fair, some people make tattoos with all kinds of silly things, the bar is pretty low. One can argue that whatever the ending text was, someone would make a tattoo with it eventually.
So then would the artist who created that ending not be entitled to the recognition they deserve for their part in it? If not this author, then another? Would the same story, but from another person change anything?
Did you read the article? There's a picture of someone with one of the lines tattooed on their arm. Obviously people aren't putting whole poem on things
I think the original point is to say that people felt moved enough by the poem to "permanently" integrate some feature of it into their lives. Critiquing the "whole poem" thing feels incredibly pedantic.
If it was any other thing, it would have been tattooed or put on t-shirts as well.
People are putting Minecraft’s ending on things because it’s Minecraft and Minecraft left an impact on them. The actual poem was a commodity that was tacked on to make the game complete as a muse.
It sounds harsh but that’s the truth and why OP isn’t entitled to any more than they got, especially with that attitude.
Keep in mind you're arguing with engineering types about this. Over the course of my career I've come to find that a not-insignificant % of engineers value art and artistic contributions very little or not at all.
The whole point of the post is that there are ways to express value other than dollars.
That’s why the author lets go of the dollars and gives the story away for free at the end.
Maybe the game would have made the same money. But it’s also true that Markus asked for an ending story, selected this one and put it in, and kept it there.
>The whole point of the post is that there are ways to express value other than dollars
That may be the author's point, but their egotism also then seems to believe that a significant portion of the non-monetary value of Minecraft is a result of their own brief work on an unskippable wall of text that has a nice sentiment but is quickly forgotten by, I'd guess, nearly everyone that plays the game.
No it wouldn't have. The poem brought minecraft into the realm of the spiritual. It might not have had that effect directly on you, but it did for many players which is enough to elevate the game in the zeitgeist of humanity.
Sure, Minecraft would have still sold as much if the ending screen said "You won" or much simply "The end".
But, he did still put in the effort in creating the poem. Every part of the game matters, and I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game.
I understand the author being hurt as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game, he just needed the credit or any little token of appreciation from Minecraft. The author asked Markus to mention something he refused, which is kind of the author's fault for not signing a contract, but it's still sad.
But he did want more, that's the whole point of the first half of this article.
> I admired the fact that he was, again, giving money to back-office staff who had just arrived in the last year, and had zero creative input into the game
> I couldn’t understand why I was again being treated worse than them. I had helped him create the actual game, I had given him the ending he wanted but could not write
He acts as if he's some creative designer that played a huge role in the creation of the game. To be frank, an intern at Mojang that was with the company for a few months and added 2 blocks to the game would have made a bigger contribution than he made.
This is, in my opinion, the core disconnect the author has with reality, and is driven by the fact that to him his work is the center of the universe and he struggles to understand why that isn't the case for everyone else.
The author genuinely believes they made contributions to the game on the same level as Jeb, and that's why it feels unfair when he sees Mojang employees getting a $300k bonus and him getting nothing. But the reality is he made a very minor contribution to the game and got paid $20k, which is a pretty nice sum for a few days of work.
You see, I might be a little biased here, but as we don't have the email in front of us I'm going to have to take a guess.
I'm fairly confident that was was meant by that was exposure in the form of his poem getting put into Minecraft, not exposure in the form of a shout-out or other promotion.
Unless the author releases the email we'll never know the context, but I've been a spectator to these types of negotiations enough that I strongly believe the context would support my interpretation.
He certainly seems to struggle with talking about money. Like he said: he should have let his agent handle it. But he didn't, because he saw this as something other than what it was: a friendship instead of contract work.
It was an awkward relationship because both sides had a completely different view of what the relationship was, and didn't really communicate that with each other. It's great that he was finally able to write this down. It sucks that he struggled, and Mojang could easily have just given him $1 million to sign the contact, but his inability to talk about this, to talk about money, is probably the main reason for this as well as possibly many of his other financial troubles.
Sure, it's possible that's true, but I don't see how that reflects poorly on anyone but himself. He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.
We can write justifications for why he did this, but that he seems to believe he was entitled to more money than the offer he accepted is entirely a problem of his own creation.
Expecting Mojang to deal with his communication and mental health issues is absurd.
Why would it reflect poorly on anyone but himself? Well, I guess he has appearances going for him: he's a struggling artist while the other party is a wealthy corporation. But him being a struggling artist seems to be a clear choice, even if he hasn't quite made that choice explicit for himself.
> He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.
The way I'm reading it is that he didn't even want to talk about the money. It had to be all about the art. And yet he clearly has lots of feelings about the money. Like I said, it's mostly his own attitude that's his problem. And although he claims lots of personal growth because of this, I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others.
Still, he's probably right that he still owns it and Mojang only had a license, and giving it to the public domain is a nice gesture, if made with some grandstanding.
Well, we're all here under a comment on HN asking why the article is getting such negative reactions. And when you describe the author's position as "I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others", maybe you can understand why the author is getting such negative reactions.
Ultimately this is simply where ape brains and business economics collide. It reminds me of the experiment with two monkeys where one gets a cucumber and the other a grape.
As he said in his writing he simply assumed that whoever he is dealing with would give him what is fair. So he accepted the $20K and he was probably perfectly happy with his cucumber. Then later after a bunch of extra money is funneled into the company he sees a bunch of other people getting grapes for what he perceives as a similar effort to his own. Now the deal stops being fair in our monkey brains and we are hard-wired to demand equivalent payment.
However business economics has an entirely different concept of what is fair. It assumes everything is fair as long as promises are kept and deals are honored. There is no concept in business of renegotiating compensation of old contracts if someone else gets more compensation for a similar effort. This is why collective bargaining by unions is the only way for everyone to get equal pay for equal work.
He was paid to write a poem to end the game. He was not paid for all rights to that work, forever. Its reasonable to assert that if Mojang wanted contractual rights for the work, they should have provided a signed contract which explained the rights they were purchasing.
>as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game
I think members of the modding community contributed much more in material terms, and both they and YouTube content creators contributed much more in driving it's rise & popularity, than the author of this poem. It seems the author had a pretty clear verbal contract on their compensation, and received the money.
They author didn't receive the promotional support for their other work that was promised, and I think should be their much bigger gripe. For an artist/creator I would think that would be the big pain point, not having their other work broadly exposed to an audience of millions, instead of the $$$ aspect they spend so much time on in this article. (Especially when that exposure would possibly have lead to significant financial success for their work as well)
> the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success
Any success exists because of the sum of its parts. I have never played Minecraft, but I've played Portal. The ending to Portal was emotional, it was the cherry on top of a great game. That song and the emotion that came with it is still ingrained in me and is part of why I still recommend Portal to people who haven't played it.
Would I have played the game without the song? Probably. Would it have made the same impact without it? I don't think so. Emotion is a large part of why people play games, so that poem might actually have an impact.
Does that mean he deserved more? I don't know, €20k seems reasonable. But I think you underestimate the impact something like a poem can have.
Eh, the ending to Minecraft was very much an afterthought. A huge number of players have never even attempted it. And the poem at the end is... frequently skipped, even on the first go-around. It's nowhere near the level of the ending to Portal.
I'm not saying that all poems in video games or all endings to video games are as little impact as Minecraft's. Portal would be a great example of an ending that was a significantly greater part of the whole.
I'm specifically referring to Minecraft, where the poem is largely disconnected from the rest of the game and doesn't pertain to any narrative or story (Minecraft doesn't have a story, it's a sandbox game). It's a cool poem, but it isn't part of the important bits that made Minecraft the colossal success that it is.
I'm not taking any side here but I don't think your comparison holds.
Portal is as much a story-driven game as it is about the mechanics. I know very few people who played Portal after they finished it, except maybe replaying it.
Contrast to Minecraft, where at least my peer group (adults already as of 2011), just spent hours, days, months building stuff on a map, completely ignoring the "story". I actually heard about this poem for the first time when I read this piece.
I've never finished Minecraft, but I guess I spent a few hundred hours building stuff and in my opinion, "played" it more than other games. But that doesn't mean I'm in any way stating an opinion about compensation or who did something wrong or how important anything is.
I've played both and it's apples to oranges, dry rotten oranges. In portal the story slowly builds up into the grand finale and the ending is indeed emotional knot to tie up the story with a bow.
In minecraft you have a a long preparing to do before frustrating boss fight followed by some scrolling text you likely won't be bothered to read and skip thinking "Well, that was a waste of time." (Not by a fault of the poem but by a fault of game design.) Minecraft is a great sandbox and world exploration game. I see why they wanted to add an "ending" (to make it clear it's out of beta, (releasing on time)) but the ending doesn't make much sense game-wise.
well, that person is an artist, artistry is all about SELF expression... people who make it along that path have a strong trait of wanting their EGO (their selves) to be seen and attended to. that's why they are artists.
the end poem is a priceless gift because they made it so: they refused to sell it, they consistently refused to put a price on it.
Right. My initial reaction was “what!? Minecraft has an ending?”. Finishing the game is not at all part of the appeal of the game. It’s like having an ending to your LEGO pieces.
> The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees
C418 made the music... plenty love it, I don't. Doesn't means it has no value, it has none to me, just like the End Poem has none to you, but yet still some people got a tattoo of it.
You are the only one belittling anyone though, you are belittling what Julian did, saying he deserve less recognition than C418, while Julian just said they got recognition while he didn't (without saying if he deserved it more than them).
Why would you think it's socially acceptable to be a flawed person? Flaws aren't something we excuse just because people express them. Expressing them doesn't absolve you of them. They are still there, as flaws, and therefore people react to them as flaws.
Of course I do, but I don't expect people to excuse me of them or ignore them, just because I say them. The OP isn't expecting that, but other people in this thread are expecting it on his behalf. I don't even think the OP wants people to excuse his flaws, like people in this thread seem to want to insist on doing.
> Why would you think it's socially acceptable to be a flawed person?
It isn't, but it should be, because everyone is a flawed person. The fact that we have all have to act like we don't makes our current society so incredibly toxic. It causes everyone to pretend to be something they're really not, because otherwise they become ostracized from their community. This is incredibly polarizing and causes (in US politics) the right to pretend they're Christian, even though they show no actual Christian values and the left to pretend they care about the environment by eating less meat, while at the same time flying everywhere and throwing out clothes after wearing them 6 times.
If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them. Then we don't have to pretend every single day that we are something we are not. Then we don't have to fake a smile when we have a bad day. Then we don't have to marry a person because it makes our parents happy. Then we don't have people who are afraid to come out as gay or trans or anything else.
If flaws were fine things to be accepted, then they wouldn't be classified as flaws.
What is society if we just accept all problems as part of the person or else society will be toxic?
Also has there ever been a society where flaws are just accepted without any kind of judgement? I would suggest that in those societies they simply did not classify them as flaws.
> If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them
We can and do accept that but again that doesn't fix the flaw or absolve the person of the responsibility of the flaw.
I personally think the toxicity of modern society actually arises from the fact that we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws, rather than the opposite.
> Also has there ever been a society where flaws are just accepted without any kind of judgement?
We're moving goal posts here. You asked whether it was socially acceptable to be a flawed person and I responded to that specifically. I never wrote that any and every flaw should be accepted. That's very different from accepting that everyone is flawed in some way or another and actually dealing with those flaws in stead of pretending we aren't.
> we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws
That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.
> We're moving goal posts here. You asked whether it was socially acceptable to be a flawed person and I responded to that specifically. I never wrote that any and every flaw should be accepted. That's very different from accepting that everyone is flawed in some way or another and actually dealing with those flaws in stead of pretending we aren't.
No I'm not moving the goalposts at all. It's not socially acceptable to be a flawed person by definition, that's why they are called flaws.
> That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.
Yes because those fulfil our desires of the fact that we don't openly attack others' flaws in day to day life. If anything they are proof of our starvation of healthy judgement.
He had multiple opportunities to get his agent (and he had one the whole time, which he mentioned early in the story) do the grown up talk for him, and he passed it up every single time. Every time, it's excuse after excuse about why he either sent nonsensical emails when trying to talk to people about compensation or just stayed silent while resenting Mojang for not actively coming after him and shower him with millions out of nowhere.
Honestly very little sympathy from me. I would be beyond pissed if I was trying to close a deal with someone who kept sending me novels over email instead.
Things are not so black and white. It's not that engineers can't appreciate art. The people commenting are saying that the payment was according to what was agreed and the artist's seller remorse is unwarranted. Thats all they are saying. It has nothing to do with art appreciation etc.
I'm actually kind of shocked at the majority reaction here. I can relate in many ways to the author and can feel his struggle through the story. I empathize even though I can see where the mistakes were made.
I figure we just have a lot of Carls in here. There's always been a very business-oriented culture here: people are looking for success in their careers and monetary success is a big part of it. Contracts and IP are big parts of the business brain and I think people just struggle to see things from a different perspective.
All I can say is I'm very appreciative for the author to share the perspective. He says it clearly, there aren't any bad guys there and I think so many people in this forum want there to be one.
It's actually pretty hilarious when you put it like that. Oh, you are insisting there are no bad guys and you refuse to make a bad guy? OK, then YOU are the bad guy! For... having feelings. Bad feelings you should feel ashamed for having. Or at least keep them to yourself for god's sake! Teach you to have feelings but still decide there are no bad guys! There's ALWAYS a bad guy if there are Feelings!
But yeah I'm shocked too, not what I would have expected from an HN comment thread. Maybe if he had been a coder instead of an author? I mean, HN threads reliably are on the side of coders who release their code open source but then have that code used by someone else to make billions, thinking they have the right to be mad and deserve a cut despite literally putting an open source license on it saying otherwise! (which this guy didn't do... until now) I really don't know what's going on.
Are people actually not mad that this guy was (at points in his life) upset he didn't get a cut, but actually mad that he released his thing CC0 in the end instead of trying to get a cut? Because he didn't do a good enough job of getting a cut, and has only himself to blame for that, and should be blamed for it? But I don't want to assume people mean something different than what they say, when they say they are actually mad at him for having the temerity to have feelings about not getting a cut. I'm just bewildered.
I think there's something beautiful about the combination of the content of the post and the content of this comment section. It seems almost too perfect.
I feel like the Bayonetta voice actress has really brought this kind of behaviour to light recently. People who have minor contributions to large franchises and then think that their part was way more influential than it was.
If you read the whole story you may realize that it was not the lack of material benefits that made him bitter but the distrust and a false friendship caused by miscommunication by flawed humans.
Honestly I think the author has the right intuition - it's a sad story with no clear-cut lessons.
He didn't file a wacky lawsuit like Wyn Cooper's friend from "I Wanna Be Yours", instead he's reflected on a brush with greatness, and he's still doing art. Seems ok.
Perhaps he is better off not having Notch's riches considering that the guy went full QAnon?
You say entitlement like it's a bad thing. When I do work, I am entitled to compensation. So yeah, entitlement is the perfect feeling one should have in this situation. Not at all like a kid in a photograph, but more like the photographer and album cover designer. A smaller part of a much greater work of art.
If not transfer copyright, a at least a licence of some kind. They must reasonably have acquired something for their consideration of 20000€ which the author accepted from them.
For usage rights, probably so. But a transfer has stricter requirements in most countries, and it doesn't mean he agreed to all the other clauses in the contract that he hadn't even seen at the time.
Yeah, I don't understand how this could've taken more than a couple of e-mails when the work was already done. Why the heck wouldn't Julian ask Markus to step in once he became uncomfortable with e-mailing Carl? Why didn't he just say "ok this took me X hours, so X euros is fair compensation"?
It's very hard for me to read this in a way where Julian doesn't come off as, at best, an idiot, and at worst, an asshole who thinks writing two pages of text is equivalent to the thousands of hours of labor the five Mojang employees had put into the project at the time.
I'm not sure the contract is even legal. In the EU "moral rights" cannot be signed away, and in many EU countries they cannot even be waived. From what I understand, in Sweden they can only be waived in limited, specific ways, and the contract Julian posted demands he waive everything he can.
Whether it's legal or not it's extremely dodgy. It's pretty much a demand of unconditional surrender. And we know C418 got better terms than these, since he retains copyright to his music.
No, because it is illusory[1], you cannot enter into a contract that basically says "ok you get to dictate the terms and I'll do whatever you say".
That said, I think a lawyer could make a strong claim that later accepting the $20k (presumably he had to provide some sort of payment info for this) gave Mojang at a minimum the rights to use it in the game.
An interesting thing is that C418 (Daniel Rosenfeld) did not sign away all his rights. That is why Minecraft: Volume Alpha and Minecraft: Volume Beta are copyright C418 on Spotify, whereas the later albums are copyright Microsoft Studios Music - and it's also why all new music to Minecraft is made by people other than Daniel Rosenfeld.
So it seems Julian should have been able to get a similar deal. I bet Jakob had no power to actually go through with the threat of taking out the end poem - Notch would have intervened if it came to that.
It is a bit of a shame but it seems like it's been used as an opportunity to bring in new people and ideas to the game and I appreciate that. Pigstep is a banger.
Agreed on Pigstep, but I bet Raine would have liked to have kept the extended rights Rosenfeld got, only she can't afford to refuse, probably.
I also got to say, although Pigstep as a record is great, and Raine's music for Celeste is terrific, the new in-game ambient music doesn't hold up to Rosenfeld's.
Notch wanted a freelance writer to write a funky written piece for after the player defeats the ender dragon. He finds one and they agree on a price via email. Notch likes the result, integrated the writing into the game and pays the writer the agreed-upon amount.
During due diligence of the MS purchase, the lawyers want the contract formalized. The freelancer erratically responds, writing self-contradictory emails to various people in the company.
Company lawyers don’t want to deal with the nonsense and decide they can win a legal challenge if it ever comes to that, based on the initial agreements between notch and the freelance writer.
The game releases and gets more popular. One day the freelancer writes a substack article. The end.
I'm gonna guess it's something like: this guy is using a "friendship" narrative because it's his best argument, but it's not the reality. He accepted, via email, a deal for what Mojang thought was a nice sum for writing an ending to their game.
Later he wouldn't sign the contract stating what he accepted in email.
Markus was seemingly very generous to everyone he felt was important to the success of Mojang. I sincerely doubt he didn't consider this guy. Markus is not so selfish that he wouldn't make the guy a millionaire if he felt his contribution was important. Or shout out his stuff.
The guy thought he was cozying up with the big boys, but he was a fiverr hire.
There's and ending to Minecraft? There goes my perception (acquired over the years of reading bits and bobs about it) of it being an endless world building game.
There's an "ending" in terms of there is an event that gets the credits to play, but you can continue to play afterwords, and there is a not insignificant amount of content unlocked by triggering the event. You can also easily play forever without achieving this ending.
I've probably played a few hundred hours of minecraft and never tried to reach the ending because I spend all my time building slight variations of the same cool wizards spire, and designing redstone minecart subways.
> You can also easily play forever without achieving this ending.
I played from 2013 to 2020 before I visited the End and killed the dragon. Then I realised how OP elytra are and now it's an early game goal to grab a pair.
I still haven't killed the dragon. My son can kill it in under 20 minutes and loves showing me the elytra, but I've never gotten myself one. I just get stuck exploring, digging tunnels, building houses and castles and collecting animals.
It is. He claims that with a specific seed, he's done it in much less (4 minutes maybe? I don't know). It's possible his speed-run record with a random seed is 14 minutes now, but I'm not entirely sure about that.
Last year, his class at school (he was 12-13) had their own server where they built lots of stuff. At some point, they divided into two teams. His team was the largest, which he found unfair, so he switched to the smaller team. Then both teams secretly decided to gang up on him, which they did when he wasn't prepared. 20 kids, against him on his own, without his armor on. He had an enchanted golden apple ready, quickly put on his netherite gear, and went to town. Beat them all.
As part of a special projects week the school organised not just a regular sports day, but also an e-sports day. 7 events. He won 6 of them, including one game he'd never played, and got silver on the one game he didn't win.
He's ridiculously good, that much is clear to me now. I'll let him know the internet says he should get a Youtube channel. He doesn't talk much, though, and I think that's kinda necessary for a youtube channel.
> It's possible his speed-run record with a random seed is 14 minutes now
14 minutes would be top 400 of the "random seed glitchless" category. Which is pretty good since there's 3600+ (distinct) runs on that leaderboard.
> He's ridiculously good, that much is clear to me now.
I would agree.
> He doesn't talk much, though, and I think that's kinda necessary for a youtube channel.
I dunno - I follow a few Minecraft channels who don't talk and use subtitles instead. Fits with the general "chill" aesthetic (although I appreciate speedruns are anything but chill.)
I discussed it with him, and he says the 14 minutes was someone else. Also, he's not that interested in Minecraft anymore and prefers Terraria. He's currently helping his older cousin beat all the bosses there.
He also claims to have beaten Civ 6 at Deity level, admittedly by following strategies he learned in Youtube, which is frustrating to me because I'm struggling on Immortal figuring stuff out on my own. At least I can still beat him in chess.
Well, there is an end. It's called The End. There's a dragon there that you can defeat, and if you do, you get to see this poem. After that, you can continue playing. And I believe there's some content you can only experience after you've finished the end.
I kinda feel like this guy is overstating his contribution to Minecraft. It's nice to have an end screen message, but that isn't what drove the value of the game and could have easily been replaced by something else.
Rule #1 of getting paid for your work is don't do a bunch of work without signing a contract first. Even if you're an artist. I highly doubt he could have released that poem on his own and turned it into millions of dollars or whatever he thinks a "fair" contribution is.
Contributing an asset doesn't give you any entitlement to share in the company. If you want some equity in the company you better ask for it up front, because they probably won't give it to you and would just hire someone else and you can save your hard work. 20k seems fair and helped the author out a lot at the time. Posting a long rant about it probably hurts his future work opportunities.
Indeed, the odd twist in this story was that he was paid for his work. I was expecting a story about how he was still chasing his money to this day.
I'm fairly sure that no credible lawyer would give him the time of the day if he did try to get more now. He did work, he accepted money for that work and only later he thinks he's entitled to more and wants to re-negotiate.
I don't know about his jurisdiction, but here even as a layman I'm confident that doing the work and accepting the money would be seen as acceptance:
"As well as using words, a contract could be implied by conduct of the parties, for example, by jumping into a black cab and stating your destination, this conduct would be taken as an agreement that the taxi driver will take you to your destination and that you will pay a price for it."
The idea that just because there isn't a written contract that he magically retains the rights is magical thinking and I'm surprised that no-one he's previously told this story to has pointed that out to him.
I don't think there's any doubt that Mojang / Microsoft are entitled to use his work. But I don't think it's clear whether he has the rights to the work or not.
> But I don't think it's clear whether he has the rights to the work or not.
He owns the copyright, hasn't transferred the copyright, he clearly owns the rights in the work.
> I don't think there's any doubt that Mojang / Microsoft are entitled to use his work.
I think you're right that there's an implied license for them to use it but the scope of that license was never specified and I'd guess a clever lawyer could make reasonable hay from the case that it's now much broader than he wanted.
Can you quote the bit of the article which says that? All I can see is that he said "ok, what's your offer?", Carl returned with "€20k", and "in all the confusion someone sent me the money, even though we still didn’t have a contract worked out" - no contract, no license.
“and so I said, OK, I’ll take whatever the first thing you offered was.”
Edit: I’m rate limited, but Microsoft doesn’t need a transfer. They bought the entire company. Just like you buying some shares on the stock exchange, except they bought all of the shares in a private transaction. Had they done an asset purchase instead, your point might be valid.
Which is an implied contract, yes. Which a court would probably find that Mojang have an implied license to use the poem, yes.
But the terms of that license are unknown - a court may well decide that it did not apply to Microsoft since he didn't sign that contract. And it also means that he did not assign copyright to Mojang or Microsoft which removes that avenue of them claiming they can use it for free.
Ready his comment again. It does not matter because Mojang still exists, it's just a Microsoft-owned company now. The contract and everything else related to the game is still property of Mojang, nothing has been transferred.
A court may well consider that becoming a wholly owned subsidiary would violate a license, despite being a distinct legal entity[1][2]. Especially when it's just an implied license with no actual agreed definition on both sides.
[1] Which is similar to what we're seeing with ARM vs Qualcomm and it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.
You’ve linked an article about a doctrine specific to patent law. Does not apply here. Also, it only speculates that it might be in issue in an acquisition of a subsidiary (vs. a direct merger).
So? He let them use it in the game in exchange for $20k. That’s all they want or need. And before you start with this tiresome license transfer crap, please take a second to read this whole thread to see why that’s not relevant.
If it were so cut and dry they wouldn't have chased his signature years later before the acquisition. A lawyer told them to do that.
I think it's more interesting of a legal case than you give it credit for. He isn't denying he was paid for his time but that the rights for the finished work are still ambiguous.
If the chance of a legal case going against Microsoft is 0.1% (e.g. his case is really bad), the estimated damages in such a case are enormous (I have no idea what they would be, but e.g. a tiny payment for every copy of Minecraft would be an enormous sum), and the cost of sending him an email is a couple of hundred dollars worth of legal counsel, then why wouldn't they chase him for a signature?
> a contract could be implied by conduct of the parties
There are other cases, though, where the courts have declined to imply transfer of copyright or license - even with a written contract - when it hasn't been explicitly specified.
> The idea that just because there isn't a written contract that he magically retains the rights is magical thinking
IANAL, obvs., but I think the situation would be "the implied contract would imply a license to use the poem but not transfer of copyright" - the key point would be whether that license was "perpetual, exclusive" to Mojang. If not perpetual, he could revoke it at any time and Microsoft will then have a copyright problem for any copy sold after that point. If exclusive, the license may not have transferred to Microsoft in which case they have an extremely large problem given the number of copies sold since the buyout.
> Microsoft bought Mojang not specific property of Mojang.
[1] says "When licences are acquired as part of an asset transaction, the contracts are taken over. In that case, the selling and buying parties need the cooperation of the licensor. This cooperation can take place before or possibly after the takeover. If the licence is not transferable, there will in principle not be a legally valid transfer unless the IP right holder in question gives his consent to the transfer of the licence."
Do you have a link to suggest that these definitely-are-lawyers are wrong in this interpretation?
The question is whether Microsoft owns the copyright or merely has permission to use it as the ending for their game. Everyone agrees Microsoft is allowed to use it as the ending to Minecraft, but it doesn't seem like Microsoft owns the copyright to it or the right to use it somewhere else.
Also, Mojang is in breach of the informal contract because they did not give him the promotion they promised.
20k does indeed seem fair - for the value of Minecraft at that moment in time.
And that's the kicker - his agent could have negotiated 100k, which would have been more than fair for that moment in time. But still be wayyy underpaid for eventually what the game would sell for.
But of course, it's not about money. I understand his point - and I wish I could find it now, but I can't, so I'll just describe it.
I saw some meme a while back with a kid sitting next to and hugging a giant frog. The text read, "Beware, the people you love don't always love you back". The second panel showed the frog swallowing the child. I've certainly had these sort of one-sided friendships, and periodically reflect on them. It sucks. It's probably worse if you're a very emotionally deep person (which writers and other artists frequently are), but I still understood well what he was talking about.
Getting mad at "the corporations" for being dirty middlemen is common, but Ticketmaster hires staffers, organizes purchases, handles refunds alllllllll the way down the line. The infrastructure to do that takes real work by real people who also need to be paid, and yes - there is a structural inequality between the company that does all the organizing and the individual person doing the work. This is both problematic and excellent.
The best part though, really - is that because of the way modern corporations work, anyone can be at the very very top of the corporate structure, above even the CEO. Regular, average humans can be shareholders, the most preferred class of all modern capitalist corporations.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 343 ms ] threadHowever, his acceptance of the money, things written in his emails, the poem itself or other behaviors, could possibly form a case that he implicitly assigned a transferable non-exclusive license to Mojang for it to be used in MC. (not a lawyer caveat applies)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Implied_license
(It looks like Irish law requires a written agreement for any non-exclusive license, but Swedish law looks a bit vague and it’s possible to assign ownership via implicit license.)
I don’t think we know exactly how this offer was worded and, therefore, what the 10k euros bought.
This is almost correct. If this was decided in the US, his discussions and acceptance of payment gave Mojang a non-transferable license. During the sale to Microsoft, he was a stakeholder. Microsoft failed to acquire a license, which was why they were trying to force him to sign a contract with terms - of perpetual transfer - that he did not agree to. Mojang needed that signed otherwise Microsoft needed to negotiate a license or purchase from him directly. Microsoft did not do this so they don't own it nor did they have the right to distribute his work until he public-domained it. They are still guilty of infringements up to the date he public domained it, but he seems to have released he right to pursue this as part of this essay.
> but Swedish law looks a bit vague and it’s possible to assign ownership via implicit license.
It's quite clear on this part - economic rights and right to use can be assigned to others no problem like most places but creative ownership can never be renounced, explicitly or implicitly. Details below for the curious.
Copyright is divided into economic rights and moral rights/droit moral (ideell upphovsrätt).
For the most part, moral rights can not be transferred - any contract claiming to do is void. Part of moral rights is the right to attribution - this can be signed away, but only "under kind and art limited use of the work" (that is, a poem could have been explicitly signed away for e.g. use as ending in a PC game title, but I have a hard time seeing the verbiage by Carl at the time of the acquisition being valid). Also, even if there is a contract full permission of use and reassigning all economic rights, unless explicitly noted the creator would still have an enforceable perpetual right to attribution.
More interesting is the "right to respect". It gives the right of the creator to object to changes to the work, or publication in a context, which damages the artistic reputation of the creator, which according to the explanatory memorandum means "violation of the author's personality, as expressed in the work".[1]
The author may sign an agreement promising the purchaser of a work to not execute their rights towards them (like Carl's rejected contract attempted, and like OP is effectively doing further down in the post when they announce it to be public domain).
droit moral limitations/transfers need to have a limited timespan (non-perpetual) and explicit and limited scope in use.
Relevant section of the copyright law ("Rättsfall" links relevant cases[2]): https://lagen.nu/1960:729#P3S1
Not sure to what extent Swedish copyright was/is relevant for the situation in the article.
When learning this in uni, the Swedish way was presented as somewhat different in the amount of protection for the creator, the limited scope under which author rights can be restricted or transferred. Wikipedia tells me that most European countries apart from the UK have somewhat similar interpretations, though.
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[1]: For example if the ending would have had a completely different twist, and adjustments made to the poem that changes its message, that could also be an issue even if the use and rights transfer was otherwise agreed upon. To give you an idea of how far this can go, a film director was awarded damages on the grounds of TV channels making inappropriate cuts for commercials when airing their movies: https://lagen.nu/dom/nja/2008s309
[2]: Related to this case: a reporter writing a news article for their employer, a local newspaper. The next day the same article was republished in another publication owned by another company, with the permission of the employer. The court held that the employer had no rights to extend the economic license to another company, and the second paper had to pay the reporter. Seems pretty clear-cut that if Swedish law were to apply, Microsoft has 0 rights wrt the economic rights of the poem and would be liable to compensate OP for past unlicensed use, up until the point of the blog post where they renounce these rights moving forward. https://lagen.nu/dom/nja/1993s390
However playing it with your kid is so excellent. Farming, fighting, building, raiding, landscaping, tunnelling, rowing, flying, whatever.
Pick your path and it is great fun.
The official Minecraft server software is exceptionally unoptimized, but a number of independent open source forks exist, some of which can substantially improve performance. Unless you're talking about maintaining the community aspect, which is definitely not so easy... :)
For anyone getting into Minecraft for the first time, be sure to check out the mod Optifine [1]. A substantial portion of the Minecraft community uses it for its UI and performance improvements to the base game. It also allows the use of custom shaders [2], which totally change the feel of the game by adding realistic effects like long shadows, wavy water, and swaying plants. I personally stick with the base game's appearance, but shaders can be really fun for exploring caves and other places with unique lighting.
[1]: https://optifine.net/home [2]: https://www.pcgamer.com/best-minecraft-shaders/
1. If you're on the same network, you can select "open to LAN" in the menu once you load into a world and it'll give you a port so anyone on your network can play in your world with you as if it's a multiplayer server. This is nice for playing with family.
2. Minecraft Realms is Mojang/Microsoft's first party solution to the problem where you pay $8 /month for essentially a private server but with some stricter rules and easier ui.
3. Now we're getting into the weeds but if you want to set up a server on your local machine but don't have admin access to your router to set up port forwarding (as is the case for many young people), there are some free tunneling services you can use like Hamachi. You'll need everyone who wants to play on the same tunnel and then they can connect to a locally hosted server as if it's online.
The remaining options are the obvious ones of setting up port forwarding so you can host a public server from your home and renting a server from a third party provider, many of which have Minecraft instances you can spin up pretty easily.
If you want to play online with friends on Bedrock Edition, the more popular multi-platform version of the game, I think it's actually pretty easy but I don't play that edition much anymore so I can't be sure.
It genuinely does make me really upset though that young people who don't have parents willing to pay monthly fees can't easily play Java edition with their friends. Plenty of other games let you host a public server on your own machine. I don't see why they wouldn't implement this except that it costs them money bydepopularizing Realms. It's honestly really sad and goes against the original spirit of the game.
Bastards.
mid 2009-end 2011 is not "the longest time", c'mon!
I think one important thing for people on HN here is this:
> I think Carl, with his background as a Corporate Finance guy, seeing the world through that filter, must have believed that I was trying to blackmail them; trying to maximise my revenue, like the “rational agents” that populate economics textbooks; that I was refusing to sign it to hold up the deal, because I wanted to get paid off. And I totally get how he could see it that way, given where he was coming from; but that wasn’t really what the issue was.
There are many people on HN (and elsewhere) who see behaving as a rational economic actor as a default state and - worse - many believe economics is a zero sum game.
Neither of these things is true, and it's a big mistake to think so. People do things for diverse motivations, and money is only one.
I'm happy when my tax rate goes up. This apparently really bothers people. (Me being happy about it.)
(1) Either you consider yourself prodigal and want an authority to take care of your spending for you.
(2) Or you have weirdly framed your views for extra shock value; and you simply dislike inequality and suffering; and you think that the state can help alleviate some of it by reallocating social resources in a socially beneficial manner. And you think it would be just if they also would take some money from you, even if it’s done by force. There is really nothing surprising about this view; I would rather say it is very popular. (And, unfortunately, for most people that feeling for equality doesn’t spread beyond their own country.)
[1] In principle, rationality in economics doesn’t necessarily imply egoism. It just means that the choices made by a person have nice properties like completeness or transitivity. Whether your choices maximize your consumption, consumption of other people, the scientific progress or the amount of plastic in the world ultimately doesn’t matter.
Why not both? I am happy for my tax rates to go up - indeed, I will vote for any political party that advocates this - and donate to developing countries (and also food banks in the UK because we are shamefully bad at being a developed country.)
Because you cannot spend the same money twice, obviously. Labor and resources are finite.
Read what the tattoo he got at the end of the story says.
Well, when most of the essay contains references to how much money Mojang made, how much Notch went home with, the many billions thrown around, the bonuses paid out per employee, the dividends from Mojang, over and over again, one gets the strong impression that he is concerned about how much money he didn't get.
Most of us don't lose all our friends, or go in the deep end alt-right in our 20's...
It seems to me he's reasonably happy, especially considering his circumstances were far from happy before Minecraft - his parents were ex-addicts, he had himself dropped out of school, his father had a mood disorder and relapsed into drug use and killed himself just weeks after the first big Minecon.
No one claimed that it was. Buying a mansion and shitposting on twitter isn't exactly the sign of being a failure, is it?
By all measureable metrics, I'd assume that his life is better than 90% of people that started life in the same socioeconomic class that he did.
I didn't say it does, but the clear fact of the matter is that there is literally no evidence that being rich leads to being miserable.
People saying "money doesn't buy happiness" don't realise that money doesn't bring unhappiness either. You can't use that statement for asserting that some rich person must be unhappy.
(TFA links to that page toward the end.)
As for others talking about games like Pac Man: yeah, they were probably the most popular games at the time but the number of total players probably pales because the audience has grown considerably over time. I guess there's a strong case for Windows Solitaire though that seems to have somewhat of an age limit as I'd expect there to be a drastic cut-off for younger generations, especially since macOS became mainstream.
Let’s not spread FUD, what would they go after for this guy and why?
I hope they don't, but they definitely could. It would be a PR nightmare though, and there's not all much to be gained either (how much money can you make with the poem if you can't mention Minecraft?), so with any luck that will stop them.
> The basic elements required for the agreement to be a legally enforceable contract are: mutual assent, expressed by a valid offer and acceptance; adequate consideration; capacity; and legality.
I agree with that.
This would be a real encumberance if the author were to decide he wants to sue someone. But that is not what we are discussing here. We are discussing if Microsoft will sue the author.
We are not discussing if Microsoft can sue him. The way this works anyone can sue anyone for pretty much any reason. So that is not an interesting question.
So will they sue? The problem with these kind of informal contracts is that they are vague. Vague in practical terms means two things: 1 the outcome of any legal action is uncertain. 2 things take longer. This means that litigating things about them are expensive and uncertain.
And here I repeat: the question here is not if they can use it, but if they paid for exclusive rights.
So on one hand you have a huge mess of a litigation. On an other hand do you think microsoft is meaningfully and perceptibly harmed here? Do you think they will sell less game licences or ender dragon plushies because of this? I very much doubt it.
Based on the balance of these two above do you feel it is in the best interest of Microsoft to sue the author?
All of his problems could have been solved if he just did the sensible normal thing any person would do and have a lawyer help him figure it out.
Curious where you got that impression? I can't see anything in the bit where he's writing the poem that he mentions anything even vaguely pertaining to drugs.
It's not an essay about a problem, it's an essay about experiencing a problem. The former can be solved with a lawyer, the latter with... Well nothing really. It's an experience.
And of course, even though he said he didn't approach anybody, the speculative part of my brain actually thinks he informally may have done so and received such advice (that he didn't have a case) and conveniently omitted as much from the narrative.
Not having a contract does not mean that Mojang’s terms are in force.
He’s very open about his responsibility for the miscommunication. And says he does not blame Carl (except for apparently hiding the Microsoft buyout from him).
As for the end poem, I’ve never played Minecraft but I found it to be beautiful and touching writing.
Whilst this may have reached a better legal and financial conclusion, I don't think it would have helped the author that much. It's obvious that he cares of the art, and for his perceived friendship.
Did you mean:
All of his problems could have been solved if he just did the sensible normal thing any person would do and flat out assume all the other humans on the planet are complete assholes.
It’s not just some capitalism v art thing either. It’s communicating and promising and accountability.
To anyone reading, if you’ve got a business partner and you think he’s given you 50% of a business because he said it one night at dinner, saying you’re cofounders— get it on paper in terms you both agree to. Go halfsies on a lawyer who helps you both accurately match terms (copyright assignment is one of those things where particular wording, intent and employment arrangement are important.) If you have doubts, maybe watch The Social Network or read about Hoefler&Co. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoefler_%26_Co.)
I mean I'm probably missing a lot of details that weren't necessary to the telling of this story, but perhaps the lesson here is don't assume people are your friends when all you have is a brief business relationship.
Then again, maybe that's all that's happening anyways.
Still, thought this was very well written, and he's not assigning them the blame.
I don't think Notch ever was his friend though.
Beautiful. I hope this brings him peace.
But I'm not sure how this works when Minecraft itself was moved out of Mojang in any way (i.e. if this is formally a Microsoft game and no longer a Mojang, now subsidiary of Microsoft, game).
Anyhow, the CC0 license also applies to Microsoft going forward so unless he wants to challenge their rights prior to this, Microsoft is apparently in the clear now. They just can't sue anyone who wants to also use the poem because they don't have standing.
https://www.juliangough.com/the-ihole-in-original-apple-fl/
"Yes my short story, The iHole, was here. No, it's not here now..."
https://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/2684207-an-open-...
https://pasteboss.com/ihole-game/
However, with an extensive email chain explaining the story was written as the ending of Minecraft, even going into detail about how it was to be displayed in game, an agreed upon offer (if a bit vague), and then an exchange of funds - with no immediate attempt to return said funds. I'm no lawyer, but that sounds a lot like a legally binding agreement.
> So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending
Did the twenty-five staff put in 5x or 6x the work? It seems likely. I understand that to some the end story may be deemed to be essential to the experience and talent was required to write this story - but that attitude just undermines the hard work of everyone else involved. Who knows how much effort those staff members poured into perfecting things that were essential to the experience that made Minecraft?
> Bear in mind, here we were a couple of weeks before the official launch, and Minecraft was already a phenomenon: in its unfinished state, it had already sold five or six million copies, in beta, at $15 a copy. So it was, at that point, already a hundred-million-dollar game, but with no ending
It certainly doesn't seem like the ending provided disproportionate value to Mojang compared to the work of their staff.
I get that he feels like he was given a small amount relative to the great success of Minecraft, but I would hope he also realizes that it was risk free cash.
If he didn't think the money was fair, he shouldn't have accepted it. I expect Mojang would have simply pulled the plug and gone with someone else if he had done so.
This really just smacks of sour grapes that Mojang was sold for squillions and the author feels entitled to some of that. Legalities aside (the absence of aa signed contract may be a problem) but I don't feel he is morally entitled to anything more than he's already received.
I honestly suspect the €20k figure was, "Let's offer him a big enough number so that we don't have to be distracted by negotiating this." And then began the long-winded and self-important wall-of-text emails.
You have to at least put a floor on that thing or you fall completely afoul of the common meaning.
My rule of thumb would be less than $1 million spent before the first public release ? (Which I assume makes Minecraft indie ?)
Now another question is whether you can even call indie those games being advertised and distributed by Steam (or any other platform) where developers are overwelmingly dependent on that platform for like 95%+ of their sales (including keys from third party websites still for that platform) - because dealing with advertisers and distributors was also an extremely important part of the job when games still came in boxes !
Imagine if all the developers expected to both be paid to write code and still own the rights to the code.
Developers are accustomed to giving up all artistic agency and authorship, and those who can’t bring themselves to do so give up on being developers. (I’m partly in the latter category.) Thankfully, that isn’t (yet?) as ubiquitous among writers.
The guy got £20,000 for some pages of babel. He should be elated.
The definition of “keep” in that sentence is the principal question of copyright, isn’t?
That is to say, if I produce a physical object at someone’s behest, I have to completely give up on the result in order for them to have unrestricted use of it, for reasons of physics. There are no such reasons for texts, computer programs, and so on, unless imposed artificially by law.
(I’m not going to call something good just because it’s the natural state of things, but neither am I going to automatically consider something reasonable just because it’s the law.)
For example, if I’m employed as a teacher, a good portion of my work is producing notes to give lectures from or to hand out to students, so that’s partly what I’m being paid for. Yet it’d be pretty normal for me to then publish them in some form, for money or not, without my employer trying to lay claim to them.
Even a developer who is employed by virtue of his experience in databases is generally not precluded from publishing a book summarizing that same experience for others to use.
> The guy got £20,000 for some pages of [babble]. He should be elated.
I don’t know anything about his situation, but a freelancer’s budgeting always has to account for the time spent waiting or searching for the next gig; being paid fabulously for a job that occupies your every waking hour for a month, then spending the next two sucking on your thumb (and recovering from the overtaxing sprint you’ve just had) is pretty normal, and on average the money ends up much less abundant than you’d guess just looking at the numbers. (Unless you’re Brandon Sanderson and can finish a novel a year, I guess.)
But there is definitely a lot of consulting where you're working more or less full-time to stay current, market yourself, etc. and when you do get work the day rate may be eye-watering--but those jobs may be short and/or infrequent.
When I was an industry analyst, in addition to our regular subscription clients, we did present at company events, did a la carte consulting days, and things like that for which we got about $10K per day. But we didn't have a lot of those.
There are, I believe, a non-negligible number of companies who will write software for you, to a specification, and grant you a (sometimes non-exclusive) license to use that software but absolutely will not give you the copyright. Pretty sure there's a lot of IT companies, for example, that UKGOV contract to which do this.
Get the tax payer to pay you to build a product and then continue looting the public to rent it out perpetually.
Well, it's less common for fiction but if you're working for a company and writing content you're almost certainly giving up any rights.
If you're ghostwriting without credit, it's not explicitly spelled out but the way it works is they'll slap it on their copyrighted website, possibly under someone else's byline. And they'd reasonably expect you not to publish the same thing verbatim somewhere else.
Though you also have cases where cross-posting is at least tolerated.
It is, and that's the problem. From way down the post:
BEGIN QUOTE
Copyright law was originally brought in to help artists make a living. But over the past century, corporations like Disney, Sony, Universal, and Microsoft, have lobbied hard to twist those laws out of shape. Now, the vast power imbalance between rich corporations and poor artists (particularly when negotiating) allows the corporations to stripmine the copyrights from artists, and keep the artists poor. To see how, just look again at the contract I refused to sign. It’s astonishing that such a mafia-shakedown, you-will-never-see-your-kid-again contract is legal; that it is considered a standard way to treat an artist, rather than greeted with gasps of horror, and treated as a crime. This is why none of your favourite comic book writers and artists own any of their creations. This is why Alan Moore, who created Watchmen, cannot use his own characters in his own work. This is why the original blues musicians, whose talent transformed global culture while creating a hugely profitable industry, died broke. This is why, even today, for every $1,000 of sales in the modern music industry, the average individual musician gets $23.40.
END QUOTE
Honestly, that's true at a lot of levels, not just the poverty level. It is said if you want to make a million dollars running a recording studio… spend three million dollars. If you want to be a million dollar rock star… invest (or have your family invest) ten million. It's like that.
It's like, you can wear rags, or you can wear a suit, or you can wear a Superman cape. Would you like to for-real wear that Superman cape, to be the hero? Well, you can, for real. And it will cost you everything, more than you could imagine.
I read this guy's essay in part because he WAS the Minecraft Story Guy, not because I thought he'd have good arguments. That's what he earned, and that's what it cost him (didn't sign up for his mailing list tho :) )
After he dies (assuming I don't go first) I'll remember things about his words. After Markus dies I won't remember a thing about his money (though I'll remember things about the game he made, he's not so different in that respect). I won't remember a thing about the Microsoft lawyers no matter whether they win or lose, whether they enjoin this guy from public-domaining what they see as their employer's property. So in a sense that thing didn't end up being their property and that's the writer's point.
It all gets into philosophic realms, and that's where poets live, not lawyers.
> the game they worked on for a few hours
Voice acting is a hard job, and it takes more time than a “few hours” to get good at it. If you think anyone can do it certainly you can just pay an anybody to do it.
He submits a bill for $200,000. It is itemized as such:
- $1 - Fifteen seconds of labor; striking with hammer
- $199,999 - Knowing where to strike
So it takes a long time to learn how to take good pictures, and therefore every picture you take after being good should be worth 5k USD or something? that's not how things work at all.
> Voice acting is a hard job,
So all other jobs are easy? That's again pretentiousness at play.
The ending is like the smile on Mona Lisa in my opinion. You can probably pay someone a few hundred dollars to paint that smile ...
> I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.
By accepting this premise, these are examples of when he expected to be treated as a friend, but was instead treated as an outsider. As for the legality, I don't think a vague agreement can clarify if the work is licenced or if the licence was transfered.
Of course, I'm sure they were friendly in their discussions, there's no point in being actively hostile to the people you're working with. But the idea the relationship extended anything past a game developer and a contracted writer seems to be entirely in the author's mind.
It certainly feels a bit like he was feeling lonely and needed to see this as a friendship. I'm sure there was a deep artistic connection, but that's not quite the same thing as a friendship. It's awkward and frustrating when only one side sees a relationship as a friendship.
> We just didn’t understand each other, because we were playing different language games.
The author collectively places the blame on poor communication from both sides. But the reality is that all of the poor communication was entirely from his side, and he knew in advance he struggled talking about money and had an agent for that very purpose.
There's also this whole weird subsection where he describes things the universe did to him as if he has no agency in his own actions and where he ended up in life.
”The misunderstanding was all mine.”
Select snips:
> I just misunderstood what was going on.
> Now, Carl didn’t do anything wrong here. Carl is not the baddie either. He was a CEO, and major shareholder, behaving the way a CEO and major shareholder is supposed to behave. The misunderstanding was all mine.
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
> Again, I have to calm down and remind myself, and you, there are no bad guys in this story. Do not hassle Markus, or Carl (or even Microsoft) about this. I’m sure they didn’t even think of it as “tricking” me; that’s my perspective, not theirs.
> He was projecting his motivations onto me, in the same way I had been projecting my motivations onto him. Mutual misunderstanding.
> Most of the fault there is mine (I am a deeply flawed guy)
> But that anger was of course misplaced. If I had trouble paying for my kid’s clothes and shoes, that was on me: my life, at that point, after all those years, was the direct result of all the decisions I had made over its course, and those decisions involved prioritising art and deprioritising money, again and again. (As Robert Louis Stevenson dryly put it, “Everybody, soon or late, sits down to a banquet of consequences.")
But the reality is that _all_ of the misunderstanding comes from him. There is no "mutual misunderstanding", Mojang understood the conversation perfectly well.
The author asked for an offer, Mojang offered $20k, and the author accepted. It's not reasonable to expect Mojang to "understand" the author is going to hold some grudge about believing they deserve more than the offer they accepted without negotiation.
The correct response from the author would be something along the lines of "I am entirely at fault, all of the misunderstanding was on my side, Mojang/Notch/Carl did nothing wrong".
Instead the author reminds us at every turn about how Notch gave bonuses to all the Mojang employees but not him, how they're such a great guy for not getting lawyers involved, and how they're turning their work into a "priceless gift" (despite being paid $20000 for it).
But at the same time it's pretty clear he was jealous of all the money he didn't want to talk about, and that he saw himself as a partner rather than a contractor.
It is what it is, everyone involved probably learned some form of lesson, and I don't see why we need to create villains or victims in this story.
More fundamentally, it takes two to tango. Just because the perspective of Mojang is the more common one in the industry doesn't make it the more "correct" interpretation. It's very much a two-way street and it's on both parties to make sure they understand each other when things are not explicitly spelled out and agreed upon.
Mojang, at a minimum, paid for a license to use the poem in the game. They wanted to have this on paper because it would make the deal with Microsoft easier, but they would have been right about that fact either way. The author, on the other hand, believes they are in a situation where Microsoft has no right to use the End Poem despite the fact they accepted $20k for it.
I mean, ignore all the stuff about friends, blah blah, Carl has apparently signed them up for whatever the defaults are under (based on other comments) UK IP laws?
All that is to say that if my interpretation is correct then Julian is legally entitled to do what he wants with the work including selling it to someone else or in this case release it under a creative commons license.
(Disclaimer: I work at Microsoft on nothing related, and love Minecraft the game.)
IANAL but I think Microsoft is in the clear here because they bought out Mojang but they couldn't for example use the ending (or derivative works of it) in a spin-off game because Mojang couldn't have done that either and they have no standing to go after anyone reproducing the poem as a whole or in part.
In fact, the poem now being CC0 grants Microsoft more rights than they had, except it's still non-exclusive, meaning the same rights are granted to everyone else too.
Though to be perfectly honest, if I were them, and they needed something like that, I'd hire Julian to write it. Or maybe ask him to write it for free after giving him a massive donation.
That is the move by Mojang that I didn't understand. They were about to be paid 2.5 billion. Why not offer 1 million for the signed contract? They could easily afford that, and with his financial troubles at the time, Julian would probably have signed it.
And he'd have missed out on his subsequent personal growth, and we wouldn't have gotten this beautiful story, and the universe wouldn't have gotten the End Poem, but Microsoft would, and the world would have been more normal, predictable, corporate. But he would have been able to eat and pay rent.
Because they believed (erroneously or not) that they already had paid for the thing the contract was about, and were offering a "peppercorn" payment for the signature itself to make the exchange complete.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peppercorn_(law)
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33532078
Julian's story is more a story of a misunderstood artist caring more about the art than the money, mistaking contract work for friendship, struggling with the consequences, hating himself for it, and finally coming to terms with it.
That seems to happen quite often. People forget that it's impossible to be friends with someone who's employing you without some major conflicts of interest on both sides.
Given the blatantly deliberate blocking to get the OST done and getting a moron to ghostwrite it makes me think id deliberately decided to ruin Mick's reputation so the fans would eat him alive and then they went for straight up libel to complete it. Marty Stratton, what a complete piece of shit.
Maybe. Maybe not. People say these kind of things, but it is often a retcon aimed to help them deal with some emotion.
Maybe he would have asked his agent to agree on a deal. The agent would have got him a tiny percentage and he would have spent the money to bring something wonderfull to the world. During which process he would have attained even more personal growth.
Totally made up story, but so is the hint that if he would have had a contract he would have missed out on personal growth.
As Marcus Aurelius wrote sometime around 170CE:
>It’s unfortunate that this has happened. No. It’s fortunate that this has happened and I’ve remained unharmed by it—not shattered by the present or frightened of the future. ...
>So remember this principle when something threatens to cause you pain: the thing itself was no misfortune at all; to endure it and prevail is great good fortune.
Personally, I don't think that stoicism is a good fit for modern times, because it conflates virtue with foregoing strong emotions, and leaving other people to their mistakes.
It does have its share of worthwhile lessons though, and if you dig a little deeper you'll find that it encourages guiding and explaining when people are wrong, rather than getting upset with them about perceived moral or practical failures.
Blowing it off with a token amount just says "this is a tiny formality, a dotting of an 'i'".
If I were offered that out of the blue, I'd be wondering what true value I'm holding to make that signature so important.
> However, in some circumstances, for example when copyright is not dealt with in the contract to commission the work, courts may be willing to find that there is an implied licence allowing the commissioner to use the work for the purpose for which it was commissioned. This does not necessarily result in a transfer of ownership. Instead, the commissioner of the work may only get a limited non-exclusive licence. This situation demonstrates the importance of establishing who owns copyright through a contract.
[1]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/ownership-of-copyright-works
Julian didn't read the contract when he first got it, because he apparently didn't care.
Torry ended up suing and they settled out of court, so I guess that's a win.
For what it's worth, this often comes as a surprise even to many German creators who are not aware of this because intuitively if you get paid to create something "for" someone, you sell them your rights to it. But in reality that requires an explicit contract spelling this out. A typical example is professional photographers actually only selling you prints of the photos they take for you, or a design agency not giving you the source files for designs they create for you.
In fact, though now my memory is hazy and so I speculate more wildly, not even most kinds of employment grants copyright to the employer. Exceptions being software developers and teachers, I think.
Of course, because in germany you can not transfer your copyright at all, unless you die. ;)
Without being nitpicky you are still right in the way you meant it: There is no automatic usage right afaik. (And also google results agree: eg https://likvi.de/blog/urheberrecht )
(Though copy rights themselves might also be treated as actual rights, rather than a temporary monopoly, an exception to the normal state of everything being in the public domain that prevails in the common law countries ?)
You can however grant an unlimited, transferrable, exclusive license, which for all intents and purposes is like "transferring copyright".
Your nitpick isn't entirely irrelevant though. This is why Germany does not recognize public domain dedications and why CC0 is necessary.
The author appears to be Irish, but living in Germany.
I'm usually on the writer's side in these kinds of things, but I have to agree. I've played dozens of hours of that game and have never even considered that it might have an end
Ah, if only we were paid proportionate to how hard we worked. Stay-at-home moms and janitors would be billionaires.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-gbacsUKpc
P.S.: I am a father that works remote from home. My girlfriend is a stay-at-home mom. Our daughter spends most time at school. Honestly, my girlfriend has a pretty relaxed life. I take care of the money and we got a small house, so cleaning the house really takes little time (I even help in weekends vacuum cleaning and evenings doing dishes). In daytime she has many hours to spend as she sees fit. And in evenings often as well.
Just gonna say it, the game was better without the rushed ending anyway and the amount it sold before it had one is testament to that.
I don't play Minecraft but my kids do, and I don't think they know Minecraft has an ending? I certainly didn't. I always thought Minecraft was this unlimited platform where you build things with no specific purpose, for the pleasure of building, like an infinite Lego set.
That said, the rant, while much too long is interesting and explains well the misunderstanding between business people and artists. Some artists are good at business (Picasso) but most aren't because they speak a different language, and because, like this guy, they cultivate and probably enjoy ambiguity, or the protection and shadows it brings.
To the extent these have a definite ending, it's not the ending intended for Minecraft.
Take Star Factory, you're not going to kill monsters and build up until you can take on a dragon, you're building a factory to make stars. You start with basic materials like an unlimited supply of wood and gold and you've reached the end of the game once your systems are just making stars automatically from your materials.
The modern game actually has a bunch of stuff "after" the ending when played straight up.
If he wanted more than $20k he should have asked for it then, but I think the appeal of putting your writing in front of over a hundred million people and a $20,000 check was "enough" compensation for the work, at the time. But resentment grew as the game continued to succeed.
To me this feels like it was written after seeing the Doom music story...which is entirely different as the music of the first (new) doom game was a huge part of its success. This is literally the opposite as the text was tacked on after the game was already successful (Just not yet at its peak success.) And in some ways feels like it is inviting MS lawyers to intervene, but he has much less of a standing.
But she straight up does not UNDERSTAND a game like Sim city, or rim world. Why would anybody "play" that, is her perspective. It doesn't have a sufficiently, singularly clear narrative, flow, goal, beginning and an end. We talked about such games a few times and I have not really succeeded in moving the needle - not in her being interested in such games, but even remotely comprehending their existence or allure.
I guess it was my wife's friends that felt minecraft really needed an ending :-)
We engage in many other "pointless" pursuits: beauty, love, culture, civilization, and indeed, life itself. Everyone "plays" for a different reason, and that makes us human.
Now, you can start with a toy (like The Sims or a regulation basketball or a pencil, paper, and dice) and create a game around it by applying rules, goals, and objectives. They may be defined by others or you may be creating the game in your own mind -- either way the toy is a piece of equipment used to play the game, it is not in and of itself a game.
Your wife may not enjoy electronic toys like Sim City or Rim World, but perhaps you could pique her interest by working together to come up with games that the two of you could play using those toys?
There is no real ending in Minecraft. "The End" is just the name of another dimension - where of course you have to battle the big bad dragon and get the "end credits" afterwards and so on. But the dimension is literally just called "The End" and is indeed just a pun - you can mine, build, explore, and play there just like in the Overworld or in the Nether, and go back & forth between the three at any time.
In fact, most of us consider visiting The End as the real beginning of the game - exploring it gives you access to two items (shulker boxes and the Elytra), that we consider about as fundamental and essential to the game as the pickaxe or the crafting table.
"Wait what? You can craft a pickaxe? I've been punching rocks all this time!"
The entire post reads like really sour grapes from someone who believes his contribution is way more important than it is. He thinks he deserves a significant higher chunk than what he was paid.
He also acts like he has a leg to stand on and is magnanimously deciding not to bring the hammer down. No. He's going to get laughed out of the lawyer's office. It's not even going to sniff a court. I can imagine what happened.
Markus and Carl were talking with their lawyers about what was needed to facilitate the Microsoft deal. Mojang's lawyers notified them to cases like this, where there's an unsigned contract floating about. They said, get that signed so Microsoft doesn't potentially pull the deal over potential issues. Microsoft, in their due diligence, also had their lawyers combing over Mojang's contracts, assets, and liabilities. Microsoft came across this contract, meetings were had, they found out about the email chain, etc. And Microsoft's lawyers decided this was not an issue. So at that point, Mojang didn't care. Because they didn't have to.
Markus and Carl didn't tell this guy about the deal because it wasn't his business. He was an artist contracted for a bit of poetry. For all intents and purposes, everyone at Mojang considered their business with him over.
But I don't believe this would stand up in court. There was a verbal agreement before he signed a contract. He was paid for his one-off contribution; I don't know how much work he delivered or how many hours he put into it, but 20K is half a year's income for some people, not to be sniffed at.
This has come up recently as well in some drama about voice acting on the one hand, and video game soundtracks on the other. Normally you get paid for the time spent, or the amount of your contributions used. But in the case of the voice actor, they decided the normal amount - or as it turned out later, a chunk well above the normal amount - wasn't enough and they threw it onto the internet.
But in the end, I think this is just a business transaction - one part of one part of the game, paid for with a five figure sum. The author neglected to do his due diligence and neglected to review and sign the contract in a timely fashion. Mojang and Microsoft may be susceptible to a lawsuit because the author never surrendered the rights to his work until now, but his unwillingness to cooperate while accepting payment for work delivered won't work in his favor.
And while he gave the text up into the public domain, I don't know if this holds up in court; iirc, copyright law only applies if you defend your copyright. Which means that if the author's copyright is voided, then Microsoft's copyright for Minecraft and all it contains might take over, and they might sue him instead. I'm not a lawyer or versed in copyright law, so this is just fantasizing.
Copyright always applies and is automatically assigned at the time of creation. Belongs to the author by default unless created in the context of some other agreement (e.g. work for hire)
The same can certainly be said for everyone else involved in this. Notch made off with 1.7 billion dollars for a few years of work - that's a disproportionate reward for the level of effort.
But if the poetry author wanted a disproportionate reward for their level of effort, they should have asked for it. It's business at the end of the day - they didn't write it for art's sake, they wrote it for a contract job. And it's not a particularly great poem that will be featured on poetry.com, IMO
I know basically nothing about the life of artists in general, but this interests me. Where can I read about this? Would appreciate a link that deals with the business side more than a general biography. Thanks.
I inherited a server hosting and came across the ending by accident. It was a moment of "What? I can win Minecraft?". Kids were "Yeah. Winning is boring."
You probably know what The Nether is, that hellish looking place you access by making a portal. Reaching The Nether is progress, by getting there you get access to stuff you didn't have before, sure you can do whatever you feel like in Minecraft, but by getting there you can do more stuff than before because you have access to more stuff.
By defeating the Ender Dragon you are free to roam The End (which is the name of the whole place) and thus you finally gain access to everything the game has to offer.
Notch’s choice to make it hard to skip/speed up the text scrolling suggests that he thought it had disproportionate value.
I don't understand what this guy is complaining about to be honest.
At a $15M valuation, the work was worth $20k to them. At a $2.5B valuation, the work was $20k to them.
I don't think so? He does say he has had hurt feelings. Do you mean you don't understand why he has hurt feelings?
20k is a very reasonable sum for this kind of gig.
For me he sounds greedy and yes it sounds like he complains (a lot)
Which is super interesting! The most successful game dev of all time was only 20% actual game devs. As if it's not about making the game but about everything else (comms, community engagement)
The reason is because in most cases (this is ~1 decade old personal research/opinion) unless specified the client is paying for access and use to the final product you make, not necessarily for anything else. This is the sane thing though, but in business in many cases you might want to also receive the blueprints, source code, assets, copyright, etc. This might be "obvious" depending on the industry and case, but that means it's not obvious at all in a general sense.
For example here, the company (and that might be why Microsoft backed up) might be happy with just being able to use the work, even if they don't have an exclusive contract or are the copyright holders of that particular bit. I do agree that it seems Mojang had implicit permission at least to use it, but not exclusive/full copyright/etc.
This might help talking about fairness when in fact MP3 build the foundation of streaming music. ;)
Same goes for iPad silhouette girl: contract work, nothing else: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPod_advertising
Or the nike logo, or...
It is hard. There won't be so many George Lucas opportunities: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/george-l...
> And I finally got round to reading the original contract, the one I didn’t sign.
> And… Jesus Christ. It was worse than I’d even imagined. It was horrible.
> The contract was for a comprehensive buyout, signing away all my rights forever, which was exactly the thing I’d told Carl that I never did with my work.
So the fact that he kept the money does say that he agreed to write the piece for that amount of money, but it doesn't say anything about under which terms, and the terms is where they disagree. The money transfer says nothing about what rights do Mojang have over the piece and what rights the writer have over the piece.
Where do you see that? I went back and re-read the section and it still seems to say that the negotiations failed and no agreement was reached.
At some point, contract or not, he agreed to take the money and do the work.
I don't think that's a contract. We need an offer and acceptance (and consideration). More broadly we also need adequate specificity to determine the essential terms.
Here there were two essential terms: 1) the author would write a poem for use in Minecraft, and 2) Minecraft would pay consideration.
Stepping through the rounds:
1. ... skip prior rounds ... 2. Minecraft demands that Julian accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is not an offer because it does not specify the essential term, consideration.] 3. Julian agrees to accept Minecraft's first offer. [This is also not an offer, because they still have not indicated what the consideration will be.] 4. Minecraft offers $20,0000 in exchange for the poem. [This is the first offer.] 5. Julian refuses to sign. [This is a rejection of the offer.]
That's why I think MS did not need to pay him off; they thought they had a license, even if they didn't own the IP. And that's also why it's totally legit for him to republish his own work under a free license.
It sounds like an awful, muddy mess that would take a great deal of time and money to litigate if the author decided to take that path. Without an explicit contract, even determining which court (and which nation) has jurisdiction for this kind of international transaction sounds like a nightmare.
I agree that in most jurisdictions I have any familiarity with, some kind of contract likely exists for usage of the text, but that is a fundamentally different question from ownership of the text. And I imagine that the text has subsequently been used by Mojang and Microsoft for other purposes, which may or may not be found to be covered by the original agreement.
In short, it's exactly the kind of ambiguity that big corporations hate when it comes to intellectual property.
Microsoft would remove his poem and nobody would read it ever again. He can only lose.
No, because he retained the copyright. If he won against Microsoft he would a) presumably get a lot of money (financial win), b) strike a small blow for the little guy against megacorps (moral win), and c) still be able to release the poem as CC0 or whatever he wanted (win).
Could have been a neat personal story, "hey you know I wrote the ending text to Minecraft?" Instead, it's this.
(I just wish the essay was edited down by 1/3, but that’s me)
20000€ would in most European countries be a pretty good compensation for about 3 months of work, after taxes. It doesn't seem unreasonable on the face of it.
> I wrote a story for a friend, but in the end, he didn't treat me like a friend, and I'm hurt.
In this framing, these are examples of being treated as an outsider.
> Early next year, Markus earned a three-million-dollar dividend on his shares in Mojang. But, as the actual value of his company, which he mostly owned, had gone up by many tens of millions, he figured he didn’t really need another three million on top. So he divided it between the twenty-five staff at Mojang, as a late Christmas bonus. That’s $120,000 each. Five or six times what I got for writing the actual ending.
(Since the author seems to have spent about a month or so working on the game, you could reason that his compensation is about on par with the employees who worked for a full year. But he doesn't seem to see it that way, or he thinks he should be compensated better than them? I don't know.)
I'm speculating, but having known "artists", some of them think very differently to the average HN crowd.
He outright says it in the article, about how it wasn't about the money. If it was, there are more effective ways of going about getting that compensation than putting the story into the public domain
However, he was just a contractor found via twitter who wrote a few pages of text for the ending credits.
They really did not think of him as a friend, and when he was done with work they never contacted him again except for legal reasons.
Once again speculating, but the author didn't want to be treated like "just a contractor", and nor did that seem like how the relationship started out. Even as a contractor, I personally feel Notch could have reached out with happy words at a minimum - instead the author got silence.
the point is the gift economy
No, this is a person who's burning with envy and finds telling yourself stories an outlet.
I have no ire towards the author. I thoroughly enjoyed the post and found several aspects of it that helped me find some introspection to something I was talking about with my wife just the other day (regarding capitalism, career, compensation).
I think in the end that's what he's doing. It's an overly long winded way to say he wrote the poem. He's trying to wrestle that recognition for his work he thought Mojang was going to provide him and he's sharing a tale of one artist who wants to live above Intellectual Property law and create beautiful things while recognizing he has to eat and put a roof over his head.
I pass no judgment on the author. I might slip him a few bucks in the paypal link he gave because I acquired Minecraft during beta and continue to play it off and on today and consider his contribution to be a nice addition to the game. Perhaps I will buy his novel. I think he did a great job trying to market himself here.
I love his story, I sympathise, and I want Microsoft, or Notch, or Mojang, to just give him a million dollars. But I can also see that his financial struggles are mostly his own doing. And probably his own choice. He wants to live in a world that's not about money, but he also wants to be able to pay rent.
Why just give someone a million for no reason. It ain't beans we are talking about money here.
You're trying to ship a game. This writer keeps hitting your inbox with prose that I assume that is about as annoying to read as the original article. He's wasting your time and not getting to the point. You don't know what the guy's deal is and you stopped trying to figure out two emails ago. Compared to all the other things that you need to be doing to actually ship the game, this is incredibly minor and taking up your time daily. You finally tell him, "look, it's 20k or we go look elsewhere".
From that story, the only thing Mojang did wrong is that they didn't send him the contract straight away. We all know he would have signed whatever was on it back then, as he clearly didn't know what he wanted. Looks like someone regretted behaving completely irrationally when closing a deal, then regretted it some more than he never attempted to get more compensation even after the fact (he could have easily gotten something a couple of years later if he had tried, and once more the article completely omits as to why he didn't try to reach out through his agent or anyone that can behave as an adult after the launch) and is now screaming at the universe that he's not being showered with riches and glory when all of this was his own doing, even after he had multiple opportunities to come out winning.
wrong. by that point they are trying to close a business deal for a lot of money
Of course when the Microsoft deal came along, stakes were much higher and patience for his reluctance a lot less.
So yeah, they weren't friends. But he thought they were, between whatever interaction they had before the poem and the collaborative effort of creating the poem. So does that really make it a Flawed premise?
Just saying that I found the story interesting and well… lovely (in a way) but perhaps that’s different backgrounds at work (I dabble in art) so I wonder what makes this such an unbearable thing to read, perhaps a very practical person? Not necessarily directed at you dcow.
So the sour aftertaste, for me, is likely related to the juxtaposition of positive and negative elements and I think ultimately is a reflection of the balance he chose to give each. Suffice to say, I think there's a not-so-different delivery of this essay which would have left me with a much better aftertaste.
I share your beliefs about IP, and I hope one day the world breaks free of the concept. But maybe try to be a little less mean. It’s worth it if only not to be one of those people that just post dunks for internet points. (I’ve done it a few times and usually regretted how I sounded after the dust settled.)
Cheers for openly expressing “down with copyright” though.
IIRC, back before the "favorite" feature was introduced, people would use - and some still use - upvotes to bookmark interesting threads.
Second thing I learned is to always at least skim the comments before opening the submission itself, to gauge whether the latter is even worth it. Quite often it isn't. Here I thought it is, but the text was so long and... off somehow, that I got back to comment thread and read it more carefully, and now I know why it's off and that it's not worth it (for me personally) to read it more carefully.
Exactly the picture/cover/person I thought of while reading this (nicely written but still a) rant.
We can disagree with him, the writing is rambling and takes for ever to get to the point, and then hits it on the head repeatedly, but in the end it does not matter. I suspect what is important (to him) is that he’s written it, not that you read it.
Anyway, I am surprised to see so much hostility here.
I didn't say he was greedy; by the sounds of it he's happy with very little. It is 100% correct to say he's entitled. He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does, and in a way that protects his interests. He feels entitled to that.
Yes, sorry, that was in other posts and it got blurred. I did not want to put words into your mouth.
> He doesn't want to do the legwork of determining the terms, instead he expects that someone else does
He explains why he did not involve his agent, and also that he does not expect anyone to do it. Otherwise he’d have plenty of opportunities to do it. He sounds entitled in that he has weird ideas about love and friendship but he just sounds like someone hurt that the world does not work as they thought.
In the end, his struggles seem to have lead to a lot of personal growth, and that's great, and he does seem to understand that he mostly created this problem himself, and could easily have prevented it by involving his agent. But I'm not so sure that he understands that this was never about friendship; he was hired to write an ending, had a profound artistic connection with the guy who hired him, and somehow he seemed to think that entitled him to a friendship rather than a business relationship. I'm not sure he understands that that was the core misunderstanding here, and that his belief in a friendship that was really a business relationship, made the business relationship really awkward and dysfunctional.
Exactly, that's another facet of his entitlement that I have deep content for. Many good people work hard to figure out how the world works. Other people have in mind how it should work and get upset when it doesn't.
I sympathize with him. I loved this piece. I hope he truly did let go of all the hangups he described. And it does seem that he actually did sell the the rights of use to microsoft, making this whole text a weird misunderstanding. But that does not mean that the text is bad, or boring, or uninteresting. Rather the opposite.
I agree with other commenters that the author is greedy and petty. He accepted €20,000 for his work, a decent amount. Then he decided that he should make way more money because the game was successful. Then he tried to take advantage of the fact that he hadn't signed a contract, even though he had obviously accepted the terms when he accepted the money. He behaved shittily by not honoring an informal contract. He tried to paint it as some huge company legal dept vs little guy thing based on the fact that it's now Microsoft and yes, work for hire contracts drafted by corporate lawyers do look evil. But he had already reneged on his handshake agreement, after spending the 20K, even before big companies or professional lawyers were involved.
Now he's trying to parlay his brush with fame into Substack subscriptions. Good luck to him.
It's kinda worth it to get access to elytra and shulker boxes but they do tend to make you a bit OP. Then again to make sensible use of elytra you need a gunpowder farm and once you're building farms like that, you're already on the way to domination...
One of the first objectives was always getting something like an Elytra, since it makes the game more pleasant imo.
https://ftb.fandom.com/wiki/Hang_Glider
Despite clocking hundreds upon hundreds of hours in the game, I too have yet to defeat the dragon.
To me the agreement sounds like they bought the right to use the story as the ending to the game. They didn't agree on signing over the rights to the story, and he said if he knew that would have been part of the deal he wouldn't have agreed. He was caught by surprise when he found that language in the contract. Sure he was negligent in not following up when the contract didn't match his expectations, but so was Mojang for not ensuring the contract was signed before using his work.
Did he not honor the informal contract? What did he not honor?
If anything, Carl didn't honor the informal contract, he was the one saying Minecraft would promote his work, and no a name in a tiny credit is not doing that... but I'm feeling generous as let's be honest that's a bullshit clause that corporation always try to use that line without meaning much so it's to be expected.
Julian said he was never giving all its rights away. That was part of the informal contract. That's the thing that made him not sign it.
To be frank, the author made little to no meaningful contributions to Minecraft's success.
The author is so self-centered they belittle the contributions of other Mojang employees and seem to genuinely believe their contribution is on the same level as people like Jeb and C418. They literally describe the End Poem as a quote "Priceless Gift".
Late at night, having defeated the Ender dragon, having spent months in the game, it turns that moment into an almost spiritual experience.
I think most HN readers reacted to that weird poem the same way the aliens in Blindsight reacted to attempts at communication
People are putting Minecraft’s ending on things because it’s Minecraft and Minecraft left an impact on them. The actual poem was a commodity that was tacked on to make the game complete as a muse.
It sounds harsh but that’s the truth and why OP isn’t entitled to any more than they got, especially with that attitude.
Wow...uh....that's kinda daft
That’s why the author lets go of the dollars and gives the story away for free at the end.
Maybe the game would have made the same money. But it’s also true that Markus asked for an ending story, selected this one and put it in, and kept it there.
That may be the author's point, but their egotism also then seems to believe that a significant portion of the non-monetary value of Minecraft is a result of their own brief work on an unskippable wall of text that has a nice sentiment but is quickly forgotten by, I'd guess, nearly everyone that plays the game.
But, he did still put in the effort in creating the poem. Every part of the game matters, and I think it's fair if he gets paid or at-least gets credit for his contributions to the game.
I understand the author being hurt as he's one of the 5 people that contributed to the game, he just needed the credit or any little token of appreciation from Minecraft. The author asked Markus to mention something he refused, which is kind of the author's fault for not signing a contract, but it's still sad.
He did get paid, $20000. How was Mojang supposed to know he wanted more when he accepted that payment?
> I admired the fact that he was, again, giving money to back-office staff who had just arrived in the last year, and had zero creative input into the game
> I couldn’t understand why I was again being treated worse than them. I had helped him create the actual game, I had given him the ending he wanted but could not write
He acts as if he's some creative designer that played a huge role in the creation of the game. To be frank, an intern at Mojang that was with the company for a few months and added 2 blocks to the game would have made a bigger contribution than he made.
This is, in my opinion, the core disconnect the author has with reality, and is driven by the fact that to him his work is the center of the universe and he struggles to understand why that isn't the case for everyone else.
The author genuinely believes they made contributions to the game on the same level as Jeb, and that's why it feels unfair when he sees Mojang employees getting a $300k bonus and him getting nothing. But the reality is he made a very minor contribution to the game and got paid $20k, which is a pretty nice sum for a few days of work.
I'm fairly confident that was was meant by that was exposure in the form of his poem getting put into Minecraft, not exposure in the form of a shout-out or other promotion.
Unless the author releases the email we'll never know the context, but I've been a spectator to these types of negotiations enough that I strongly believe the context would support my interpretation.
It was an awkward relationship because both sides had a completely different view of what the relationship was, and didn't really communicate that with each other. It's great that he was finally able to write this down. It sucks that he struggled, and Mojang could easily have just given him $1 million to sign the contact, but his inability to talk about this, to talk about money, is probably the main reason for this as well as possibly many of his other financial troubles.
We can write justifications for why he did this, but that he seems to believe he was entitled to more money than the offer he accepted is entirely a problem of his own creation.
Expecting Mojang to deal with his communication and mental health issues is absurd.
> He asked for their offer, Mojang offered $20k, and he took the money.
The way I'm reading it is that he didn't even want to talk about the money. It had to be all about the art. And yet he clearly has lots of feelings about the money. Like I said, it's mostly his own attitude that's his problem. And although he claims lots of personal growth because of this, I'm still not sure he really understands that he's mostly projecting his own issues on others.
Still, he's probably right that he still owns it and Mojang only had a license, and giving it to the public domain is a nice gesture, if made with some grandstanding.
As he said in his writing he simply assumed that whoever he is dealing with would give him what is fair. So he accepted the $20K and he was probably perfectly happy with his cucumber. Then later after a bunch of extra money is funneled into the company he sees a bunch of other people getting grapes for what he perceives as a similar effort to his own. Now the deal stops being fair in our monkey brains and we are hard-wired to demand equivalent payment.
However business economics has an entirely different concept of what is fair. It assumes everything is fair as long as promises are kept and deals are honored. There is no concept in business of renegotiating compensation of old contracts if someone else gets more compensation for a similar effort. This is why collective bargaining by unions is the only way for everyone to get equal pay for equal work.
I think members of the modding community contributed much more in material terms, and both they and YouTube content creators contributed much more in driving it's rise & popularity, than the author of this poem. It seems the author had a pretty clear verbal contract on their compensation, and received the money.
They author didn't receive the promotional support for their other work that was promised, and I think should be their much bigger gripe. For an artist/creator I would think that would be the big pain point, not having their other work broadly exposed to an audience of millions, instead of the $$$ aspect they spend so much time on in this article. (Especially when that exposure would possibly have lead to significant financial success for their work as well)
Any success exists because of the sum of its parts. I have never played Minecraft, but I've played Portal. The ending to Portal was emotional, it was the cherry on top of a great game. That song and the emotion that came with it is still ingrained in me and is part of why I still recommend Portal to people who haven't played it.
Would I have played the game without the song? Probably. Would it have made the same impact without it? I don't think so. Emotion is a large part of why people play games, so that poem might actually have an impact.
Does that mean he deserved more? I don't know, €20k seems reasonable. But I think you underestimate the impact something like a poem can have.
I'm specifically referring to Minecraft, where the poem is largely disconnected from the rest of the game and doesn't pertain to any narrative or story (Minecraft doesn't have a story, it's a sandbox game). It's a cool poem, but it isn't part of the important bits that made Minecraft the colossal success that it is.
Portal is as much a story-driven game as it is about the mechanics. I know very few people who played Portal after they finished it, except maybe replaying it.
Contrast to Minecraft, where at least my peer group (adults already as of 2011), just spent hours, days, months building stuff on a map, completely ignoring the "story". I actually heard about this poem for the first time when I read this piece.
I've never finished Minecraft, but I guess I spent a few hundred hours building stuff and in my opinion, "played" it more than other games. But that doesn't mean I'm in any way stating an opinion about compensation or who did something wrong or how important anything is.
In minecraft you have a a long preparing to do before frustrating boss fight followed by some scrolling text you likely won't be bothered to read and skip thinking "Well, that was a waste of time." (Not by a fault of the poem but by a fault of game design.) Minecraft is a great sandbox and world exploration game. I see why they wanted to add an "ending" (to make it clear it's out of beta, (releasing on time)) but the ending doesn't make much sense game-wise.
the end poem is a priceless gift because they made it so: they refused to sell it, they consistently refused to put a price on it.
C418 made the music... plenty love it, I don't. Doesn't means it has no value, it has none to me, just like the End Poem has none to you, but yet still some people got a tattoo of it.
You are the only one belittling anyone though, you are belittling what Julian did, saying he deserve less recognition than C418, while Julian just said they got recognition while he didn't (without saying if he deserved it more than them).
Who is to say who is right here?
It isn't, but it should be, because everyone is a flawed person. The fact that we have all have to act like we don't makes our current society so incredibly toxic. It causes everyone to pretend to be something they're really not, because otherwise they become ostracized from their community. This is incredibly polarizing and causes (in US politics) the right to pretend they're Christian, even though they show no actual Christian values and the left to pretend they care about the environment by eating less meat, while at the same time flying everywhere and throwing out clothes after wearing them 6 times.
If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them. Then we don't have to pretend every single day that we are something we are not. Then we don't have to fake a smile when we have a bad day. Then we don't have to marry a person because it makes our parents happy. Then we don't have people who are afraid to come out as gay or trans or anything else.
What is society if we just accept all problems as part of the person or else society will be toxic?
Also has there ever been a society where flaws are just accepted without any kind of judgement? I would suggest that in those societies they simply did not classify them as flaws.
> If we all just accept that everyone has flaws and we can express them, then we can take them into account and deal with them
We can and do accept that but again that doesn't fix the flaw or absolve the person of the responsibility of the flaw.
I personally think the toxicity of modern society actually arises from the fact that we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws, rather than the opposite.
We're moving goal posts here. You asked whether it was socially acceptable to be a flawed person and I responded to that specifically. I never wrote that any and every flaw should be accepted. That's very different from accepting that everyone is flawed in some way or another and actually dealing with those flaws in stead of pretending we aren't.
> we don't feel comfortable openly judging people's flaws
That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.
No I'm not moving the goalposts at all. It's not socially acceptable to be a flawed person by definition, that's why they are called flaws.
> That's hilarious in a period where politics is turning into nothing more than pointing out the flaws of others, whether those flaws exist or not. Attack ads have become more common than ads talking about plans and politics. There are entire TV shows only taking about flaws of others. All while pretending that the people judging others are in some way not flawed at all.
Yes because those fulfil our desires of the fact that we don't openly attack others' flaws in day to day life. If anything they are proof of our starvation of healthy judgement.
Honestly very little sympathy from me. I would be beyond pissed if I was trying to close a deal with someone who kept sending me novels over email instead.
I say this with all the love in the world: it's hard for engineers to think like artists and vice-versa.
I went more in depth here about my perception.
I figure we just have a lot of Carls in here. There's always been a very business-oriented culture here: people are looking for success in their careers and monetary success is a big part of it. Contracts and IP are big parts of the business brain and I think people just struggle to see things from a different perspective.
All I can say is I'm very appreciative for the author to share the perspective. He says it clearly, there aren't any bad guys there and I think so many people in this forum want there to be one.
But yeah I'm shocked too, not what I would have expected from an HN comment thread. Maybe if he had been a coder instead of an author? I mean, HN threads reliably are on the side of coders who release their code open source but then have that code used by someone else to make billions, thinking they have the right to be mad and deserve a cut despite literally putting an open source license on it saying otherwise! (which this guy didn't do... until now) I really don't know what's going on.
Are people actually not mad that this guy was (at points in his life) upset he didn't get a cut, but actually mad that he released his thing CC0 in the end instead of trying to get a cut? Because he didn't do a good enough job of getting a cut, and has only himself to blame for that, and should be blamed for it? But I don't want to assume people mean something different than what they say, when they say they are actually mad at him for having the temerity to have feelings about not getting a cut. I'm just bewildered.
He didn't file a wacky lawsuit like Wyn Cooper's friend from "I Wanna Be Yours", instead he's reflected on a brush with greatness, and he's still doing art. Seems ok.
Perhaps he is better off not having Notch's riches considering that the guy went full QAnon?
If he said that in an e-mail, doesn't that constitute a written agreement to transfer copyright to Mojang?
It's very hard for me to read this in a way where Julian doesn't come off as, at best, an idiot, and at worst, an asshole who thinks writing two pages of text is equivalent to the thousands of hours of labor the five Mojang employees had put into the project at the time.
Whether it's legal or not it's extremely dodgy. It's pretty much a demand of unconditional surrender. And we know C418 got better terms than these, since he retains copyright to his music.
That said, I think a lawyer could make a strong claim that later accepting the $20k (presumably he had to provide some sort of payment info for this) gave Mojang at a minimum the rights to use it in the game.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_promise
If you yourself don’t know what you want how do you think other people will know, let alone make it happen somehow?
So it seems Julian should have been able to get a similar deal. I bet Jakob had no power to actually go through with the threat of taking out the end poem - Notch would have intervened if it came to that.
I also got to say, although Pigstep as a record is great, and Raine's music for Celeste is terrific, the new in-game ambient music doesn't hold up to Rosenfeld's.
During due diligence of the MS purchase, the lawyers want the contract formalized. The freelancer erratically responds, writing self-contradictory emails to various people in the company.
Company lawyers don’t want to deal with the nonsense and decide they can win a legal challenge if it ever comes to that, based on the initial agreements between notch and the freelance writer.
The game releases and gets more popular. One day the freelancer writes a substack article. The end.
Later he wouldn't sign the contract stating what he accepted in email.
Markus was seemingly very generous to everyone he felt was important to the success of Mojang. I sincerely doubt he didn't consider this guy. Markus is not so selfish that he wouldn't make the guy a millionaire if he felt his contribution was important. Or shout out his stuff.
The guy thought he was cozying up with the big boys, but he was a fiverr hire.
I played from 2013 to 2020 before I visited the End and killed the dragon. Then I realised how OP elytra are and now it's an early game goal to grab a pair.
If that's "20 minutes from start of game to end", that's pretty good going. Get him a YouTube channel and get him grinding towards the World Record!
Last year, his class at school (he was 12-13) had their own server where they built lots of stuff. At some point, they divided into two teams. His team was the largest, which he found unfair, so he switched to the smaller team. Then both teams secretly decided to gang up on him, which they did when he wasn't prepared. 20 kids, against him on his own, without his armor on. He had an enchanted golden apple ready, quickly put on his netherite gear, and went to town. Beat them all.
As part of a special projects week the school organised not just a regular sports day, but also an e-sports day. 7 events. He won 6 of them, including one game he'd never played, and got silver on the one game he didn't win.
He's ridiculously good, that much is clear to me now. I'll let him know the internet says he should get a Youtube channel. He doesn't talk much, though, and I think that's kinda necessary for a youtube channel.
14 minutes would be top 400 of the "random seed glitchless" category. Which is pretty good since there's 3600+ (distinct) runs on that leaderboard.
> He's ridiculously good, that much is clear to me now.
I would agree.
> He doesn't talk much, though, and I think that's kinda necessary for a youtube channel.
I dunno - I follow a few Minecraft channels who don't talk and use subtitles instead. Fits with the general "chill" aesthetic (although I appreciate speedruns are anything but chill.)
He also claims to have beaten Civ 6 at Deity level, admittedly by following strategies he learned in Youtube, which is frustrating to me because I'm struggling on Immortal figuring stuff out on my own. At least I can still beat him in chess.
I hope that makes it clear.
Rule #1 of getting paid for your work is don't do a bunch of work without signing a contract first. Even if you're an artist. I highly doubt he could have released that poem on his own and turned it into millions of dollars or whatever he thinks a "fair" contribution is.
Contributing an asset doesn't give you any entitlement to share in the company. If you want some equity in the company you better ask for it up front, because they probably won't give it to you and would just hire someone else and you can save your hard work. 20k seems fair and helped the author out a lot at the time. Posting a long rant about it probably hurts his future work opportunities.
I'm fairly sure that no credible lawyer would give him the time of the day if he did try to get more now. He did work, he accepted money for that work and only later he thinks he's entitled to more and wants to re-negotiate.
I don't know about his jurisdiction, but here even as a layman I'm confident that doing the work and accepting the money would be seen as acceptance:
"As well as using words, a contract could be implied by conduct of the parties, for example, by jumping into a black cab and stating your destination, this conduct would be taken as an agreement that the taxi driver will take you to your destination and that you will pay a price for it."
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2015/15/notes/division/...
The idea that just because there isn't a written contract that he magically retains the rights is magical thinking and I'm surprised that no-one he's previously told this story to has pointed that out to him.
He owns the copyright, hasn't transferred the copyright, he clearly owns the rights in the work.
> I don't think there's any doubt that Mojang / Microsoft are entitled to use his work.
I think you're right that there's an implied license for them to use it but the scope of that license was never specified and I'd guess a clever lawyer could make reasonable hay from the case that it's now much broader than he wanted.
Can you quote the bit of the article which says that? All I can see is that he said "ok, what's your offer?", Carl returned with "€20k", and "in all the confusion someone sent me the money, even though we still didn’t have a contract worked out" - no contract, no license.
Edit: I’m rate limited, but Microsoft doesn’t need a transfer. They bought the entire company. Just like you buying some shares on the stock exchange, except they bought all of the shares in a private transaction. Had they done an asset purchase instead, your point might be valid.
But the terms of that license are unknown - a court may well decide that it did not apply to Microsoft since he didn't sign that contract. And it also means that he did not assign copyright to Mojang or Microsoft which removes that avenue of them claiming they can use it for free.
A court may well consider that becoming a wholly owned subsidiary would violate a license, despite being a distinct legal entity[1][2]. Especially when it's just an implied license with no actual agreed definition on both sides.
[1] Which is similar to what we're seeing with ARM vs Qualcomm and it should be interesting to see how that shakes out.
[2] Mojang into Microsoft sounds like "forward triangular merger" on this page: https://www.faegredrinker.com/en/insights/publications/2003/...
he smartly follows the line you quoted out of context with "and even that they didn't deliver" or something.
so, no contract, an email agreement which was never fullfilled.
man, be happy this guys is a spineless hippie or you would be working overtime and still paying a deal.
I think it's more interesting of a legal case than you give it credit for. He isn't denying he was paid for his time but that the rights for the finished work are still ambiguous.
There are other cases, though, where the courts have declined to imply transfer of copyright or license - even with a written contract - when it hasn't been explicitly specified.
cf https://www.albright-ip.co.uk/2013/04/implied-assignments/ for one example
> The idea that just because there isn't a written contract that he magically retains the rights is magical thinking
IANAL, obvs., but I think the situation would be "the implied contract would imply a license to use the poem but not transfer of copyright" - the key point would be whether that license was "perpetual, exclusive" to Mojang. If not perpetual, he could revoke it at any time and Microsoft will then have a copyright problem for any copy sold after that point. If exclusive, the license may not have transferred to Microsoft in which case they have an extremely large problem given the number of copies sold since the buyout.
I can tell. None of what you wrote, which is mostly wrong, matters. Microsoft bought Mojang not specific property of Mojang.
[1] says "When licences are acquired as part of an asset transaction, the contracts are taken over. In that case, the selling and buying parties need the cooperation of the licensor. This cooperation can take place before or possibly after the takeover. If the licence is not transferable, there will in principle not be a legally valid transfer unless the IP right holder in question gives his consent to the transfer of the licence."
Do you have a link to suggest that these definitely-are-lawyers are wrong in this interpretation?
[1] https://www.blatterlegal.com/en/intellectual-property/transf...
There is a written contract. They agreed on the price on email and he then took the money.
Also, Mojang is in breach of the informal contract because they did not give him the promotion they promised.
And that's the kicker - his agent could have negotiated 100k, which would have been more than fair for that moment in time. But still be wayyy underpaid for eventually what the game would sell for.
But of course, it's not about money. I understand his point - and I wish I could find it now, but I can't, so I'll just describe it.
I saw some meme a while back with a kid sitting next to and hugging a giant frog. The text read, "Beware, the people you love don't always love you back". The second panel showed the frog swallowing the child. I've certainly had these sort of one-sided friendships, and periodically reflect on them. It sucks. It's probably worse if you're a very emotionally deep person (which writers and other artists frequently are), but I still understood well what he was talking about.
Getting mad at "the corporations" for being dirty middlemen is common, but Ticketmaster hires staffers, organizes purchases, handles refunds alllllllll the way down the line. The infrastructure to do that takes real work by real people who also need to be paid, and yes - there is a structural inequality between the company that does all the organizing and the individual person doing the work. This is both problematic and excellent.
The best part though, really - is that because of the way modern corporations work, anyone can be at the very very top of the corporate structure, above even the CEO. Regular, average humans can be shareholders, the most preferred class of all modern capitalist corporations.