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Green Spiderman would be copying of protected elements - like Spiderman's outline. Style and general ideas are not protected by copyright. Substantial similarity comes in as a test for whether copying of those protected elements occurred, to avoid an otherwise disprovable "I didn't copy, I just drew Spiderman's exact outline by complete coincidence" defense, but is irrelevant if the what's supposedly been copied isn't protected by copyright in the first place.
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Usually the benchmark is "would a person reasonably confuse this for being the IP of another company"

https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg

C'mon...


The most prominent object in that scene is the low poly airship. Minecraft does not have vehicles, does not have objects with components with such a small thickness as the railings, does not have angles like the bow of the ship or the ropes.

It looks more like a Runescape asset than a Minecraft one, for example:

https://runescape.wiki/images/thumb/The_Adventurous.png/1200...


And you would bet your life savings that the general public, including a jury, would know that? They would look at Minecraft and say it's a clearly different game?

"Obviously the real Spiderman has an "i" and not a "y" in its spelling!!1!"

Explain that to a jury in front of a judge and Disney lawyers and see how your legal theory goes over...


Do you think that the way a jury trial works is that they call the jury into the room, show them a few screenshots, and then immediately say "right, time to give your verdict!"?

If this were ever to go to a jury trial, both sides would get to present their evidence, which includes explanations of how Luanti is different from Minecraft.

If you were correct, then basically every accusation of substantial similarity would be upheld in court because apparently juries are morons and they don't get given the full facts.

However, you also have failed to provide any support for your assumption that this would go to a jury trial; the article doesn't mention any kind of trial. DMCA notices are adjudicated by the platform owner, with very little transparency, and certainly no jury of peers. If it doesn't get resolved by the counter-notice, then maybe Luanti will sue (Microsoft? Google? Tracer.AI? all of the above? who knows!), and maybe it would go before a jury. But given how lawsuits in the US go these days, that's pretty unlikely. Odds are if there is a lawsuit, it will be settled before a jury ever gets selected.


> Usually the benchmark is "would a person reasonably confuse this for being the IP of another company"

That's not a standard anywhere in copyright law. You may be conflating it with parts of trademark law.

> https://www.luanti.org/media/gallery/5.jpg

That's a screenshot of a game made within Luanti (the voxel game engine being DMCA'd). The blog post shows all the textures included with Luanti itself (https://blog.luanti.org/static/blog/2026_dmca/builtin.webp).

Even then, it doesn't appear to show anything actually copied from Minecraft that would fall under copyright protection - the assets appear to be original.




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