
Bukkit no longer available for download. Hit with DMCA takedown. - JoshGlazebrook
http://dl.bukkit.org/downloads/craftbukkit/
======
kevingadd
So, from reading the notice and looking at commits:

This guy, whoever he is, has been making fixes/adding features to his fork of
Bukkit, and some (most?) of them have been getting merged to trunk. Bukkit's
repo is apparently GPL.

Now he's pissed off for some reason so he issues a DMCA to take down software
_he participated in the development of_ because it violates the GPL by
depending on the closed-source Minecraft server software? Super confusing. I
don't understand how you would be a developer on this project without
_knowing_ that it depends on closed-source software to function (and yes, is
basically incompatible with the GPL as a result).

The end result of this appears to be that nobody can use the software he works
on other than developers able to do the build locally and violate the GPL by
hand themselves. Bizarre.

~~~
efstone
As a copyright attorney (stonevaughanlaw.com), I can tell you this is total
b.s. I've sent hundreds of takedown notices for various clients, namely
FUNimation Entertainment. Over 9,000 notices, in fact. And I've actually
handled lawsuits involving specifics of the 17 USC § 512(c) provision.

No one can issue a DMCA takedown notice on behalf of Mojang without Mojang's
authorization. Period. A regular notice, yes--but not a DMCA takedown notice.
This is because a DMCA notice triggers very specific and harsh liability if
not acted upon. (Unless the alleged infringer files a counter-
notification...but I digress)

As for copyright and the code this guy wrote, it's considered a work of joint
authorship and no joint author can prohibit the exploitation of a joint work
by any of the other joint authors. They can each do what they want with it.
All that the disgruntled dev can do is to sue for an accounting of royalties
to be paid based on monies earned from the exploitation of the work. Have fun
with that calculation. And notably, such a suit is NOT an infringement suit.
So it stays in state court and doesn't carry any of the crazy statutory
damages or attorney's fees penalties that an infringement suit would, assuming
the work was registered with the U.S. Copyright Office, which it isn't.

As for the GPL, it's a nonexclusive license, revocable at will as to new
users. Any dev who contributed to the work can license the work however he/she
wants. Only the licensees (us users of bukkit) are bound by the GPL if and
only if we downloaded bukkit pursuant to a GPL agreement.

All Mojang has to do is file a counter-notification and the files can all be
reinstated without the webhost worrying about liability.

~~~
bradleyland
It appears the basis for the takedown is that the distribution includes code
that is in violation of the license. Specifically, Bukkit includes code that
is not GPL licensed. The GPL prohibits this, and so the author is able to
exercise his rights under the GPL. To restate it more concisely, the claim
made is that the code authored by the DMCA issuer is being distributed in
violation of the license under which it was written (the GPL).

What makes this extraordinarily messy is the fact that it is almost
indisputable that the author was aware of this at the time he contributed.
IANAL, so I don't know how that effects the license, but entering in to
agreements that you are knowingly violating at the moment you enter them has
the effect of providing a basis to challenge the validity of the agreement.
Again, IANAL, but my concern would be that if the license were found null and
void, the whole situation would fall back to copyright law, which still gives
the author ownership of the code he has written, because there was no explicit
assignment of copyright.

Basically, the choice of GPL for the Bukkit project was a timebomb from day
one. Any project using the GPL would be wise to take note of what has happened
here. Should someone find any significant amount of proprietary code in your
GPL project, they can quite simply nuke your entire project with a single
DMCA.

------
JoshTheGeek
Fun fact: Mojang bought Bukkit. (@jeb_ tweeted the other day. This notice
states that bukkit uses Minecraft's code without permission, and it did at one
point. Now, though, as Mojang owns both, I think it should be allowed. Oh, and
a Mojang employee (Dinnerbone) has stated he will be updating it to support
1.8.

------
Gamblore
This has wide ramifications for quite a lot of projects that have implemented
parts of the Bukkit API that this guy has contributed code towards.
CraftBukkit and Spigot are used on most servers but it also affects a lot of
mods like Tekkit, MCP etc

I hope they sort it out.

------
apo
[http://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/2fd0rt/multiplay...](http://www.reddit.com/r/admincraft/comments/2fd0rt/multiplays_wesley_wolfe_issues_dmca_takedown/)

------
berred
It is available.
[https://dl.bukkit.org/downloads/bukkit/](https://dl.bukkit.org/downloads/bukkit/)

Your welcome. =P

~~~
CMonster95
That's not CraftBukkit. That's the API.

------
hartator
What's bukkit?

~~~
8_hours_ago
It seems to be related to Minecraft servers.
[http://wiki.bukkit.org/Main_Page](http://wiki.bukkit.org/Main_Page)

There's not a lot of context in the take-down notice... does anyone know the
actual story?
[http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/notification.txt](http://dl.bukkit.org/dmca/notification.txt)

~~~
Macha
Bukkit is a wrapper around the Minecraft server that is one of the two major
modding APIs. It is used for a lot of server plugins for multiplayer gameplay.

It consists of two major projects. Bukkit itself is an API that plugin authors
code against. In theory it could be implemented for e.g. Terraria too but in
practice its completely tied to Minecraft. Bukkit (the api) is licensed under
GPL with little issue.

CraftBukkit is the implementation of this API. It is licensed under LGPL.

This was originally started as a community project. However the issue is that
CraftBukkit includes a decompiled Minecraft server, which mojang never
officially allowed.

This meant that Bukkit (the server) contained the bukkit api (GPL), the
craftbukkit implementation (LGPL) and the Minecraft server ( All rights
reserved) and was being distributed as "GPL". While mojang looked the other
way about their proprietary software being distributed as GPL, everyone was
pretty much happy.

The issue gets muddier when Mojang hired the core Bukkit devs to work on
Minecraft. They left the Bukkit project to run itself and everything continued
as is for two years.

Then two years later the community team announce they're shutting down the
project. At this point, Mojang reveals that when they hired the original team,
they also acquired the Bukkit project (trademarks, infrastructure, the
original core teams code, etc) and as such it didn't belong to the current
community team to shut down.

Now one of the GPL contributors is demanding that Mojang take down the project
because it contains his code under the GPL but isn't validly licensed under
the GPL due to containing the all rights reserved mojang code.

------
0xEA
mind = blown

